right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?
Facebook in Three Acts
A digital commons, upon which anyone who wishes may establish, free, his or her own personal “page.”
Each page owner determines who is permitted access to his or her page.
Thus creating a worldwide community of “friends” who can interact with other “friends” and communicate or share virtually anything they want.
That’s Why They Call It Rewriting
The old saw says there’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. This is true.
Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all.
Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.
Next question: How do you get it down?
Start at the End
Here’s a trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish.
If you’re writing a movie, solve the climax first. If you’re opening a restaurant, begin with the experience you want the diner to have when she walks in and enjoys a meal. If you’re preparing a seduction, determine the state of mind you want the process of romancing to bring your lover to.
Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.
Yes, you say. “But how do I know where I want to go?”
Answer the Question “What Is This About?”
Start with the theme. What is this project about?
What is the Eiffel Tower about? What is the space shuttle about? What is Nude Descending a Staircase about?
Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state. And when you know the end state, you’ll know the steps to take to get there.
Moby Dick on a Single Sheet, Working Back to Front
What is Moby Dick about?
It’s about the clash between human will and the elemental malice of nature, i.e. (in Melville’s dark 19th-century view), the Old Testament God.
So … a monster. A whale. A white whale (because white is even weirder and scarier than whatever color whales normally are).
Next: a mortal to challenge the monster. He must be monstrous himself. Obsessed, arrogant, monomaniacal. Ahab.
Knowing our theme (in other words, what Moby Dick is about), we now know the climax: Ahab harpoons the white whale and duels it to the death. No other climax is possible.
Now we have Act Three. We have our end.
Next: beginning and middle. We need to set the climax up and load it with maximum emotion and thematic impact.
We must, in other words, establish both protagonist and antagonist, make clear to the reader what each of them represents and what their conflict means thematically in the broader scheme of the human (and divine) condition.
Beginning: Ishmael. Our point of view. A human-scale witness to the tragedy.
Once we have Ishmael, we have our start and our ultimate finish—after the whale destroys the Pequod and all her crew and drags Ahab to his death in the depths, Ishmael pops up amid the wreckage, the lone survivor, to tell the tale.
End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.
“But hey, Steve … I thought you said ‘Don’t think.’”
Let’s pause for a moment then and consider the difference between thinking and “thinking.”
Thoughts and Chatter
Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that.
These are not thoughts. They are chatter.
I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap
Facebook in Three Acts
A digital commons, upon which anyone who wishes may establish, free, his or her own personal “page.”
Each page owner determines who is permitted access to his or her page.
Thus creating a worldwide community of “friends” who can interact with other “friends” and communicate or share virtually anything they want.
That’s Why They Call It Rewriting
The old saw says there’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. This is true.
Better to have written a lousy ballet than to have composed no ballet at all.
Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.
Next question: How do you get it down?
Start at the End
Here’s a trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish.
If you’re writing a movie, solve the climax first. If you’re opening a restaurant, begin with the experience you want the diner to have when she walks in and enjoys a meal. If you’re preparing a seduction, determine the state of mind you want the process of romancing to bring your lover to.
Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.
Yes, you say. “But how do I know where I want to go?”
Answer the Question “What Is This About?”
Start with the theme. What is this project about?
What is the Eiffel Tower about? What is the space shuttle about? What is Nude Descending a Staircase about?
Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state. And when you know the end state, you’ll know the steps to take to get there.
Moby Dick on a Single Sheet, Working Back to Front
What is Moby Dick about?
It’s about the clash between human will and the elemental malice of nature, i.e. (in Melville’s dark 19th-century view), the Old Testament God.
So … a monster. A whale. A white whale (because white is even weirder and scarier than whatever color whales normally are).
Next: a mortal to challenge the monster. He must be monstrous himself. Obsessed, arrogant, monomaniacal. Ahab.
Knowing our theme (in other words, what Moby Dick is about), we now know the climax: Ahab harpoons the white whale and duels it to the death. No other climax is possible.
Now we have Act Three. We have our end.
Next: beginning and middle. We need to set the climax up and load it with maximum emotion and thematic impact.
We must, in other words, establish both protagonist and antagonist, make clear to the reader what each of them represents and what their conflict means thematically in the broader scheme of the human (and divine) condition.
Beginning: Ishmael. Our point of view. A human-scale witness to the tragedy.
Once we have Ishmael, we have our start and our ultimate finish—after the whale destroys the Pequod and all her crew and drags Ahab to his death in the depths, Ishmael pops up amid the wreckage, the lone survivor, to tell the tale.
End first, then beginning and middle. That’s your startup, that’s your plan for competing in a triathlon, that’s your ballet.
“But hey, Steve … I thought you said ‘Don’t think.’”
Let’s pause for a moment then and consider the difference between thinking and “thinking.”
Thoughts and Chatter
Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that.
These are not thoughts. They are chatter.
I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap
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