Scott Berkun's Blog, page 39

Book Review: Good Prose – The Art of Non Fiction

I gave a talk at WordCamp Seattle recently about writing. One early point I made was about the limitations for improving writing skills merely by listening or reading. For the same reasons reading about playing guitar or juggling knives is insufficient to learn how to be a great guitar player or fully limbed knife juggler, mere reading is consumption, not practice. Skill development only comes from practice. Over the years I’ve read many books on writing anyway, they do help more if you are practicing the craft, but rarely read any of them now.

This one, Good Prose, however I had to read. Tracy Kidder is a pioneer of modern narrative writing, especially about technology and entrepreneurship, for his Pulitzer prize winning book Soul of A New Machine. I read it in college as many in my generation did, and it planted seeds for how to write and think about many things. When I heard he’d published a book about writing in collaboration with his long time editor Richard Todd, I had to check it out. And as time would have it, I was working on revising the Year Without Pants just when it came out. The timing could not have been more better.

[Actual review begins here]

Good prose: art of non-fiction is unusual for its lack of pretense about why you are reading it. It’s not a manual and it’s not a lesson. It’s two masters who have been studying and practicing the craft of journalistic narratives for decades attempting to document what they do and what they know. The essays in the book wind around deep subjects like narrative, honesty, structure and style, frequently referencing stories from Kidder’s book projects as examples for challenges faced and overcome.

Most of Kidder’s work is reportage, long form journalism and the book follows that line. What’s notable for all writers are the hints and nods the book makes to the fact that all writing has a narrative, and all writing is reporting. Even if you blog about your adventures in the kitchen, or post short summaries of your day on Facebook, you are engaging with many of the challenges Kidder and Todd explore in the book.

The biggest surprise for me as an author was how long Kidder’s writing projects take. Research is often years and he explains 8 or 10 complete drafts are not uncommon. As a fan of his work these facts are a reminder there are no shortcuts. Better writing is the result of more work and commitment.

The payoffs for the book are greater for people who write deeply, books and longer narratives, but anyone interested in writing craft will find this book a pleasure. It helps if you’re familiar with Kidder’s work, but that’s far from a requirement.

Here are some choice quotes from Good Prose:

No other art form is so infinitely mutable. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details.

Writers want to be engaging, and it is easy to try to purchase charm at the expense of honesty, but the ultimate charm lies in getting the face more right than pretty

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the book or article appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Much overstuffed prose reflects a desire to bully, to impress, or to hide.

It has taken, on average, about three years for me to research and write a book, long enough for each to seem like an occupation in itself.

Every piece of writing, even classic works, can be ridiculed.

Whatever art any book achieves may or may not be rewarded in the marketplace, but art isn’t generally achieved with the market in mind. Every book has to be in part its own reward. In happy moments one realizes that the best work is done when one’s eye is simply on the work, not on its consequences, or on oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde’s term, a gift.

I always wince when a reviewer says, “This book needed an editor.” Often it had an editor, but the writer prevailed.

Here are some usages, circa 2012, that we would happily expunge from the language.     • “Going forward.” Sometime in the 1990s, many Americans of the corporate and professional classes seemed to grow tired of the phrase “in the future” (and “someday” or “soon” or “later on” or the unadorned future tense), and they started saying “going forward” instead. It may be here to stay, but it still carries a Panglossian tone, a faith in the five-year plan.     • “Proactive.” This is a neologism and an annoying one. Even more annoying, it’s a succinct way of naming a quality that otherwise takes a couple of words to express. It too seems to ally the writer with a world of committees and agendas, as do “stakeholder,” “planful,” “impactful.”     • Certain nouns used as verbs: “parent,” “access,” “impact.” Also nouns rejiggered into verbs—“incentivize,” or just “incent,” for instance.     • “Grow,” as in “to grow one’s business,” deserves a category all its own. Why does it seem okay to grow corn and not an economy? Sheer prejudice, and we share it.     • Adjectives and adverbs suffering from exhaustion: “sustainable,” “green,” “iconic,” “incredible” and “incredibly.”

 

Get Good Prose: The Art of Non-Fiction on Amazon.

