The New Thing: In Closing

When I started this series of New Thing posts I simply wanted to find out whether any of my ideas had an audience, but I very quickly realised that your questions (and my focus on answering them) was helping me get a feel for each project. At the same time as we were discussing each pitch, I explored each idea, and now I've got a good sense of what needs to happen next. There are 2.5 projects I want to dig into further(*), and 1.5 projects that I realise now are more for fun (and can slip a little down my to-do list).

(*) I'll go into details about those, below.

Another thing I didn't realise when I started was how much I'd appreciate people getting involved in and commenting on each project. Your comments continuously surprised me (people wanting a female bully, the positive reaction to Artificial, Matt disliking the narrator of my excerpt from Left Coast). My conclusion is that discussing your projects is good - enthusiasm is good and criticism is also good (and not as off-putting as I feared I might find it). So, thank you very much for all your thoughts and feedback.

The big lesson for next time - because I do think I'll do this again - is to handle the online conversation more carefully. I made an effort to answer everyone's comments and questions - which forced me to pay attention to what was really being said, and to think about each project in more detail. However, I failed to be as interactive as I wanted to be - due to some privacy concerns, I stopped auto-linking each post on Facebook, and I didn't follow twitter as much as I wanted to (... and I'm not exactly sure why I didn't). I also have to be careful to not suffer from blogger's syndrome - to not to let the buzz of getting really involved in answering questions (and discussing the ideas) to substitute for working on the idea


What's next

Workplace Bully is definitely one of the projects to dig into further (and I want to thank everyone for their enthusiastic and challenging comments about it). During the last month I've been researching and outlining it, specifically trying to get an idea of how the second half of the story might work. Turns out there's a danger that I could write it so that it's too plotty rather than about the characters (Billy's 'educational video' effect). The next step is to explore its ideas and develop its plot.

Artificial wasn't as easy to write as I'd hoped. I am going to have to sit down with it for a ... fortnight? a month? and investigate it further. This is an idea I like, but I could easily see myself abandoning it if I don't think it's worth working through the Dip on it.

As for The Orphans, I love the characters, I made good progress on outlining the story and I'm desperate to know how it all turns out. I'm just not sure if it's a movie, and I'm not sure if I will want to take it any further once I've finished outlining it. For the moment, I'm gunna consign it to PLAY!

Finally, Left Coast. Judging from the number of idea-bombs that exploded in my brain while I was thinking about this, I believe can be a good game. From what I can tell, the effort I need to put in to making it something that others can playtest is reasonably small. I think if I dedicated a couple of weeks to it, I could get it into shape.

So, from here I'm going to concentrate on getting outlines together for Workplace Bully, Artificial, and one other idea (which I'll hopefully confirm with the people involved in the next three weeks). In the downtime from doing that, I'll work on a rough-n-dirty playtestable draft of Left Coast for me and others to have fun with. The outlines, though, are definitely the main priority.

Left Coast: Why I write

I wanted to pull out a couple of comments from the previous post about Left Coast. A asked:

I think the question is what do you want to do? What are your priorities? Cash? The widest possible audience? Creative satisfaction? And what would be the opportunity cost of prioritizing this project? 

And then Karen asked:

If you do this, do you think you'd learn enough from the process to make it worthwhile anyway? (Whether it succeeds or fails in attracting a wider audience/making money/being an awesome creative endeavour or however you are measuring it... I reckon any experience you learn from is worthwhile in some sense) 

These are excellent questions. And complicated - Sean has a whole blog devoted to examining his answers to them. I had a discussion with J recently that helped me start to answer the first of A's questions, about my priorities. Two of the big reasons I write are 'to realise a project's potential' and 'for the sense of creative engagement'.

I love the satisfaction of taking a project to its conclusion and making it the best it can be. Oddly, as I've noted before, this sense of satisfaction seems to be completely independent of the size of the project. A script I've been working on for seven years gives me the same buzz as feeling like I've written a blog post that clearly articulates what I'm trying to say. The only difference is in the amount of complexity that the project has or the amount of layers it contains, which changes how satisfying it is to revisit something. So I write to finish things, but also to revisit them and see that they've lived up to their potential.

In this case, writing a game is interesting because the amount of times I can revisit it and experience it is probably higher than with a TV series or script.

I also value the sense of total mental engagement that I have when I'm creating something. A combination of puzzle-solving, intense visualisation, feeling deeply about characters who don't exist, and discovering the core of an idea (then figuring out how to express it). That sense of engagement is like crack for me ... in that I find it addictive and rewarding, rather than rendering me a non-viable member of society.

So, to flip to Karen's question: I do think I would learn enough from the process of writing Left Coast to justify doing it. I think it's an interesting game and one I want to play, and it contains a whole bunch of ideas (about who is actually telling the story) that I want to work out how to execute. It's also about characters I care about. Writing the game would be a chance to apply some experiences from writing Bad Family, as well.

... Yes. I would learn enough from writing (and especially from playtesting Left Coast) to make it worthwhile.

But it's A's question about opportunity cost that really hits home. I have something I want to work on now that has a hard deadline of October this year. That'll involve working up three projects for a Film Commission scholarship. Anything else I do will have to fit around that. For the meantime, then, Left Coast will probably fit into the category of things I play around with during the breaks between those three projects.

Left Coast: A day in the life of a writer

Here's a little something I wrote up for Left Coast, my game about drug-addled science fiction writers struggling to write their books.

