Where Ideas Come From

When asked where he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman often gives the pithy answer, “I make them up. Out of my head.” When a seven-year-old asked the same, he felt compelled to expound a bit (or rather a lot, really, but for my purposes here I've edited out most of it):

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

[...]

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is.”

Daydreaming is a huge part of the creative process. You don't have to stare at a blank page until ideas come—in fact I would advise against it. Gaze blankly out of a window once in a while. Go for walks and stare at clouds. Get lost in your thoughts. Let your inner child wander.

If ever anyone remarks that you look like you're doing nothing, don't be ashamed. Treat it as a badge of honor.

The Right Words

Patrick Rhone:

“It is moments like this that I am reminded why I am a writer. I’m in love with and in awe of the power of language. The way a single word or just the right ones strung together can capture the whole of something otherwise only imagined. An entire experience can be encapsulated, examined, and then set free for others to bear witness to, all in an instant, with just three simple words.”

This is truer than many writers know. I'm reminded of Tom Stoppard, who said (emphasis mine):

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

The right words in the right order. A powerful idea, that. Put another way, which words are within you right now, merely waiting to be placed in their proper order?

A Day in the Life of John Lasseter [Video]

Speaking of John Lasseter, this 25-minute documentary provides a fascinating look at a typical day in the man's life—namely: Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011.

The camera follows him from breakfast at his incredible house all the way through his workday at Pixar HQ. I particularly liked how he can work remotely from an iPad using Pixar's in-house apps, and of course getting a peek at the creative process is awesome too.

Am I a weirdo for finding this sort of thing entertaining? Maybe. I don't care.

John Lasseter on Storytelling

Caitlin Roper of WIRED examines the kind of philosophy that allowed John Lasseter and other members of Pixar to completely revitalize Disney's animation studio over the last decade:

“And the emotional core of a movie is what Lasseter pursues. Anybody can make films that dazzle you with technical wizardry or crack you up with biting humor. But that’s not enough for Lasseter. More than anything, the world’s most emotional executive wants to make movies that you connect with, movies that make you feel.

[...]

“The connection you make with your audience is an emotional connection,” Lasseter says. “The audience can’t be told to feel a certain way. They have to discover it themselves.”

Though I am neither an animator nor filmmaker, John Lasseter is one of my biggest heroes, right alongside Hiyao Miyazaki. These guys have set the standard for modern storytelling, and I aspire to approach writing in the same way they have film. I'm not there yet, of course—it's a work in progress.

The article also includes a line from Ed Catmull excellent book, Creativity, Inc., that aligns perfectly with what I said yesterday about words being more important than design:

“Visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.”

Ryan Holiday: “Wanting to be a "writer" was your first mistake”

“The problem is identifying as a writer. As though assembling words together is somehow its own activity. It isn’t. It’s a means to an end. And that end is always to say something, to speak some truth or reach someone outside yourself.

[...]

No one ever reads something and says, “Well, I got absolutely nothing out of this and have no idea what any of this means but it sure is technically beautiful!” But they say the opposite all the time, they say “Goddamn, that’s good” to things with typos, poor grammar and simple diction.”

Holiday is one of those guys who has achieved quite a lot at a young age, and can dole out advice like "go do interesting things" as a 26-year-old without a hint of pretension.

This particular post really speaks to me for two reasons:

1. I do self-identify as a writer. It's my standard response whenever asked what I do for a living.
2. I don't lead a particularly adventurous life. A happy one, sure, but it's hard to write interesting things when most of your time is spent at home.

If nothing else, Ryan has given me some food for thought. Perhaps a little more adventure in my life is in order, hm?

* * *

If you want to read more from Ryan Holiday, I recommend his book, The Obstacle is the Way. It's all about applying the tenets of stoicism to view life's obstacles in a totally different light. He also has an excellent book recommendation newsletter I've been subscribed to for years.

Crave

Chase Reeves, writing for The Sparkline:

“I think our buddhist friends would say something to the tune of, “all cravings will eat you up from the inside out.” Maybe they’re right.

But I have cravings.

[...]

I see [Robin Williams] sweating and manic and quick and sharp and brilliant and dynamic and feeding, feeding, feeding on the relationship with the audience… and I see a fable about myself, a hole in the center, a vacuum, always on, sucking, searching, hungry… for this moment, laughter, friends, me in the center of it… not wanting the moment to end.

The things I create come from there. That hole, that insecurity is an engine of creation.”

I love this piece. Sometimes I forget that Chase is just as great a writer as he is a web designer. For more stuff like this be sure to check out his personal blog, Ice to the Brim.

The Clues to a Great Story

Andrew Stanton of Pixar, during a 2012 TED Talk in which he shares some of the storytelling secrets he's learned over the years (timestamps included):

[6:22] “Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.”

[12:19] “And it just went to prove that storytelling has *guidelines*, not hard, fast rules.”

[16:27] “And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling -- to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder.”

If there's anyone I trust when it comes to guidelines for good storytelling, it's the director of Finding Nemo and WALL•E—two of my all-time favorite films. Definitely set aside twenty minutes to watch this video.