How Pulp Fiction was written (and rejected)

From Cinephillia and Beyond, this comment from Roger Avary, who co-wrote Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction with Tarantino:

We just took all the best scenes we had ever written, and we packed them up, and we went to Amsterdam. Quentin rented this apartment, and we laid them out on the floor and basically just started moving them around… Our one requirement was that every scene should be able to stand on its own and be able to be performed in an acting class. A couple of actors should be able to do it together and it should be contained that way. No establishing shots… No wasted space, no traveling here and there, just no fat. It had to be the best material we had written to that point. We laid it out and we started changing names and piecing it together… It underwent a number of passes and pretty soon it was what you see.

When we finished that script it was taken to… TriStar and a producer named Mike Medavoy. We turned it in and they said ‘this is the worst screenplay that this film company has ever been handed. This is awful. It’s not funny. It makes no sense. This guy’s dead, he’s alive. What’s going on?’ They put it into immediate turnaround…

The full interview is here.

The Meaninglessness of Google Glass

“The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” – J. B. Priestley

I don’t care about Google Glass. When I say this I mean I’m neutral about the impact it will have on me or culture at large. Google Glass does not solve a single problem that bothers me. My life will not improve because I can more easily take photos or do web searches, as those things are almost too easy to do today given how often I see people doing them.

Every important attribute of my life will remain unaffected whether I have a Google Glass or not. I will not love my family more or less. I won’t have more or less friends. My dreams won’t be more or less likely to come true. And the amount of time I spend doing things I love, or being with people I care about will remain the same.

The consumer fallacy the tech-sector surrounds us with is that the progress we need comes in upgrades, upgrades made by corporations designed for profit. While I don’t regret the clean water that comes to my house or the WiFi I’m using to publish this missive, technological progress has diminishing returns for many dimensions of modern life. If you tripled the water pressure to my home or quadrupled the WiFi speed, as impressive as those leaps sound, it would have zero impact on my ability to drink water, or write and read posts. But technological progress is easier to measure than any other kind (spiritual, personal, social, metaphysical) so we measure it, and obsess about it, and allow it to distract us from more worthy improvements to modern life.

I enjoy doing one thing at a time. I become more efficient and proficient the more time I can spend doing one thing, not less (See Attention And Sex). I have little interest in machines and devices that compress more simultaneous activities and experiences into a single moment. My ability to enjoy life fades the more distracted I am. And it fades the more time I spend with people who are distracted. I like putting my phone in my pocket and having to choose to take it out, keeping myself aware of the personal and social interruptions it creates. I use my phone often, but I’m just as happy not to use it at all if I’m doing something important, or spending time with important people, two activities I want as much of as possible before I die.

I don’t care about Google Glass in the same way I don’t care about a pencil with stronger graphite, or a car with more powerful air conditioning. It’s a kind of progress that has almost no meaning for my quality of my life.

Would you hire me? Resume from 1994

In going through old boxes I found this resume from 1994. And a wave of bad memories returned. I had a miserable time finding a job after graduation.

Most of my friends had offers months earlier, but I ended up stuck for a summer in the 2nd level of hell known as Pittsburgh in July, staying alone in my girlfriends apartment (while she was in Australia). I desperately did not want to return home to my parents. I had dozens of interviews, from at the career center, to on the phone, to fly outs to various companies. It was a benefit of graduating from a good school like CMU that I had so many, but there were no offers.

I didn’t want to be a programmer (and wasn’t strong enough anyway) and job openings for anything else entry level in the tech sector in 1994 was hard to find, as it was still climbing out of a recession.  In 1994 there was no web and no startup community. No Facebook and no Twitter. Unlike today, I wouldn’t have imagined I could build a mobile app or web service on my own to prove my worth.

After months of struggling I lowered my expectations and made customized resumes for each job I applied for, bending my little pile of experience in whatever way best fit the job I was applying for. This one must have been one for a usability engineering position, which did in fact turn out to be the first job offer I got (from Microsoft, Sept 1994).

I’m posting for posterity and recent graduates having a hard time. Everyone starts somewhere. Applying for jobs is an absurd and unfair process, then and now.

When in Doubt, Make A List

My favorite trick when overwhelmed is to make a list. It’s shocking how many people and projects fail to remember the power of lists. They do so many good things for our psychology, memory and camaraderie  it’s worth remembering the adage: Make a (Fucking) List. When in doubt, just make a list. Sit down, shut up and start writing.