A Left Coast Life

6 am. Can't sleep.

6.07 am. Baby wakes up screaming.

6.30 am. Wash baby poo off hands.

7.34 am. Score.

8.40am. Sit down to write.

8.43am. Breakfast.

9.04am. Sit down to write.

9.11am. Tidy room.

9.15 am. Blink.

Sometime. Sit down to write.

Afternoon. Blank.

2.14pm. Realise I’ve been staring at a wall for a long time.

2.15pm. Wash unidentified brown substance off own hands.

2.something. Blank.

4pm. Driving north.

4.23pm. Coffee with the gang.

5.05pm. Steal TV back from Eddie.

6.10pm. Pick up more nappies. For baby.

6.11pm. Score.

6.13pm. Phone dealer.

6.15pm. Phone dealer.

6.16pm. Phone dealer.

7.48pm. Party with dealer & the gang.

8.09pm. Replace smashed painting with vase of flowers picked from front lawn.

1am. Where am I?

1.02am. Call wife.

2am. Walk 5 miles back to home.

2.50am. Scribble short story idea on borrowed napkin from diner.

4am. Write on front porch while drinking beer and ignoring screams of baby.

New Thing: Left Coast

Five years ago I wrote a role-playing game called Left Coast, in which you play science fiction authors living in a dreamy, drug-addled version of 1960s and 1970s California. The game is about trying to help these authors balance their family obligations with writing a novel, and hopefully doing that before they go insane.


Not only was Left Coast a lot of fun to work on, it also won an award and still has people who like it today. As far as I'm concerned, that's success ... but it's a form of success that brings up two questions for me:

First, is something worth writing if its audience will probably be intensely passionate but small?

Because the thing is: there's an audience for Left Coast. Like I said, there are people who still bring it up in conversation five years later. There are people who've volunteered to playtest it. Let me restate: five years after I wrote it, people are volunteering to play my game, and encouraging me to finish it. That is amazing.

And shouldn't I capitalise on that?

I feel churlish making the following calculation (like I'm scanning a free iPad for spyware), but I find myself balancing that audience enthusiasm against the numbers of people likely to like, play, and buy the finished game and against the effort involved in finishing it.

In fact, this is the first project I've mentioned here where I think Seth Godin's 'viral idea' post really applies. Let's say I execute Left Coast perfectly - I create a game that's fun to play and lives up to its potential, and I publish it in either (a) an attractive format, or (b) for free. Let's say the game reaches a bunch of people through the enthusiasm and evangelism of the people who already like it, and through whatever marketing efforts I make to reach more people who are into the sorts of things that Left Coast is about.

How many people will that second generation of people tell? Will the number of people who know about the game expand exponentially or will it flatten off? I'm fascinated by and uncertain about this. I know Malc's told Joe, who's into it. Jesse talked about it at Story Games a little bit (with no prompting from me).

My gut says that a game about sci-fi authors trying to write novels while they deal with weird shit that's either the result of them going insane or might be an alien invasion from an alternate dimension is an idea that (by its very nature) will have a small but intensely enthusiastic group of supporters: it's not people who play games, ... it's people who play role-playing games, and who are interested in the lives of drug-addled science fiction authors.

But ...

... that logic apply to every single RPG ever written on every single subject ...

... my gut instinct could be completely wrong.

So, really, let's rephrase my first question and ask: Does this game sound interesting to you?

Second question is: Am I into it?

Let's say that I shouldn't be concerned with how wide-spread the appeal of Left Coast is. As a creator, surely the only thing that matters is whether I'm excited by it?

That question, that phrasing, is the whole point of the New Thing. Am I excited by it?

Well, I like Left Coast. Even though I'm wondering if it's the best use of my time, I do want to make it better because it's a game I want to play.

So let's figure out what 'make it better' entails.

I think Left Coast's got the potential to be a pretty weird and awesome game. At the moment, it has a good process for setting up a bunch of eccentric characters who are involved in difficult relationships with the authors and for creating some conspiracies for the authors to become involved with. But while the set-up's fine, the process of playing the game, of generating conflicts and stories, is not so much sorted out.

Talking with Joe Murphy (who's keen to playtest Left Coast) about this, he gave me an insight into what needs to happen next:

I don't know if it'd help, but don't worry about producing a finished game. Literally, don't concern yourself with that. Just produce something that works enough that we can poke at it at the table and see where the system doesn't work.

This is similar to the Pixar philosophy of sharing your unfinished work as soon as possible. Rather than be terrified that something doesn't work, playtest as soon as possible. Joe continues by saying:

Try to create something that allows you to at least paper over the cracks in the system with fun roleplaying. Left Coast [has] such a strong premise that I've no doubt charitable groups would give it a shot and paper over the cracks.

So, for Left Coast to take a step forward in the next three to six months, I'd need to create a version of the rules that other people could playtest. That'd involve:

• revising the game based on the notes I took and the feedback I received from the previous playtest
• running a one-off playtest specifically to test and break the new scene framing mechanisms (and to brainstorm new ones)
• starting a discussion about scene framing (perhaps on The Forge, or Google Wave)
• running a second playtest (either a one-off or a 'fresh start' using setting and characters from playtest one
• producing a draft of an unfinished game that "works enough" so that Joe, Malc, et al, can poke at it at the table and see where the system doesn't work.

