Things I learned yesterday — 07/09/15
I’m trying to get into a habit of writing regularly so I’m spending a few minutes every day thinking about what I learned yesterday.
On ideas
When talking about the many ways ideas come to us I’ve always pointed at Tom Waits describing where songs come from… “There are songs that you have to sneak up on like a rare bird, there are songs that come fully formed like a dream taken through a straw, there are songs like bits of chewing gums you scrape off the bottom of a chair that you have to put together, and there are songs that need to be bullied into shape.” This has served me well over the years but I’ve tired of the sound of my own voice repeating it. So now I have Werner Herzog’s “Ideas as uninvited guests” metaphor to bore people with. “The problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it is how to contain the invasion. My ideas are like uninvited guests. They don’t knock on the door; they climb in through the windows like burglars who show up in the middle of the night and make a racket in the kitchen as they raid the fridge. I don’t sit and ponder which one I should deal with first. The one to be wrestled to the floor before all others is the one coming at me with the most vehemence. I have, over the years, developed methods to deal with the invaders as quickly and efficiently as possible, though the burglars never stop coming. You invite a handful of friends for dinner, but the door bursts open and a hundred people are pushing in. You might manage to get rid of them, but from around the corner another fifty appear almost immediately… Finishing a film is like having a great weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s relief, not necessarily happiness. But you relish dealing with these “burglars.” I am glad to be rid of them after making a film or writing a book. The ideas are uninvited guests, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t welcome.”
On mastery
I loved basketball player Bill Bradley’s methods for learning. Despite being tall Bill had no natural talent for the game. His mastery came as a result of hard work and experimentation. Bill committed to 3 hours of training every night after school and on Sundays. Then 8 hours on Saturday. Despite his height he wasn’t great at jumping so he trained with ten pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring. His biggest weakness though was dribbling and speed. Working on this he taped cardboard to the bottom of his glasses, so he couldn’t see the basketball while he practiced dribbling around chairs. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball. And whilst he was out and about he would always look forward but try and read what was in the shop windows without shifting his eyes. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court.
On TV
I’ve come to accept that when it comes to entertainment via the medium of TV there is no ‘too far’ or ‘too soon’. In a wonderful episode of This American Life on ‘How soon is too soon?’ there was a story about a prank show featuring OJ Simpson that aired 10 years after the trial. Listen to the show — it’s great. And maybe watch this clip to give you a little bit of an idea of how bad it really is. The point being that it’s not just a terrible show, it’s full of nods to the murders he was accused of. Despite his acquittal there are still the families of two dead people who will never be ‘over it’.
On storytelling
We’ve always been fans of magic at Storythings. And I’m always looking to other disciplines to learn more about the craft of storytelling. Yesterday I came across this on what a Dungeon and Dragons master knows about storytelling. I liked the bit about understanding your audience’s expectations so that you can continually alter them. There is always going to be a structure to your story, but as with magicians, creating an allusion of being off rails is where the real magic is. “You want them to feel like they’re telling the story and you’re just improv-ing wherever they go.”