Big Update to Shawn Blanc's eBook, 'Delight is in the Details'

My buddy Shawn Blanc has published a huge update to his ebook about creativity, Delight is in the Details. Everything that made the original version awesome is still there, along with a ton of new content and refinements:

• The ebook has been upped from 75 pages to 88 thanks to the addition of two new chapters
• Two new audio interviews (Matt Alexander and Jared Sinclair), bringing the total to 10
• All of the audiobook and audio interview tracks have been remastered
• There are now transcripts of all the interviews, in case you’d rather read than listen
• A new Makers Q&A section
• References to iOS and OS X have been updated
• Three short videos about creativity and design, all with high production value. You can watch one of them right now: “The Creative Life”

If you already bought the first edition of Delight is in the Details, you get this update (and all future updates) for free. A Gumroad link to the new files will be emailed to you, so keep an eye out.

As for the rest of you, now is the perfect time to get in on a fantastic book that will spur your creative work and show you why sweating the details is so important.

Neil Gaiman's 2012 Commencement Speech [Video]

This link was originally published before the launch of The Spark Journal. I will be republishing (and lightly editing, in some cases) a handful of such things in the coming days, mainly because I feel they're worth seeing twice. My apologies if this annoys anyone.

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Somehow I completely missed out on watching this speech until recently. It seems like the kind of thing I should have come across sooner, since my internet friends presumably would have been linking it left and right at the time. But I guess better late than never right?

Here are a few of my favorite highlights, with accompanying time markers:

[1:51] - “First of all, when you start out on a career in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing know the rules, and they know what is possible, and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not.”

[2:10] “The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again.”

[19:29] “And now, go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.”

Introducing: the Spark Journal

So, I have an announcement to make. Nothing world-shattering, but worth mentioning all the same (and those of you who visited the site over the weekend already know about it anyway).

Henceforth, this site will no longer be known as Unretrofied. Instead, I welcome you to The Spark Journal.

Let's go ahead and get the admin stuff out of the way:

• The new domain is sparkjournal.net. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

  (Theoretically, if you visit any old unretrofied.com links (or, say, you still have the old URL bookmarked), you should still be directed to the proper destination. At least, it's worked with all the links I've tried so far.)

• There's also a new RSS feed. Again, subscribers to the old Unretrofed feed shouldn't have to do anything because I've switched the feed URL on my end. If you do run into any issues, try unsubscribing from the old one and resubscribing to the new one. I apologize for any inconvience.
• New Twitter account: @thesparkjournal
• New App.net account: @sparkjournal (for those of you still clinging to the dream, maaaaaan)
• New contact email: chris@sparkjournal.net
• I've created a weekly email newsletter containing all of that week's posts. If that sounds like your thing, you can find the subscribe form on the About page. Goes out every Saturday morning.

• The site has a new look! If you're reading this in RSS, click through and check it out. I tweaked a lot of CSS this past week and finally settled on something I'm happy with.

  The most obvious changes involve updated typography, a new overall color scheme, and a slightly nicer layout (I finally figured out why the entire blog index was shifted slightly to the left rather than centered, despite having margin: auto !important; configured in CSS: I was missing one teensy little Squarespace-made selector that controls the so-called "blog list").

• Along with the new name, The Spark Journal will exist within a different "blog" on my same Squarespace account (i.e. sparkjournal.net/journal). It will look as though the old Unretrofied content has disappeared, but you can still find it at sparkjournal.net/blog and sparkjournal.net/archive-old.

Feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don't want to read a long-winded story about the change. Enjoy the new digs! —Ed.

* * *

So why the sudden name change? Well actually, this decision has been a long time coming. I remember emailing Shawn Blanc a year ago to ask what he thought about my idea to burn Unretrofied to the ground and starting something new. I couldn't quite articulate why I wanted this, I just knew it was time for a change.

He gave me lots of good advice, particularly this:

“It's the content that matters, not where it lives.”

And he's right, a new domain and CMS won't make me a better or more dedicated writer. If I wanted to change the editorial direction of the site on a whim, I totally could. Wouldn't be the first time.

Even so, I haven't really identified with the Unretrofied "brand" (blegh) for a long time. The site started as a very Apple-centric blog, and I honestly don't care much about that sort of thing anymore. And despite my own feelings on the matter, many readers still see me as a purely tech-oriented writer. If you want proof, look at the names of the Twitter lists I'm a part of.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy (and will continue to write about) nerdy things like apps and using an iPad as one's primary device. Even as I write this, the big review I've been writing about Day One is calling my name from my drafts folder. It's just that my interests have expanded beyond the tech world and it's about time the site's name reflected that.

What I care about are the people who make things, and I care about helping people who struggle to make their thing. I want to write in a way that inspires others to do awesome stuff rather than drifting through a dreary rat-race life. I want to tell better stories. I want to try new things. As Chase Reeves might put it, I want to do things that are matterful.

This brings us to where the "spark" in Spark Journal comes from. Many months ago, I started keeping a list of my favorite words in Drafts, thinking I could maybe turn one or two of them into a new site title. Lots of good combinations came from this list, but "spark" was always the one that stuck in my mind most.

When people speak of inspiration or creativity or genius or adventure or love, they often refer to the spark of that thing. It was the best possible word I could think of to describe where I wanted this site to go.

The journal part of the name is merely a natural extension of my love of journaling and my rekindled interest in handwriting and notebooks and such. Plus I just like the word :)

I'll stop rambling now, and I hope you'll join me on this new journey. I have lots of ideas and things I want to do here, and couldn't be more excited about what's to come.

“A computer will make something perfectly square, perfectly spherical, and that’s just ugly and boring. All of your time is spent kind of messing it up, which is the opposite of most people’s jobs…the real world is a big old mess and most people’s time is spent tidying it up.”

—Suzanne Slatcher, former technical director at Pixar