Tag: 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.

 

Do Cool Stuff: The Key to Being a Writer

Written by Brendan O’Meara

My big writer’s resolution of 2014 was to do more immersion projects. I stopped covering high school games. I’ve covered hundreds upon hundreds of games. They’re not worth my time any more in a very small media market.

The best thing any writer can do is to do interesting things (or do things the writer finds interesting). The technical skills that come with writing comes with repetition.

The literary agent Jeff Kleinman visited Goucher College one summer residency. This was in 2007. He rattled a lot of cages for harping on the MFA program for producing what he loathes: the MFA Voice. The MFA Voice is subjective, of course, but it’s a voice that is technically sounds but almost always devoid of energy, spunk, and edge. It’s a voice that is bogged down by fundamentals, that’s too aware of itself, that doesn’t want to get in the way of the story. It can be very vanilla. Take movies. You know when you’re watching a Wed Anderson, a Christopher Nolan, a Stephen Spielberg, a Quentin Tarantino. That’s voice.  We want to occupy their brain space for two to three hours at a time.

Certain stories that are very heavy need the author to step back, but for most stories, especially memoir, the voice has to be engaging and full of energy. The key, as Austin Kleon writes in his great book Show Your Work, is to “Be an Amateur.”

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.

That’s what Jonathan Safran Foer did when he wrote Everything is Illuminated. He wrote like an amateur. In Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Gladwell wrote a great piece on late bloomers (Foer is not a late bloomer, but the other side of the coin). Foer brought an amateur approach to his writing. He was a freshman at Princeton (smaht kid, as we say in the Boston area). On a whim, he took a creative writing class with Joyce Carol Oates. Gladwell wrote:

Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an entire story for each seminar.

“Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” [Foer] said with a laugh. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”

Foer went to Ukraine to see where his grandfather came from (doing cool stuff). He came back. Foer said:

I was just writing. I didn’t know that I was writing until it was happening. I didn’t go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I’d never done it like that.

This is the type of thing that gets a bit smothered in the MFA crowd, a crowd that gets bitter when their technically sound prose can’t find a home. It’s like what Kleinman told me once, “It doesn’t matter how great a writer you are if you’re not writing anything people want to read.”

I’m writing about maple syrup these days. It’s cool. It’s about syrup, but it’s also about my fleeting sense of manhood and a search for brotherhood. Anyway, go ahead and watch some sap dump into the holding tank. I think it’s interesting.

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 ….”