The expletive is a reminder not to be a dumbass. Many projects, despite how high-brow and complex everything is, simply needs someone to stand up, go to the whiteboard, and make a list of all the things that need to be done. We convinced ourselves we’re so amazing that if we’re stuck it must require a high powered and complex method to save us, but that’s hubris.  A well written list is the fastest way out of most problematic situations (See How to Make Things Happen). It’s true when working alone or with a team.

Since without a list:

It’s harder to make decisions
You can’t compare relative importance of different items
Work can’t be assigned or tracked
You can’t see how big or complex the project really is
It’s harder to share different people’s insights  

1. The first task is write a flat, unordered list

Writing things down is powerful. When thoughts are written down you can move them around, compare them, combine them, or divide them as your thinking progresses. If you’re working with others, lists force you to come up with a common language to describe tasks:

Land on Moon
Build Space Rocket
Build Lander Module
Invent triple warp drive
Make spaceship crash proof
Design tasty food to eat in space
Craft space uniforms that make everyone look hot

No matter how big the list is, everyone feels better once the list exists. Hey! You made something! Change of mood or mind starts with small things.

2. Now Thinking Begins

Once there is a list, pivotal questions can be asked: what should be done first? what’s hardest to do? Which thing isn’t understood well enough to know what to do with it?

The list can also be put into order by priority (or cost, or time to finish, or a dozen attributes):

Build Space Rocket
Build Lander Module
Land on Moon
Invent triple warp drive
Make spaceship crash proof
Design tasty food to eat in space
Craft space uniforms that make everyone look hot

It can take hours to debate which things are more important than other things, but once you have a prioritized list you get magic powers: simply by always working from the top down you are guaranteed to always be working on the most important thing, no matter how much work you get done, or how long your list becomes. This means you can stop worrying about the bottom of your list, or how long the list is.

3. Priority 1 and 2

With an ordered list, you can divide between things that must be done (Priority 1) and things that are good, but you can survive without (Priority 2). It can take much thinking to divide a list this way, but once you do, you have clarity. You give yourslef the power to say NO to many things, creating space for the priority 1 things to be done well. You know you should not be working on Priority 2 items until all of the Priority 1 items are finished.

Build Space Rocket
Build Lander Module
Land on Moon

—————————————–
Invent triple warp drive
Make spaceship crash proof
Design tasty food to eat in space
Craft pretty uniforms that make everyone look hot

4. The Big Lesson

When in doubt, make a list. You’ll feel better, I promise.

Are you important? (Emotions vs. Actions)

When people say “you know you are important to me” the best answer is “I don’t know.” Think about it before you answer. There’s great social pressure to say “yes, of course I know that” when asked by a parent, spouse, boss or old friend,  but that pressure confuses your abstract feelings about a person with an evaluation of how they behave towards you. Feelings and actions are different things, and the fact someone feels you are important to them doesn’t guarantee they treat you well, or that they should be important to you.

Feelings and actions are different things. As important as feelings are, if they don’t influence behavior feelings have little meaning for anyone but the person having them. If I love you, but treat you horribly, or ignore you, or behave selfishly and never consider your needs in any of my actions, I’m betraying those feelings (whether I realize it or not). It’s therefore not about whether I love you or care about you, but how my behavior towards you reflects those feelings. That’s the basis for healthy relationships: a connection between feelings and behavior, or emotions and actions. All too often our actions and emotions are disconnected from each other. Either through fear, disfunction, or ignorance, our emotions never make it out of our hearts and into actions that have meaning for the people we care about most. Integrity is the proximity of your beliefs to your actions, and we need more integrity in this world.

There are similar truths in the workplace.  To be told a project is important, but not to get the resources you need to do it well is a kind of lie. It’s a disconnect between the word “important” and any action that would embody importance. The person with the disconnect might not realize they are betraying themselves, but they are. Either you’re not important enough to deserve the resources and they’re deceiving you by using that word, or they are incompetent in not giving you the resources your importance merits.

It’s a low bar to ask “you know you’re important to me, right?” The better question is “does my behavior express to you how important you are?”

Blog Community Panel: Summary (WordCamp Seattle)

Thanks to everyone who attended our panel session at WordCamp Seattle, and to our panelists:

Ariel M Stallings, from Offbeatempire.com, a niche lifestyle publisher, covering weddings, parenting, and home decor
Steve Roy, from Disqus.com
Michael Cyger, from isixsigma.com a B2B website that provides research and how-to knowledge for businesses (who took this photo)

It’s hard to capture the vibrancy of a discussion in a blog post, but this is a short summary of some the topics from my notes.