Beyond that, success for Left Coast would involve publishing it in a format that evokes its subject matter, and it being a game that's not only fun but it also clearly explains how to play it. I'd also find out how to tell the audience for this game that it exists. ... And 'Wild Success' would be for Left Coast to be popular, to reach a dedicated audience, and for it to have decent word of mouth

I'm interested in your thoughts. What does this sound like to you: Interesting? Worthwhile? What's your assessment of the effort vs. the reward?

New Thing: The Orphans

So, when I was a kid I loved watching scary shows on TV ... and I had a nice give-and-take relationship with Mum and Dad about it:

Doctor Who: no problems; I could watch as much as I want
Sapphire and Steel: they let me stay up late, and then were pretty kind and low-key with the 'I told you so' after it had finished and I was in bed freaking out about plagues and men hiding in photographs
The Andromeda Strain: had to sneak into the living room at my grandparents' house and hide behind the couch watching it without anybody noticing.

For the last two years, I've been working on a ghost story for kids. A horror movie for kids, really. That's my goal: to create something that just slightly too scary for my target audience to handle, and thus begin the cycle again.

The Orphans is a little bit Sapphire and Steel and a little bit Silent Hill. A bunch of pre-teenagers live in with their parents in an old building that's been renovated into a bunch of apartments. One day the kids wake up and their parents are gone. As in missing, with no trace of them.

When the children try to leave the building they find that the doors won't open, the windows won't break and the walls can't be cut through. No-one outside can hear them or seems to notice them at all. The children are trapped.

And that's when the ghosts start showing up.

The Orphans mixes in a whole bunch of different influences: Lord of the Flies, my nightmares about Victorian orphanages, bodysnatchers, and a bit of survival horror.

For me the cool thing about it is that I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I've been outlining it, for fun, for about a year - coming back to it whenever I get some free time, and discovering what happens in the next bit of the story. At the moment, I'm trying to decide exactly how unhappily it's going to end; it's definitely not a safe movie.

As a feature film, I have a feeling that it'll look slightly animated - like Waking Life, or this trailer for Mars:


MARS - The Movie [HD Trailer] from Geoff Marslett on Vimeo.



The next step (in the next three to six months) would be to finish the outline and see if this is a story I want to take any further.

A reasonable success would be to write a draft of the script.

The wild and outrageous success would be to get enough funding to make the movie (and make it live up to its potential), so that it scares one 9-12 year old child hiding behind the couch and gets them in to horror movies.

New Thing: Artificial

Why hasn't anyone written a 'good' AI movie before? We've seen lots of films where creepy artificial intelligences stalk and kill people via food processors (and a few reasonably famous films about AIs using humans as batteries). But not so much with exploring the idea that humans creating another form of sentient life might be a good thing. It's all Frankenstein and dystopias and the dark future. Well, how about having a bright future?

So I want to write that story and I think I've got a way to do it.

Artificial is a low-budget science fiction film - and, in an attempt to not lose a quarter of my readers with that statement, it's got a modern-day, real-world setting and a strong focus on characters.


In fact it's a love story. I didn't realise this when I first came up with for Artificial; I thought it was going to be about the changes that happen to society once AIs are released into the wild, and about the philosophical clash between two computer programmers - one who's optimistic about the future vs. one who's pessimistic, suspicious, and vigilant about what will happen when their team creates an artificial intelligence. Both these women have strong relationships with the AI (one respectful; the other, darkly glowering and paranoid).

If I were a cleverer writer, I'd make the love story be between the AI and the paranoid pessimist. But I'm after something much simpler I'm afraid - and between the story of an optimistic programmer and her impossible yet deepening love for the million lines of code contained inside a metal box, the clash of the whole human race's hopes and fears playing out in microcosm between the optimistic and the pessimistic programmers, *and* a story (that feels mythic) about the creation of a race of artificial intelligences ... well, with all of that I'm feeling like this will be a fun script to write.

How does this sound to you? Is it something you've seen before? (I'm fairly sure there are novels about it, but not movies - as far as I'm aware). Express your thoughts!

(And if you're interested in more, I have heavily inspired by this article by David Brin.)

Workplace Bully: Wrapping Up

I think it's time to wrap up this first New Thing; tomorrow I'll post the pitch for the second New Thing. It's a love story.

Thank you for all your help and insights during this. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you, in particular, for sharing your insights about when this has actually happened to you.

I've been doing more reading on bullying recently (John Clarke's 'Working with Monsters', an excellent book with a strong focus on the psychology of the bully). It's been a good source of inspiration for things that could happen in this story of the conflict between the bully and their target. It's also helped me start to take the 'step forward' that this project needs in order to convince me that it's worth doing - there's a sub-text running through it that I've identified, a sub-text that (for me) represents the true horror in this particular story of bullying:

The Bully is destroying the Target's reputation. The Bully is manipulating the situation so that the Target looks incompentent and angry. The Bully is creating an identity for the Target with is unfair, but which unfortunately is backed up by facts that the Bully has engineered ... and by changes in the Target's personality (which are totally the result of the Bully's behaviour).

I love this idea that the Bully is warping the reality of the workplace, creating an environment in which the Target is perceived as the bad guy. That will really inform my outlining work as I keep exploring this project.

All right! Time to do a little more wrap-up research on this. I'll post the next New Thing tomorrow morning.

