If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Alan Watts explains the best way to live your life (thanks, D):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L_cGjQSR80

The Beach Boys shred ‘I Get Around’ (thanks, T):

The most beautiful bookshop in the world.

American colour photos from the 30s and 40s look not unlike today (thanks, R).

Amazing photorealistic oil paintings.

And pictures made by injecting paint into bubble wrap (thanks, L).

Michael Owen is such a massive cock (watch till the end):

Drawing johnsons in video games (thanks, J).

Weirdly angry Mail Online commenters (thanks, T).

My anus is relaxed (thanks, T):

Movie Mainframe Madness (thanks, J):

Rap quotes:

Winning a karate match the Russian way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7nU4bG5uT4&feature=player_embedded

Actresses without teeth (thanks, J).

Strangely addictive eelslap.com (thanks, J).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PvgM6z12bQU

It’s the new Spotify ad from Droga 5.

For my part, I think it’s fine.

It doesn’t make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I can’t help thinking that if all you have to do is sell music as a positive thing then you could probably come up with something better than this.

But y’know, it’s fine.

A recent commenter wanted some advice on how to write a book. Now, I’m no Jeffrey Archer, but I have indeed managed to marshal 100,000 words into a story that was published in a series of pieces of paper, which means I’m qualified to explain how I did it.

Let’s make the explanation more palatable by configuring it as a list:

1. Have a strong idea. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s fair to say that plenty of people start off with nothing more than a rough concept or situation that they might be able to squeeze a plot out of. If that’s what you’ve got I think you’re going to be in trouble. Create a plot that can be reduced to a couple of sentences and it will concentrate your thinking and make it much easier to answer the essential question, ‘What’s it about?’. You will be asked that a lot, so come up with a good answer at the start and you won’t go wrong.

2. Writing a novel is an enormous amount of hard work (if you enjoy doing it you might not consider it to be ‘work’, but it will still require many hours of writing and revising), so if you’re under the impression that writing 100,000 words is going to be difficult, think again: you’re going to be writing closer to 500,000, or even a million if your book’s going to be any good. You will write a first draft then a second, then a third, then if you’re me, another 40 or so. And by ‘writing a draft’ I mean reading your novel (yet again. That’s another thing – you’re going to read your novel many, many times if you want it to be good, so write something you’re going to enjoy or you’ll never finish it), making changes, perhaps making more substantial changes and reading it again to make sure the changes work in the context of the whole thing. If they don’t you’ll be reading/writing/reading again. There’s an old saying: writing is rewriting. It’s very true.

3. You have to make sure all 100,000 words work perfectly. You may have read my novel, and you may or may not like it, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that it doesn’t work. By that I mean that the characters are consistent, the plot makes sense within its own world/rules, it has a beginning, a middle and an end and, most importantly of all, it makes you want to turn the page (at least a bit). That last point is the most important of all: the only responsibility of the author is to make the reader want to turn the page. Everything else is immaterial. Without the turn of the page the great ideas, the crackling sentences and the intricately symmetrical plot might as well be used loo roll.

4. I think there are two kinds of novelist: the ones that write 300 perfect words a day, and the ones who write 3000 shit ones. Most of us are the latter. The first ones think and revise as they go, which slows momentum and can lead to paralysis of insecurity, but I suppose if you’re good enough then why not do that? The rest of us just get any old shite down (at least for the first draft) to maintain the flow of the plot. Then we repair all the clichéd metaphors and tortuous sentences during the revision process.

5. You might want to think of it like this: you have the central idea (the skeleton) and as you write you keep adding flesh. A scene-by-scene synopsis might be the muscles, a more detailed version of that could be the sinews etc. until you have every necessary sentence written and a proper working body (or corpse, depending on how successful you have been). If you think your hero is going to arrive at the police station and cross the road to the bank you’re going to have to know what car he drives, how he drives it, what time of day he pulls up, whether or not there are any other cars around, when he speaks, what he says, who he says it to, what the reply might be etc. This is why it takes a while.

6. Try to write every day. If you don’t the trail goes increasingly cold until you have to re-read everything you’ve written and then you get caught up in a spaghetti junction of changing things before you move on. Before you know it you’ve spent three days writing nothing. Also, you won’t get to 100,000 words by doing it every now and again. There have been times when I’ve managed 10,000 words in three days, and others where I’ve done nothing for a couple of weeks. While the iron is hot, strike.

7. You will make it up as you go along. You might have the broad outline, or even a tight outline, but as in the car example above, you have no idea what every single single scene will look like. If you’re anything like me you might start with no exact idea of the ending and let the story have a life of its own (I could never work out the second half of Instinct until I gave it a go. Actually, that’s a whole point of its own. 7.5: the way to cure writer’s block is by writing. Go on, write any old shit. It’s much easier to repair something than it is to create a perfect series of bons mots with which to fill a page). Even if you do know your ending you might well find you arrive there via an unexpected route, or arrive somewhere else entirely. Go with the flow.

8. Ignore all the above if you like. There are no hard and fast rules. That’s just the way I’ve done it. If that helps you then great. If not, find your own way.

9. I think that’s it. Any questions?

UPDATE: a tip from Chuck Palahniuk.

Here’s a dreadful ad I saw on the weekend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01JkaMPUR4A

I can’t remember anything about it but I’m sure as hell not going to sit through it again.

