Category Archives: Writing

Soundtracks for Life

Maybe it’s my age, but the Rocky Theme pumps me up. I always run harder when it comes up in my playlist. The music from Rocky makes me think of the training montage, and then I want to exercise.

When I read (especially on an airplane), I listen to ocean waves. Music would be a distraction, but hearing waves won’t make me think about them.

I do sometimes listen to music when I program. I once read a study that it can help when doing mundane, rote tasks. Uptempo music helps me—I like to use dance music. Sometimes I’ll just put a single song on repeat.

Right now, I am writing this blog post while listening to “Going the Distance” from Rocky and Rocky II. It’s what plays right after Adrian tells Rocky to win. It’s a little more low-key than the main fanfare and for me, it means that it’s time to get down to business. I think it’s fine when I am trying to get out the words for the first draft, but I’ll probably have to shut it off when I edit.

In all of these cases, I am trying to use sound in the way that movie soundtracks work—to enhance the foreground activity. It’s working in tandem, manipulating my emotions while I am engaged in something else.

Minimum Viable Journal Entry

Most mornings, I get up and have a bowl of oatmeal. Then, while eating it, I open my journal and write down “Oatmeal” in the right margin of my daily journal entry. This is my minimum viable journal entry.

The idea comes from BJ Fogg and the Fogg Behavior Model (and described in Tiny Habits). To change your behavior, he recommends that you follow a formula that is patterned like this: “After I do [thing I do automatically], I will [do a very tiny version of the new thing I want to do]”. I use “After I eat oatmeal, I will write the word oatmeal in my journal” as a way to get myself journaling every day. After I write down “oatmeal”, I rarely stop.

I write down as much as I can from this list:

  • My appointments
  • My exercise plan
  • Three things I want to accomplish that day
  • What I will have for lunch and dinner

But, I’m ok with my journal entry for the day being “oatmeal”.

Journaling into an Empty Space

I stumbled upon an environment hack that helps me journal every day. Before this year, I just kept a running journal—each day just followed the last at whatever part of the page where the last one ended. If I skipped a day, then the journal just jumped in time. If I skipped a month (or two), then there was a bigger time jump. It’s annoying when I look over the journal, but there’s not much I can do about it.

Now I use a journal where there’s a space for each day. If I skip a day, I can reconstruct it from memory later. But, because there’s an empty space, I don’t often skip it.

Writing While Writing

A few years ago, I wrote a post, Writing While Reading, about how I write notes in Obsidian while I read.

I also write while I write.

While I am writing a blog post, I often will write whole paragraphs that don’t fit. If I’m doing a good job of editing, I will remove that paragraph, but I don’t delete it. I select and cut the paragraph, but then I go to Obsidian and paste it into a new note. I try to find at least one other note to link it to.

At some point in the future, that paragraph might find itself in a post where it makes sense. Or, more likely, I will add more notes around its core idea and develop something around it.

The Ending Should Oppose the Beginning

In episode 44 of Scriptnotes (transcript), John August and Craig Mazin talked about how the ending of a movie should relate to the beginning. One thing Mazin said made this clear:

… if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

In my post about The James Bond Opening to a software demo, I recommended starting with something exciting about how another customer is getting value. This should be short and sweet and gets the prospect to lean forward.

But next, talk about the problems the prospect is having right now, which you learned about in discovery. Remind them of this as you start their story—the one you are about to tell, which will take them from their life now to a new life after they buy your software. By the end of the demo they should be convinced to take the next step.

If you want to learn how to tell stories like this, I recommend learning how screenwriters do it. Scriptnotes is a great place to do that. They know how to tell a story where a protagonist makes a decision that inevitably leads them to a changed life. This is like the story you want your prospect to feel they are in.

Sweep Edit for Adverbs

I use Joanna Wiebe’s technique of editing in sweeps, which means that I edit written work in multiple 2-pass sweeps that each address one problem. In each first pass, I highlight the text that I should fix in this sweep, and then I do a second pass to fix them. This is in contrast to fixing different problems in a single read-through of the work.

For example, right after I finish a first draft of a blog post, I do a sweep edit to make the piece about one specific message to one kind of audience. I highlight anything that isn’t part of that message, and then I go through those parts and either remove them or make sure they are short enough to not distract the reader. While I am doing this, I am not fixing grammar or tone because I will do that later—each sweep is focussed.

After reading Writing Down the Bones, I finally have a better way to make my writing use fewer adverbs and adjectives. I have always tried to find and remove adverbs, but now I also find better nouns and verbs for the sentence I just edited. This lets me gorge on as many adverbs and adjectives as I want in the first draft, because I can trust myself to fix them later.

The extra adjectives and adverbs actually help me. They are a wordy description of the better noun and verb for that sentence. I can use Goldberg’s noun and verb game or a thesaurus to find them.