Workplace Bully: Answering questions

I've finally had a chance to answer the outstanding questions from the previous post. Stephanie asked what kind of tone I want for this story; Sean asked a related question:

How do you want viewers to feel while watching this? Do you want them to really feel the experience of being bullied? If so, what does that feel like to you?

My feeling is that this whole project is going to be an exercise in tone. It’s got something going on that has no obvious reference points because I can’t think of anything that’s done it before. Here are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about while the Tone thread has been going on, though:

• To me, bullying feels like it happens incrementally. It starts as small-scale, isolated incidents. The Bully is testing whether they can get away with their bullshit on this particular person. Those isolated incidents slowly begin to make you feel stressed and terrible about yourself; they gradually form a pattern of dysfunctional behaviour where you’re accepting being bullied because it’s just normal and the way things are.
   
• You could think of Workplace Bully as a disaster movie – a social disaster movie, where the Bully is the iceberg and the Target is the Titanic, and we the audience can see the two of them moving slowly towards a collision.

The great thing about these thoughts on tone (slow, incremental) is that they feed into the way I want to present the story (bite-sized, episodic).

Related to this is Emma’s question about whether this will be hard to write, because I’ll inevitably be pushing something very personal out into the world. I’ve thought for a long time about how to answer this, and in the end my answer’s very simple: You’re totally right. I’m expecting there to be a lot of elements in this story that are highly personal to me. But I have no idea what they are, yet. Part of the fun of this is going to be discovering those truths while I’m in the process of writing it.

+++

Joe, thanks for your comment and questions. You said:

Storytelling is about simplification. There's also a tendency for people to define themselves in simple terms - a gamer, a nerd, a victim of abuse. How are you going to ensure that the victim isn't just a victim?

A couple of short answers to this. First, the character traits that make someone a good target for bullying will help flesh her out. Secondly, I really think that the second half of the story (where she fights back) will has the potential to demonstrate enormous character growth and put her under some really interesting new types of stress (which gives me the opportunity to demonstrate new facets of her character).

I guess I’m saying that I will have to write this in order to demonstrate to myself that she’s not just a caricature, but I feel the potential for a well-rounded character is there.

You also asked how are people around her affected by the tension or stress she's under. Excellent, excellent question. I’m very excited by this. I think there’s a lot of scope to show the pressures that the bullying puts on her partner and her workmates, and look at how her behaviour changes. I think I’ll leave it there, but I will say this: people who are bullied run the real risk of becoming bullies themselves.

There are a couple more questions to answer, but I’ll leave it there. I’m going to spend a bit of today researching and outlining. If you’ve got more questions or comments, feel free.

FYI: I’ve been stoked by the feedback you’ve been giving me. I suspect there will only be a few more days of Workplace Bully as the New Thing, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m playing this by ear, and figure I’ll present the next New Thing when it feels right (rather than on some arbitrary schedule).

Workplace Bully: Should the characters be male or female?

When over 25% of the people who are commenting on Workplace Bully bring up the same point, it's time to pay attention. In my pitch, I said that the Bully is male and the Target of his bullying is female. A lot of you have expressed surprise, curiousity or even concern about that, so this post is for you to share your thoughts and perhaps even discuss it among yourselves.

First off, here are my thoughts about why I pitched it the way I did:

1. I have some actors in mind for the roles.
2. My instincts are telling me that the second half of the story, where the Target fights back against the Bully, just plays better if the Target's a woman.
3. I know how to write this if it's a male Bully and a female Target. Not so sure about the other way round; I don't have an instinctive feel for what that female Bully would be like yet (more research required).

Against that, there's a couple of points that have come through strongly:

1. A couple of people have mentioned that they've been bullied by women (I certainly have), and there's an impression from that that middle-aged women bullies are quite common in the business world.
2. Making the Bully a woman removes the undertones of sexual predatoriness (?) and physical intimidation that a man would bring to the role.

So there's a starting point if you'd like to discuss it. If necessary, I'll moderate this - but I figure it should be really interesting to hear each other's ideas. Now! Off to answer some of the questions raised in previous comments, and do some research on this story.

Workplace Bully: What's the tone?

Here's a question for you while I'm busy working on answers from the comments thread and resting my hands: when you first heard the pitch for Workplace Bully, what did you imagine it would be like?

When you hear that it's a webseries of short one to two minute episodes about a bully victimising someone at work, what do you expect to see?

New Thing: Workplace Bully

In the last ten years, both at work and in my flats, I've had the misfortune of running into four enormous arseholes. One of them very nearly broke me.

Confronting and defeating bullies isn't something that comes naturally to me. Or to a lot of people, I suspect. But it's totally necessary for our survival. Bullying is high-stakes. It can drive a person to a nervous breakdown or to suicide. And a lot of people share this experienceaccording to this Stuff article, one in five New Zealanders may experience bullying.

In the process of learning a little bit of verbal self-defence, I realised there's a great story in here. I'm interested in watching a story about someone who's driven right down to the breaking point, and who fights their way back up.

Workplace Bully is a web-series.

There are two main characters - the bully and the woman he's bullying (a new arrival to the office).

There are two halves to the story - her slowly realising she's being bullied as her self-esteem gets driven down to breaking point, and then her learning how to fight back against the bully, which will require her to push herself, her workmates, the bully and her workplace as far as she possibly can.


