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Someone pointed me at Natalia Ilyin’s brief rant about how designers can’t write—but, worse, believe they can anyway. It reminds me of the endless string of self-help books and slogans we’ve seen over the last several years—things like The Secret—that suggest if we only believe in ourselves, the power of positive thinking will carry us through.

This is bullshit.

And it’s not just bullshit for the big things, like cancer, but for the little things, too, like writing ability. Believing you’re a good writer (or designer, or marathon runner) won’t make it so.

Instead, I recommend my new, patented technique for self-improvement: The Power of Negative Thinking™.

It works like this: look at your work, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and focus on what about it sucks.

Chances are, you can find a lot. Absorb your work’s flaws. Study them. Learn them. Look at how other people, people better than you—which is near everyone, right? remember, we’re looking at the thing you suck at—dealt with those areas.

Now, next time you do that sort of work, pay attention to those flawed areas. That’s where you need to improve. Learn from the other people (people better than you). Do it better.

Once you’re done, look at your work, and focus on what about it sucks. And so on.

That is how you get better at something. If at first you don’t succeed, suck, suck again. Eventually, you’ll suck at something else instead.

But why listen to me? I suck at this, too.

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Merlin Mann posted a long (long, long) video rant today, following up on a much shorter and funnier one he posted yesterday (note: neither video is safe for work, but the second one is much more egregiously so).

One of the things he talks about (the main point, I think, of his rant) is that there are tons of advice blogs that threaten purport to help you with lots of little bits of information, and that these can be really dangerous because they won’t tell you to stop when you’ve had enough—indeed, it’s in their best interest that you go on benders as often as possible.

This mirrors a change in writing that’s taken place with the internet. 20 years ago, you’d get your advice from a book, a piece of a defined length which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The author, in the course of writing a book (if they did it well), starts at one point, walks you through all the things they want you to get through, and ends. By its very nature, the book tells you to, forces you to put it down.

Websites don’t do that. They’re not like books: they go on and on serving up bite-sized pieces of content for as long as whoever maintains them can keep up the pace, hour on hour, day on day, week on week. It is, in some sense, the nature of the internet to cater to that frenetic “advanced beginner” stage of understanding.

Obviously, the solution (to the extent that this problem needs a solution) isn’t to go back to books. But I’d be thrilled to see a format for publishing on the web that abandons the hyper-current pace of the blogosphere for a more careful, deliberate, considered approach, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The model for the internet thus far has been newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. Maybe we should think about making it like books?

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the full quote →

In the event you’ve never heard the original radio show, or read the books, you should do that. Now.

Happy Towel Day, everyone.

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• Typography
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• Writing

Oh dear.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

That’s the coda of Nabokov’s afterward to Lolita.

What I wouldn’t do for a shadow of his “second-rate brand of English.”

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• Writing

I have all too many aspirations in life, but one that’s been with me for as long as I can remember is the desire to write. This is something I have never quite been able to do, and it has always bothered me.

What I mean may not immediately be obvious, so I’ll explain. I enjoy writing immensely: there’s an act of pleasure in it, in turning a string of words into something that is more than the sum of its parts. I play games with words, in essence, like I make games out of everything: I try to get the most evocative meaning out of the fewest words. Though they may have different idioms for it, this is really what all authors do—even long-winded ones, like Dickens: his words march on for pages and meander off course at every opportunity, but scarcely any are wasted; his diversions serve to gently submerge you in the scenery and the characters and the milieu of his time and place. His writing stands in stark contrast to that of, say, Hemingway, but it is no less efficient. It merely seeks to accomplish something different.

I digress. It’s not that I can’t do that—indeed, I feel I can do it fairly well. I have certainly been told so by a number of people, many of whose judgment on the matter I trust. (Such praise is quite valuable, by the way. I am—like many, I suspect, who are or aspire to be good at something—my own worst critic. It takes a marvelous confidence to release something you’ve made, not only because it ceases to be yours, but also because you are sure you are inflicting it upon a world that neither wants nor needs it, and most likely will never care (or, perhaps, notice) that it is there.)

There is a difference, however, between what I can do and writing. There is plenty of good literature in the world. There’s a sizable helping of great literature. But there is very little writing: things like Peake’s Gormenghast, Nabokov’s Lolita, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. These books take the language and do something extraordinary, fantastic with it. They are (as someone described Gormenghast) not mere fiction but real additions to life.

In more lucid moments, I am well aware I have scarcely more chance of being able to write something than my dog did, if I define it this way. This is something I’m quite comfortable admitting (indeed, it’s so obvious as to be scarcely worth saying), but it’s also something I must firmly deny. Otherwise, I would never attempt to write anything. What could possibly be the point?

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• Writing

Writing is hard work.

I’m working on writing a number of things write now, in particular a novel, a serial fantasy story, a handful of short stories, and this blog. I’m more successful at some than at others. This blog, for example? Clearly not writing that often.

I’m used to writing narrative or writing with a purpose, so with a blog I don’t have much idea what I should be writing about. (It obviously doesn’t help that this blog is deliberately themeless.) It seems unlikely that I don’t have much to say, as I can drone on endlessly about most things, even when I know nothing about them.

I used to post (prodigiously) to message boards, in particular one that I moderated for some time. But that feels like a conversation, and this feels like narcissism. (Oh, right, it is.) My defense against narcissism is, I suppose, that no one’s reading.

What am I writing about here, again?

Oh, right, that was the question.

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• Writing

I learned about Flannery O’Connor via Kurt Vonnegut, who showers her with praise in an essay at the beginning of Bagombo Snuff Box. She was one of the writers in the American southern tradition.

So when I saw a collection of her complete short stories (The Complete Stories) on the shelf at Borders, I grabbed it.

Vonnegut was absolutely right about her. Here is her description of mid-century New York, through the eyes of an aging southern gentleman:

New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next. His daughter didn’t even live in a house. She lived in a building—the middle in a row of buildings all alike, all blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people just like them looking back. Inside you could go up and you could go down and there were just halls that reminded you of tape measures strung out with a door every inch.

And here she is, about the New York subway:

People boiled out of trains and up steps and over into the streets. They rolled off the street and down steps and into trains—black and white and yellow all mixed up like vegetables in a soup. Everything was boiling. The trains swished in from tunnels, up canals, and all of a sudden stopped. The people coming out pushed through the people coming in and a noise rang and the train swooped off again.

I’m floored.