Some of the terms / facts I learned as moderator:

“cold start” – the challenge of getting your first comment, people are afraid to be first
“Cheers effect” – you need a small group of interesting regulars
Quality content first – you can’t get community until you have visitors. You won’t have visitors until you have (good) content.
“sockpuppeting” – the ethically questionable practice of posting comments as other people
10am is often the peak of commenting activity (Steve mentioned it: need source)
60% of time by readers is spent below the fold (ditto)

Questions to ask:

Why do you want a community? Do you have a larger ambition (say profit)? How does that fit or conflict with the goals the people who you hope will join your community? You need to personally reach out to people who might match your goals and invite their participation.
How do you reward people who comment? What natural, intrinsic rewards can you provide?
Brand and names matter: you want to pick a name for your site that is inviting and attractive, but not so bland as to be generic.

Here is a brief list of the links and references mentioned during the panel:

Megapost from Disqus with interesting data about how to measure community engagement
Slate article about how much of posts people actually read (Chartbeat)
Offbeat empire post by Ariel about balancing community rules with engagement
How To Get More Comments - what I learned while I worked for WordPress.com

 

How to Meet Your Hero

Here’s a question from the mailbag:

I’m going to a conference for the first time, in part to meet an author that inspired me who’s speaking there. Do you have any advice on what to do and, mainly, what NOT to do when I meet him?

I know that I’d love to talk with him about a lot of things, but I don’t wanna bother him. To be honest, I’m a little anxious. How can I help make this more natural, without killing the authenticity? Am I already killing it by thinking about it and asking for your guidance?

I don’t know that anyone has traveled and paid for an event just to meet me, but I have had the good fortune to meet people who are fans of my work. It always feels good to meet the people who like what I do and it’s easy to be nice to them, since their purchases make my career possible.  Often they’re truly fun and friendly to hang around.

But I have had some awkward experiences too where people expect a little too much from me, forgetting that the dynamic isn’t symmetric: they’ve known my work intimately for months or years, but I’ve just met them for the first time and it’s impossible for me to catch up in just an hour, much less a few minutes.

Here’s what I advise:

Set your expectations low. People who make great books, movies or games are just people of course, but in our minds as fans we build up an image that is impossible to live up to (Some of the marketing artists and makers do fuels this of course). A book or song can be perfect, but people never are. It’s worth looking over the 12 reasons you should never meet your hero as many people tell disappointing tales of meeting their lifelong idol. I myself have met some of my heroes, and I’m convinced if you set your expectations right, it can be a thrill. The trap is many people expect far too much and end up unnecessarily disappointed.
Be patient and simple. Most speakers at events are accessible directly after they give their presentation. A crowd forms near the stage and fans take turns asking questions or getting autographs. Have one thing you want to ask or say, and plan for that to be the totality of the experience. A simple “I’m a big fan of your work and it has inspired me. Thanks for doing what you do” goes a long way. No one tires of hearing this. If you want a picture or an autograph, that’s great. Or if a burning question has been on your mind, ask away. Let that be your one request. But after that, let someone else have their moment. If your hero isn’t speaking but merely attending, politely introduce yourself when you see them in a hallway and then make your request (don’t wait for a perfect opportunity, since at a big event you might not even see them more than once).
In social situations, leave them a way out. At smaller events, or if you’re lucky to spend significant time with them, always make sure they have a way to escape and that you haven’t cornered them into spending an evening with you hovering over their shoulder like a gregarious hummingbird all night long. If you do want more time with them, collaborate with another fan or two so the offer comes from a friendly group and not a solo stranger. If your hero wants to spend all night talking to you or share a meal, or have you join his/her social circle that evening, that’s great, but be polite about not assuming you’re their new personal companion.
Contact them online, before the event, if you want a dialog. Email has the tremendous benefit that recipients can respond at the time they wish. There’s much less social pressure in email, whereas at an event, there is tremendous social and time pressure on famous people. Email them before the event with a very well thought out comment or question, and/or a strong thanks for their work and how it inspired you. Mention you’ll be at the event and hope to meet them. Odds are very good you’ll get a reply if your email is thoughtful, well written and not too long. Pick one clear question to ask if you have one, rather than a litany of little ones.  I get a lot of email, but the odds of getting a reply rise dramatically for the ones that are well-written, thoughtful and ask clear questions (that they know I haven’t answered elsewhere). Many blog posts here on scottberkun.com come from reader questions, which I love to get.
Bring a copy of their book, album or whatever they make. It’s impossible for me not to notice someone in the audience who is holding a copy of one of my books. I can’t help but want to talk to them, as they’re visually putting up a flag that they’re a fan and probably want an autograph. I might feel differently if everyone in the audience showed up one day with a copy of my books (that might be a little terrifying but I’d like to find out of course). I don’t know of any musician or writer who doesn’t respond with the same undeniable joy when they see a stranger with the book or CD that took years to make in their hands. 