I have a very clear vision for this show. It's funny (in the sense that watching a witty bully is entertaining), but the first half is mostly about tension and slowly-mounting disaster. There's no physical violence in it; the only violence in this story is verbal and bureaucratic.

In the second half, as she learns how to fight back, I'd hope that the story starts to feel archetypal - a hero's (sic)journey about a woman nearly destroyed by a monster. And then fighting back against him.

As a show, I think it's going for something very real. Plausible. Realistic. And, I think, really dramatically satisfying. But not a drama; it's almost like a constructed documentary

Episodes are very short - one or two minutes. In fact, each episode is basically a scene focusing on a single situation - a morning tea, a power-point presentation, a single moment of insight into the woman or the bully's personal life. And the episodes don't follow on directly from each other: this isn't a cliffhanger-type show; it's more a gentle observing of incidents from two peoples' lives that add up to a bigger story.


I have two actors in mind, and I'm keen to try and shoot it Lone Gun style. So far it's been an easy show to outline and come up with episodes for (and it has the added bonus that doing the research benefits me). I suspect that rather than scripts, Workplace Bully would semi-improvised from an outline.

What I'd like to do in the next three to six months is:

1. Outline and research a bunch of episodes, to make sure that there's enough material there.
2. Shoot a Season Zero: three to six easy to achieve episodes over one or two days, Lone Gun style.

The Big, Wild Success for this project would be that I film the whole arc and that there's an audience for it. It'd also be great if it helped people (but maybe that's just a little too sincere).

So, if you're interested in this project or you have some thoughts on it, let's have a conversation about it. Because I'd like to try and get the most out of this, I've implemented a few rules:

• Interview me (and each other). Ask questions, rather than posting monologues about what you think.
• Be nice. Make people feel safe to post, and try and critique constructively. Although, if you absolutely must tell me why this idea is not damn good, go for it ... but - you know - 'constructively', and we'll sort out how that works.
• I will try and engage heavily with this conversation, here, on Twitter and on Facebook. Let's see how that works.

The New Thing Part 2 is coming in 1 day

Tomorrow, I'm going to start posting the first of four pitches for projects that I'm thinking about working on, and I'm going to invite you to help me play a game with me to figure out which one of them I'll tackle next.

I'm doing this because I spent seven years developing The Limit in secrecy; at most 5 or 6 people knew about that script's details. That was tough: the amount of feedback I could get was extremely limited, and I couldn't tell if people would be interested in it when I finally got around to putting it on the market. This time I want to create a bit more openly, and I want to figure out which ideas might have an audience - which simply means figuring out if you're interested in a particular idea, and whether you'd want to tell other people about it.

So, over the next two weeks I'm going to publish these pitches and I'd like to talk with you about them. Now: I think it'd be boring for everyone and pretty much useless if this conversation turns into some serious, high-stakes thing where everybody (including myself) expresses their opinions, invests a lot of status in 'being right', and the whole thing ends up in a cluster-fck where we're judging each other's creative ability.

I think we can agree that that would suck. And therefore I would like to do the opposite.


Let's pretend to be interviewers

Inspired by Tim Brown's TED talk, I want to play a game. I would like you to pretend to be interviewers, interviewing me about each of these ideas (or, at least, the ones that interest you). Rather than opinions, let's have a conversation where I listen and answer your questions, and think about your points and engage with them.

Questions, not monologues. That's my goal. (I have reasons for this, which I can go into in Comments if you're curious.)

Inviting you to discuss stuff with me like this implies a few things:

• You're a guest here. Since I've invited you in, it's up to me to make sure people are playing nice and positive, and that these interviews are good. In fact, I'll adopt the Lurkers Rule from Mo Ryan's TV blog: the environment here should be so accepting, so calm and so non-screechy that most timid lurker should feel safe about commenting. Upshot: I'll be moderating these conversations, as well as participating in them.
  
• What does 'nice' mean? Simply that I'm expecting people to be courteous and empowering. I'm fine with disagreement - it's valuable! - but I'd like that disagreement to encourage creativity, rather than be a blunt 'No' that blocks all further conversation and discourages me (or anyone else from working on it).
  
• You can share what you'd do with the idea, but - you know - phrase it like an interviewer would.
  
• I'm looking forward to discussing this with you! And I'm interested in your opinion ... but I guess I'll have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether I care about it. In other words: I'm not asking for your permission to create something.

Hopefully, if this is successful, three things will have happened:

1. I will have learned something
2. I will be more likely to create something
3. I will have a guideline about which ideas have the potential to create an audience (As a rough guide, I'm going to base that on how vigourous the conversation is)

What would I like you to do?

My goals for this are pretty simple. I want to gauge if people are interested in any of these ideas - and if they are, then what are they interested in?


That means if you like one of these upcoming ideas, or if you feel you've got something to say about them, or even if you don't like them - I'd love you to comment. And if you don't like one, or aren't interested and don't comment, then that silence is helpful too.

(And if you've never commented before, please feel free to.)

So, comment. Ask questions. Be yourself, but pretend to interview me. Let's try to create something that's fun and positive. Will this work? I have no idea, but let's play the game and find out.

For the first time, I'm going to really use twitter and facebook to continue the conversation. I'm going to post and reply on these more than I normally would. If you're not on twitter, you can check the sidebar on my blog's main page to follow along.

So here we go. First up - tomorrow - an idea for a web-series about a nasty little situation that many of us will have seen in our everyday work and flatting lives ...

