Category: Show Your Work

The Age of Process or The Story Behind the Story as More Important Than the Story

Fatigued pencil. #keepwriting

A photo posted by Brendan O’Meara (@brendanomeara) on

By Brendan O’Meara

Listening to the run up to the Oscars, what was the main thing you heard about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood? It wasn’t how great a movie it was or how powerful the performances were. It was This movie took twelve years to make!

The marketing machine behind this movie was brilliant. I haven’t seen Boyhood yet (I will), but the true brilliance of this movie is the story behind the story. The actors and filmmakers committed a few months every year for twelve years to make the film.

This story behind the story was more powerful than the story itself.

So what’s the lesson? As I see it, make your process as transparent as possible and make the making of your art part of the narrative. Blogs are perfect for this. Show Your Work, as Austin Kleon would say.

Part of Boyhood’s appeal was this notion of backstory. Whether it was intentional or not from the outset is unknown, but once it became part of the movie’s machinery, it was this unbelievable talking point that made the movie irresistible to viewers because people kept saying, “Can you believe this movie took twelve years to make?”

This backstory was even more powerful than the actual movie. A Google search for “boyhood took 12 years to make” yields over 4 million hits.

Blog about your book. Take pictures. Make little confession movies. Make a mini documentary about your project. Pretend someone is interviewing you and answer questions. Create a story about the story and people will read the story you want to sell.

 

Want a Free Book Signed by Me? Written by Me?

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Sooooo, as you can you see from the picture above, my cool, little book Six Weeks in Saratoga is prominently displayed at my favorite bookstore (Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs).

I’ve got 11 books just sitting in a box downstairs and I want to them to land in the hands of someone willing to read them. Here’s my plan: I’m going to GIVE THEM AWAY FOR FREE*!

Say what!?

All you have to do is sign up for my email posse (over there in the right margin). Whenever I write a blog post, you get a notification every Tuesday (just once a week). If I write none, you get no email. If I write ten posts, you get one email with the links to all the posts. It’s less intrusive that way.

Here’s what you do:

1. Enter your email and sign up for the newsletter

2. Wait for me to email you (It will be from brendan@brendanomeara.com)

3. I will ask you how you want your book inscribed and ask for your mailing address

4. I will ship your book to you media rate (Hey, you’re getting a hardcover book for free, don’t complain about shipping!) along with a snappy bookmark

5. Here’s the one little catch, if you can call it a catch: All I ask is that you review the book (honestly) on Amazon or Goodreads or both (use the same review for both).

That’s it. It’s a free, hardcover, personalized book. Let’s be friends!

*Limit one per email

Got something to say? Email me at brendan@brendanomeara.com.

Take Notes, Take Notes, Take Notes

Written by Brendan O’Meara

I was listening to The Moment with Brian Koppelman. It’s a great podcast for screenwriters, but also creatives in any genre. The principles of creativity are the same across all disciplines. First and foremost: get your ass in the seat and work. Don’t be a little shit like I was in this post. I could delete that post and pretend it never existed, but that would be dishonest and weak. Own it, yo.

What Koppleman and John Hamburg talked about in an earlier episode of The Moment was finding a movie (could be a book, essay, etc.) that inspires you. Take your favorite movie and get a notebook. Take notes throughout the whole movie. Pause the movie. Watch the movie five, six, seven times. What works? How did the director lay out the scenes? How did he sew them together? How does the dialogue work? The list goes on and on.

I’ve watched The Dark Knight probably 15 times. I’ve watched the ending to The Dark Knight probably 50 times. It sums up everything about the movie beautifully. The movie, in many ways, is about duality. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It’s illustrated in Two Face. It’s illustrated in the Batman v. Joker rivalry. It’s in the duality of Batman v. Bruce Wayne. Everything has its dipoles in this movie, positive and negative components of a magnet.

In the ending of The Dark Knight, Jim Gordon says of Harvey Dent (covering up the mess Dent made), “A hero, not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed.” Then as Batman runs into the night Gordon says, “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.” I love how Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan flipped the wording. Again with the duality. The past and present tense. (It’s also classic Christopher Nolan cross-cutting.)

Whatever the creative medium, if you’re serious about your art, you stand on the shoulders of titans before you and you examine the what the why of their work. Football head coaches watch hours and hours and hours of game film, why? They’re trying to understand the inner workings of an opponent. In art there are no opponents, but the same measure of examination is imperative to those serious about the art.

I think The Great Gatsby is THE model of first-person storytelling. I’ve read it six times, but never with a notebook. When I read it again I’m going to peel back its facade to the scaffolding underneath. I recommend this to anyone, for anyone.

It’s the dirty work that goes unseen.

Today is the First Day of the Rest of the Blog!

Written by Brendan O’Meara (email sign up form ====>)

I read the great Show Your Work by Austin Kleon on my Kindle on Wednesday. It’s a short book, but I highlighted a huge number of passages (I’ll share more as I go, but I’ll practically copy and paste the whole book here if I copy them all now). The premise of the book is that by sharing your work, giving away insights, and process for free, it actually helps build your army. It’s simply a look behind the curtain.

It makes a lot of sense. People have been doing this for years now. By being consistent and giving away personality and access into the work, it’s a positive feedback loop that feeds the artist as well as the consumer. Kleon writes:

Instead of wasting their time “networking,” they’re taking advantage of the network. By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can then leverage when they need it—for fellowship, feedback, or patronage.

I’ve tried just about everything to build a following (and failed). The one thing I haven’t done is share a little every day. That’s my goal for a month, to share a little every day. I’ll scale back after that (maybe). I’ll use it as a warmup for my day’s work. I’ll share some of the mechanics behind what I’m working on. But, like Kleon writes:

Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones.

That’s the dilly. I’m working on a ton of junk, but I hope that junk turns into something great, something worth buying, something worth re-reading. So, like the Chips Ahoy! cookie, “Today! Is the first day of the rest of my ….”