The only impression it left me with was that of the utter lack of personality displayed by Jenson, Jessica and the other one.

OK, it’s not their day job, but nor is it the primary skill of American athletes, yet they do it so much better:

I wonder why that is.

Media training? Better directors? The prevalence of public speaking opportunities from an early age, such as ‘show and tell’? All of the above?

UPDATE: I’ve watched it again (it was on before Se7en on Living) and it makes literally NO fucking sense. Why are the three ‘stars’ following people around and telling them boring things about Santander? It says something about the 123 account at the end, but I still have no idea why that means sportspeople will stalk you while you’re taking a piss or painting a picture.

Any ideas? Anyone? Bueller?

Fine R. Kelly cut (thanks, J):

Punctuation we now require.

Every James Hetfield ‘Yea-ah!’ (thanks, J).

Impressive ‘Cook With Me Now’ (thanks, C):

Graffiti pedantry/English lessons (thanks, J).

Disney characters hidden in other Disney movies (thanks, M).

Amusing reviews of Mr. Men books (thanks, T).

Questionable retro inventions (thanks, J).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PW-aRqeZMQ8

Actually made me interested in watching the Grand National this year. Quite a feat.

UPDATE: this is Chris and John’s first 4Creative work since joining (interest: they are friends of mine).

(Thanks, S.)

Apparently, Trevor Beattie thinks the 30-second TV ad is ‘bullshit’ because we absorb information much faster than that. He says five seconds is the optimum length of message/consumption:

“30 second [TV ads] are ridiculously long, it is a lifetime,” he said. “People know within two seconds if they like something. The absorption of information is so fast these days it is amazing.”

Now, the slightly cynical part of me would suggest that Trevor (speaking at some conference) was looking for a headline-grabbing remark. I’m not saying he doesn’t think a 5-second communication is a good idea, but to say that thirty seconds is bullshit might be overstating the case somewhat.

To me it’s like the adage that we don’t read these days, when the truth is many of us read thousands of words on the internet every day. Can we cope with thirty seconds? Yes. Is five seconds going to work for all the things we want to say? No.

Having said that, I have to confess that I rarely watch longer things through to the end and if a clip says it’s going to be 2 1/2 minutes my heart sinks a little. But that depends what mode I’m in. I’ll gladly read a book for hours, but if I’m in ‘pissing around on the internet’ mode I’ll most likely feel a more pressing impatience. However, I can usually cope with 30 seconds.

I think that’s what behind this might be the standard of ads these days. It’s now so unlikely that a 30-second ad will be a rewarding use of your time that none of us is now inclined to choose that way of spending half a minute. Name a 30-second ad you’ve seen in the last year that you’d go out of your way to watch again. There might be five, but that means the odds are ridiculously low.

So what really matters may not be the timelength so much as what you choose to fill it with. As the big voice in Field Of Dreams almost said, ‘If you build it well, they will come’.

Just been reading this interesting article about the amount of work we should do to be as effective as possible.

If you can’t be arsed to read it it says there’s a lot of research to suggest that the optimum amount of effort for ‘elite’ workers is no more than three 90-minute bursts a day with frequent breaks. We should also have naps and get more sleep overall (sleep deprivation cost the US over $63bn last year).

We’ve probably all read similar studies over the years and reacted in similar ways: I wish I could do that, but the way my job is set up, there’s no chance of it happening. Ad agencies seem to have been moving to the quantity over quality model in recent years, leaving many of us producing a volume of ideas during late nights and weekends only to have the vast majority hit the waste paper bin (clearly, the client is only going to make one ad/campaign). But quantity can be measured by anyone with eyes and an IQ over 70: just look at the number of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ on them. Quality, however can only be measured by a few, and here’s the kicker: those people are not always right. That leaves us unsure and insecure. We can’t have one idea; it might be the wrong one or it might come out at the wrong time. Let’s have tonnes, and in the process of killing some we’ll feel better about the others that live, for they will have ‘superiority’ over the dead.

Is that a good way to go about the production of work? Possibly. It’s clear that in producing more you are never going to make your best ad worse, and the further exploration will often result in reaching areas you would not have discovered on the first go. But then there has to be a point where an idea is chosen and developed and the more time you spend looking for the initial idea the less time you can spend working on the all-important execution of that idea. I could say that an ad with horsey waves would be brilliant for Guinness, but that’s a million miles from what ended up on our screens.

So can you maximise your working day and still have a life? Of course you can. I think the idea of working in shorter bursts makes a lot of sense. The 20 minutes where the ideas just flow with ridiculous ease should be familiar to most of us, as should the hour and half where it’s like trying to squeeze Dr Pepper from a pigeon. So I’m very much of the school of thought where you should find the method that works best for you and do that, and that’s what I tell my department. After all, I just want the best work and I don’t care how it happens: arrive late, arrive early, work on your own, work with your sister… If the end result is good that’s all that matters, and staying all night to do it can often do more harm than good.

Having said that, it only applies to concepting. Sometimes the demands of execution (creating edits/storyboards/layouts etc.) require longer attendance and that’s just an unfortunate fact of how long it takes to actually make something really good. It’s a shame about the hours, but I find the energy of practical ‘doing’ pretty invigorating.

What are your methods? Is there a giant shadow of presenteeism hanging over your department? Do you stop at your first thought or explore until your eyes bleed? Feel free to comment and educate the rest of us…