Let's get ready to start the conversation!

The New Thing Part 2 is coming in 2 days

Let's summarise where I'm at:

While working through my issues with writing last year, I realised that I wanted writing to fit into my life, rather than dominate it. And that led to me discovering something about the New Thing: By choosing to write less, I'm writing more.

The most obvious thing I've done is limit myself to working on two things at any one time.(*). That means I'm getting more done partially because I'm stopping myself from spreading my attention too thinly. If my life gets busy, then I drop down to one thing. And if my life gets super-stressful then I'm fine about simply spending between zero to 20 minutes a day just playing around with ideas.

* 'Thing' can mean a writing project, but it can also mean 

some big project to do with another aspect of my life.

 
Changing how I feel about writing has also been a big part of writing more. I've gone from freaking out to seeing writing as an opportunity to work on things that excite me. This means, for instance, I'll be doing something like cleaning the toilet or washing the shower curtains, and I'll suddenly (perhaps 'reasonably') get enthusiastic to write - right now.

Basically, the way I procrastinate has flipped polarities, and I like it.

The New Thing Part 2 is coming in 3 days

An essential part of the New Openness is letting people judge your work. I'm a little cautious about this, mostly because I'm acutely susceptible to negative feedback - it's not that I don't like it, it's that I've often found negative feedback demolishes my desire to create something.

There's been a recent bubble of articles about letting people judge your work, and asking who should judge your work. Seth Godin has been talking a lot about shipping (finishing a project and sending it out into the world); he says:

[S]ome people learn to ship, they learn to do work that matters and most of all, they learn to ignore the critics they can never possibly please. The ability to choose who judges your work--the people who will make it better, use it and reward you--is the key building block in becoming an artist in whatever you do.

Trent at the Simple Dollar also did a post of being careful about who judges you.

A lot of the people who judge you will never be pleased with you, no matter what you do. It will never, ever be enough. There will always be something with which they can bring you down and reassert their sense of superiority.

Guess what? Their opinions do not matter. Not one little bit. If you waste even one second of your life trying to please such people, that’s a second you’ll never get value from and never get back.

<snip>

In the end, the only opinions that really matter are your own opinions and the opinions of a very small and select group of people who know the full situation and whose opinions you’ve actually decided to care about. Everyone else? Not so much

After thinking about this, I've decided to take a different approach with Part 2 of the New Thing. I'm going to be interested in everyone's opinions and ideas, but I'm going to reserve the right to not care about them. I have no idea how that balancing act will work in practice, but I'm fascinated to find out.

The New Thing Part 2 is coming in 4 days

As a counter-point to the New Openness, Derek Sivers has a great post all about the dangers of sharing what you're planning to do.

Research shows that talking about your ideas makes you less likely to accomplish them (because announcing something gives your mind just enough of a sense of achievement that you don't actually need to do the thing).

I'm actually aware of this principle - and I've fallen victim to it many times. I'm hoping that clearly defining the next actions I'm wanting to take with each project will help minimise the threat from this effect a little.

The New Thing Part 2 is coming in 5 days

There is lots of anecdotal evidence that having a career as a writer in New Zealand is f--ing difficult. Like, there are somewhere around 20 screenwriters working in New Zealand who make a living from writing full-time. Like, our most successful novelists with an extensive back-catalogue are earning around $30,000 p.a. from their work.

Here's an excerpt from a Salient interview with Witi Ihimaera that illustrates this point:

Every time I look at Maurice Gee’s work, or Patricia Grace’s work, I’m always stunned at what they’ve achieved. If they were working overseas they would not be working, I would not be working. They would be supported, I would be supported. Let me fire you an example:

Sky Dancer has know sold out 4,000 copies at $34.95, of which I get 10 percent in royalties – $3.45 for every book. From 4,000 copies I will realise $14,000.

It’s not a lot of money, so we do it for love, we do it because we have this commitment. I remember Maurice Gee saying once on the radio, he won an award for about $12,000 and the interviewer was saying ‘what are you going to do with this money?’ And he said ‘oh well, there’s a thing called the mortgage, and this will help to pay it off.’

About six years ago, I was script-editing at Gibson Group (which, in my experience, involves trying to find the funny while infected with the flu and working till 2am). I hung out with the other editors, who'd been writing professionally for years. When I asked them about their careers, they kept emphasising that they had other jobs - part-time, sure, but steady incomes - and they wrote and created in multiple areas, just to make sure the money kept coming in.

I begin to suspect that my experience working on lovebites has ill-prepared for the realities of writing in a number of ways.

So, my starting position is this: I need to be writing and creating stuff because I love it ... and worry about the potential (or 'hypothetical' or 'tiny') monetary rewards later. So rather than money, I want to be mentally engaged and excited by building stuff, and I want to feel that it's adding to my life.

The New Thing (Part Four): The New Openness

OK. I know that I have enough space in my life that I can work on writing (at most) two things: one 'Big' project and one less important project (which I drop if life gets busy).

But what do I write? That's always been my problem ... and a leading contributor to me freaking out about writing: I stress about what's the right thing to dedicate myself to right now. Unpacking what feeds into that stress, I found a whole bunch of stuff:

• focusing on the opportunity cost (If I write this, I won't be able to work on all my other projects. And will this one even work out? Should I actually be working on something else?)
• fear of how long I'll be working on it (I ended up working on The Limit for seven years - I am prepared to commit to this for that long?)
• a tendency to judge the worthiness of a project before I start exploring its potential. 