I’ll be elaborating on this in tomorrow’s episode of the Write While True podcast.

Writing Down the Bones is a Playable Book

After I wrote yesterday’s review of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, I went to my copies of The Golden Book on Writing and The Elements of Style to find out what they had to say about verbs.

As expected, they also recommend that you avoid adverbs and pick out more specific verbs. I’ve heard this advice many times and all it has resulted in is that I remove most “very”, “really” and “pretty” intensifiers before I publish. I don’t take the second step, which should have been to find better nouns and verbs. This leaves my sentences imprecise and boring. The advice failed me because it didn’t come with any instructions. They just dropped a few examples and figured you’d get the idea.

Natalie Goldberg uses one sentence to say that you should use better verbs and then spends the next few pages showing you exactly how to do that. She gives you an exercise that will train you to think up more precise verbs. More importantly, it’s kind of fun. Like a game.

It’s play.

Review: Writing Down the Bones

My memories of reading Writing Down the Bones will always be tied to the beach. I read the book over several mornings on the Gulf Coast of Sarasota. It was early enough in the morning to beat the Florida-in-August heat, but late enough to let the truck rake the sand at the shoreline. I walked to the edge of the water, put my chair in the sand with my back to the sunrise, and settled in to read the wisdom of Natalie Goldberg. When I had about 50 pages left and didn’t have enough time to go out, I put my AirPods in and played some ocean sounds while I finished it.

Writing Down the Bones is a book about writing. It’s also a book about meditation. And, like many writing books, it’s a memoir. The three themes are intertwined in short, practical chapters that will get you writing.

It was written around the same time as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, more than 30 years ago. Like Cameron, Goldberg recommends that you “practice” writing. Her timed writing exercise is a lot like Cameron’s morning pages, and since Cameron wrote a foreword for this book, I’ve imagined them as lifelong friends and cross-influencers.

The main difference in their daily practice is that Goldberg recommends that the writing be directed. Like Goldberg, I have come to the conclusion that I should try to guide my pages a little more. She has a chapter with some suggested prompts. My favorite is to start with “I remember” and then just write what comes to mind. Whenever you get stuck, just repeat “I remember” and start again. I have used this idea often since I read it.

Goldberg uses the name “writing practice” for her timed writing exercise to evoke the “practice” of meditation. She draws comparisons between writing and meditation throughout the book. A through line of work is her accepting her guru’s attempts to convince her that writing was meditation. She is a much more serious practitioner than I am, but I have meditated regularly for more than five years, so these comparisons made sense to me. I consider my morning pages a kind-of meditation.

Another chapter, “The Action of a Sentence,” is a practical way to find good verbs. First she lists 10 random nouns. Then, she picks a vocation (in this case a Chef) and lists all the verb associated with it (chop, mince, slice, cut, taste, etc). Then she matches a noun, a verb and completes the thought. As a poet, these serendipitous combinations might go right into her work. For me, just expanding the list of verbs in my mind makes it possible to avoid adverbs and make verbs exert themselves to describe the scene.

I reread books like this every so often, so I am sure I’ll read it again in a few years. But, right now, I’m going through the book again and trying to figure out how I will keep it fresh in my mind as I continue to write. I was too enthralled to take good notes the first time.

Perhaps it’s a book I just need to consult more often. Pulling it off the shelf when I need a boost. Or maybe it will be my perennial beach read—with me when the waves remind me to flip through it again.

July 2023 Blog Roundup

This month I kept up with my Podcast, mainly because I banked five episodes and then took a break

Based on my podcast, I wrote

I also used the Hacker News OPML file to add a bunch of blogs to my feed. This resulted in a bunch of posts

Having a Blog Makes Me Do Things

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded an OPML file of 1,000+ blogs to follow, which I only did because I thought I might get ideas of things to write about. I ended up writing about minimal blog feeds, how NetNewsWire handled the OPML file, raylib, linear algebra in game dev, and then I worked on a game in raylib (which I only did to write about).

A few years ago I started reading books about writing including Bird by Bird by Anne LaMott, On Writing by Stephen King, Art & Fear by Orland and Bayles, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and most recently, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. These books have been the backbone of my podcast about writing and have generated a lot of posts on this blog (Here’s a mashup of the ideas of Lamott and Cameron). If I didn’t blog, I would not have read them, which would have been a shame, because they are great and very applicable to writing code.

Obviously, not everything I do is just for this blog. Most of what I do is not. But, having this blog has made some use of the exhaust I spew by wanting to try things out. I used to stop myself by saying that I should focus on fewer things (which I did, and that was good), but now the thing I am focussed on is writing, and this blog is making it beneficial to do things that don’t seem to have much point.

Rewrite of Blogging follows doing based on Old, Flawed Work is the Jumping Off Point