 

Book Review: Microinteractions

They say the devil is in the details, but the angels are in there too. That is, if you have a clue about what you’re doing. People who want to design things have large egos and presume that they’re skilled enough to work on large, grand ideas. But so rarely do designs in this world get the small things right, and if the small things, the little pieces that get used the most, are broken, what is the point of being large?

Dan Saffer’s book Microinteractions is the best book I’ve read about design in ages. I’ve been working in design for 20 years and often have younger designers ask me for advice, or how to achieve their grand design dreams. Most books about design are similarly grand and presume that everyone knows the basics well enough to do the little things well. The world proves this not to be true. Spend an afternoon strolling around town with a gaggle of caffeinated interaction designers and you’ll hear an endless commentary on the details the designers of the world have gotten wrong.

The book itself is a wonderfully self-consistent: it’s short, concise, well designed and brilliant. The fun and salient examples nail Saffer’s points, and his writing is sharp, incisive and with just enough comedic curmudgeonry to keep you smiling most of the way through. The book’s ambitions, like any good design project, are clear. Saffer’s focus is on the small sequences of interactions he calls, surprise, microinteractions. Ever been frustrated by entering your password? Leaving a comment on a blog? You’ve been let down by a microinteraction design. Perhaps the majority of design frustrations in the technological world are micro, not macro.

This is the book many designers will begrudgingly pick up, thinking it’s beneath them, but by the time they get to page 25 they’ll be thinking “oh, this is fun” and then by page 50 they’ll realize “oh dear, I make that mistake, or have peers that do” and when they’re finished they’ll know “I now have a language to describe these important problems that have bothered people for ages but were hard to describe, and I have the knowledge now to fix them properly”. What more can you ask for from a book about designing things?

We live in a world where the clueless have disturbing amounts of influence. There are no licenses required to use words like design, simplicity and quality, and it should be no surprise we’re often victimized by the engineered junk companies pass off as products. If we want that to change we have to start in the small. Until a designer, or an organization, can consistently get the details right, what hope is there to get the grand things right either?

Please buy this book. I say that selfishly as I want better design in the world. But I also say it generously: so many design books are fluffy affairs, lost in abstraction and ego. Saffer has hit the bullseye of problems the design world desperately needs to solve, and written a book every designer needs to read.

A free chapter is here (PDF) and the book has its own website.

 

The idiot ratio

Every organization has a ratio of idiots to non-idiots. This is the idiot ratio.

It’s an easy way to measure the talent pool in any organization. If for every 10 people you work with 3 are morons, your ratio is 3:10.

How to use it:  when two people meet to compare their workplaces, both parties think through the people they have to work with regularly and assess how many are incompetent or ineffective. The resulting ratio, 1 in 5, or 1 in 20, is the idiot ratio.

With the ratio two people can quickly compare their assessments of their teams.

Every executive says “we have the smartest people in the world” but that’s just self serving hype. There is no executive that says “our talent sucks” or “we are mostly idiots”. Even if they believed that, they’d never say it.

Limitations:

Intelligence doesn’t guarantee chemistry. A collaborative team of good people can run circles around a dysfunctional team of geniuses. (See Teams and Stars)
Idiocy is about the person, incompetence is about the job. Calling it the Incompetence Ratio would be more accurate, as the person might be a bad fit for the job but possibly good fits for other jobs, but less fun to say.
It’s assumed you are not the idiot. If you are, your ratio won’t be accurate unless you are humble enough to count yourself.

[This idea is from Rachelle Uberecken, a Senior Software Developer at a place with a pleasantly low idiot ratio]