 ... The result? Paralysis.



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So what should I do with this discovery that I feel good about writing but I'm still afraid to commit to writing something?

On the 652 kilometre drive back from the Pixies' Auckland gig, Sean and Helen and I had a wide-ranging conversation that - at one point - touched on the idea of writer's paranoia: the fear that if you actually talk about your awesome story idea, someone will steal it and write it before you get a chance to.

I've been this guy. I've suffered from this fear, this paranoia, this community-destroying suspicion of other writers. I've thought things like: I can't trust you because you might plagiarise me. I can't trust you because you might get inspired to write something similar - and you might do it first. Or you might get all the credit. Or getting your advice might taint my self-image as the 'solitary creator'.

Well the upshot of that Pixies roadtrip conversation was: I don't care.

First off, it's bullshit. Most writers are too busy trying to figure out how to execute their own ideas to worry about stealing yours. And the chances that they'll be inspired to work on something you've come up with and are passionate about, and work on it in a way that's good and meaningful and fun ... well the chances of that are low.

Second: how are you going to find the people who can help you work on your idea, who help you have fun with it and help it grow, unless you tell people? And the people who might be good supporters for this particular idea might not be who you expect.

Third: I'm going to be alive for another ... (consults life expectancy calculator) ... 53 years. ... Well, that's an unexpectedly awesome discovery, but the point I'm making is that at my current rate of progress, I'll probably create another 3 to 8 ideas in my life.

I came up with 20 ideas in the last two months (thanks to the new routine of 20 minutes free writing a day).

That math's relentless: I have more ideas than I'll ever be able to execute. For some of them, by the time I get round to doing them I won't be into them anymore. Or their time will have passed. What I'm getting to is that (from a certain point-of-view) if people do 'steal' an idea of mine, it saves me the trouble of doing it myself.

Couple those realisations with Seth Godin's post on the importance of:

a) creating ideas that spread
b) focusing on the ideas that spread the most

... and the answer to how do I get over my fear of committing to writing something is obvious.

I can't be afraid of sharing ideas.

I can't be afraid of talking about them and seeing what happens.

Of seeing what works, and what's interesting.

Of seeing what sticks with people.

I can't be afraid to find out which of my ideas are good.


So, a big part of the New Thing is the New Openness. I'm going to talk about the things I'm considering for my next projects, and (hopefully) get a discussion started with you about them. This is entering into Phase 2 of the New Thing: I'm going to write pitches for 8 projects I'm thinking about doing (which will apply lessons from Made to Stick, and maybe even look a little bit like a media release.)

That'll start next week.

A New Thing Bonus Feature: Thank you!

Only a couple more posts to go in this series about how I've changed the way I approach writing (and then we move on to Phase 2 of the New Thing). I just wanted to say thank you to all the people who've been discussing this with me - especially the people who've approached me or asked after me, concerned that I'm OK.

I'm fine.

Consider this series of posts about the New Thing to be something like a character arc. While they started off describing a low point (which really was about 6 to 8 months ago), they'll end up in a good place. I'm really enjoying writing at the moment, and a lot of other elements of my life are going well too.

So, thank you for your concern and good wishes.

Also: how freaking cool is Lost right now? Evil Good Desmond. Zombie Sayid. Off-handed answerings of enormous questions, and Jack? Jack is a compelling character again? I couldn't believe it when they did it with Sawyer, but making Jack awesome seemed almost impossible to me.

Three fantastic episodes in a row, really interesting situations having been set-up to explore, and absolutely no character is safe (except for maybe Hurley and Jack).

Loving it.

The New Thing (Part Three): Making writing fit

Two years. That's how long it took to mentally get to a point where just sitting down to write would freak me out.

Thirty minutes. That's how long it took (with the right tools) to completely flip my brain from that to seeing writing as an opportunity.


But while I was stoked that that had worked, I was becoming aware of another source of stress underneath that: stress from trying to fit writing into my work and personal life.

Some numbers: after a normal day of work, I have maybe two hours (max) where my brain is clear and active, before it starts shutting down and going to sleep. And before work, I probably have 20 to 30 minutes of free-ish time, which I often spend surfing the net. With about two-and-a-half hours of good brain time available to me, I realised I needed to create a routine for writing that I could fit into my life - a routine that would place as little pressure on me as possible.

A couple of years ago, I read a book called 'Margin', which talked about the idea of creating free time and breathing room in your life (much like the white margins that surround the words on a page). The way I had been writing - focusing on a big project, spending all my free time on it - had been filling up the page with words and leaving very little white space.

Two Things


After reflecting on it, what I realised is that when my life is going well, when I'm productive, feeling good, and not stressed at work ... then I can handle working on two extra projects. That's any big project that's going to take a lot of energy to move to the next stage (or finish!). And it's not just writing. It's anything from my '12 things to do in 2 years' list. It's blogging. It's two extra things in my life.

So here's my starting point: If I want to have margin in my life, I have to limit myself to two things. For instance:

• Finishing a draft of Bad Family to send to Simon and Malcolm for peer review is a thing.
• Spending six weeks going to ceroc, to learn to dance is a thing.
• Writing this series of blog posts about The New Thing? It's a thing.

What I didn't consider, for the longest time, was that the blog is a Thing. Writing this blog has been so important to me that I've felt like I've had to do it, even if I had lots of other stuff going on in my life. But what I realised was that blogging can't be an 'extra' thing that competes for my available writing time. It's better for me to think about blogging as just one way I can express myself through writing, and these book analyses and multi-part essays are just one of the possible 'things' I have the space in my life to write about. (That means there will probably be further changes to what I blog about, but I'll let Future Steve sort that out ...)

(Future Steve?)

This isn't perfect

Through figuring all this out and applying this '2 Things' principle I seem to have stumbled into a good new space for writing - a routine for writing that fits into my life. As long as I write for 10 minutes a day, usually before going on the net in the morning and - if I can - when I first get home from work, then I'm happy. And seem to be making a lot of progress.

I'm definitely not saying that this is something people should try, and I'm not saying this routine is some perfect, finished thing. In fact, one of the great things I took from the Pixar talk is that there's no such thing as a 'perfect' way to live your life; it's just good to keep adapting to your circumstances and energy. I actually expect to keep refining and changing how I run my life every three to six months, and that's totally cool.


All I'm saying is that I have a new routine. Next: what am I going to do with it?

A New Thing Bonus Feature: The Lone Gun Manifesto

Clive Davies-Frayne at the filmutopia blog (one of my new favourite reads for thinking about script-writing and film production) posted this film-making manifesto, which I found so inspiring that I asked him for permission to reproduce it in full. So, here's Clive, distilling 12 years of experience into how to make a film:

     The Lone Gun Manifesto

For the last twelve years I've been banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to deal with the insanity of the movie industry, whilst at the same time exploring the equally insane world of micro-budget movie making. The problem is that neither system works. The industry becomes more and more obsessed with playing it safe and the independents largely try to imitate the work patterns of the industry, only with less money. For people like me it's a nightmare, because what I want to do is make movies and have people watch them... and, to do that without investing three years of my life and all of my money into a project which then flounders around the ridiculous distribution system.

Anyway, after many years of pondering the problems of funding, shooting and distributing movies, I believe I have an answer. However, it means completely changing the way we think about movies. It is a production philosophy designed to let creative people make brilliant movies quickly, cheaply and without exploiting the people who contribute to its making.

Here are the headlines:

1) One DSLR camera, One person, One microphone (The lone gun shoots alone)
2) Strip movie making down to the basics - a camera, a great story and some actors
3) A lone gun never asks for permission to shoot at a location
4) Put something original and honest in front of the camera
5) Think like a photographer, not like a film-maker
6) Money is for food, transport and a dedicated hard-drive for each project and nothing else
7) Natural light only
8) Everyone who works on a movie, has the right to distribute that movie for free or for profit
9) No credits before the title ever, regardless of how famous someone is.
10) The end product must be cinema quality (capable of projection to cinema sizes without falling apart)
11) A creative common license for the movie (how open you go is up to you, but people must be able to share and alter it for free)
12) If you’re going to be a gorilla… you may as well wear the full monkey suit.

OK. In practical terms this means that you are shooting in public places,but never in such a way that anyone is aware you are shooting. That's why it is done best with a standard DSLR camera. (I really want to see someone figure out how to do this with the RED by the way!)

In terms of the sound recording there are two alternatives: radio mics for all cast - or the way I am doing it, a $30 pair of binaural mics, (which look like iphone headphones) jacked into a portable digital recorder. (I've tested this method and the sound quality is phenomenal, once you've got the hang of it) To use the binaural system, the actors have to set away the sound, which is placed in shot between them... and one of them is given a Zippo cigarette-lighter to clack at the start of a scene, which gives you the cue for syncing the audio.

In reality this means you are only filming mastershots. You can't control the environment to get coverage. However, this really, really speeds up the production process. Basically, you and the actors pick your location. You decide where you are going to place the camera. When you're set up, they walk into the set up, set away the audio and play out the scene. Because there is no crew and no lines to edit, the acting can be completely natural (think Woody Allen circa Manhattan).

Here's the list of kit I use (feel free to improvise better solutions):

1) A good DSLR camera
2) A portable digital audio recorder
3) A microphone (not the kind you’re thinking about.. The one I use cost $40)
4) A Zippo cigarette lighter
5) A small beanbag
6) A computer with some professional editing software on it
7) Some actors
8) A pocket sized notebook
9) A brilliant idea for a movie
10) A script
11) A dedicated hard drive
12) An idea about how you’re going to build an audience

One of the things that I think makes this philosophy work is that the writer/director decides in advance, to give everyone who contributes to the movie the rights to distribute the movie for free or for profit. My project has been running for four weeks so far - we’re in writing and pre-production. The first actor I attached has already told me he has friends at a European TV station, to whom he would like to give the finished movie... along with a raft of international arts festivals. Neither of those two distribution options would ever have occurred to me. I'm working on free distribution via iTunes and also on getting a US theatrical release via some of my US contacts. Once you take the rights shackles off a project, it's amazing what happens. Seriously amazing.

Finally, I know there are issues about working this way. It forces moviemakers to give up a lot. However, the freedoms it gives in return, to just work with a team of people quickly and creatively to make a movie, more than pays off for any restrictions.

And… finally, if you know of anyone who would make an outstanding movie, if only they had this one piece of paper, then give it to them. Pass this on to the people you believe it will inspire.

Thanks for reading this - up the revolution!