Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 142
January 25, 2016
A Bigger And Better Excuse Dept.
Working on the second draft of the outline forAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunnedtoday, something occurred to me as I found a detour around a plot roadblock. Time and again I've come up against what looks like plot holes, things that caused me to stop what I was doing and argue with myself. Does this not make sense? Why is it really here in the first place? Should I do something else?
Round and round turns the hamster-wheel, until a day or two later an answer pops out. Sometimes I scrap what...
January 23, 2016
Listen Without Prejudice Dept.
Further notes on the posts from earlier this week. If our instincts for what kinds of advice to accept or reject are based on our tastes, how can we be certain our tastes are better than someone else's? (This was Matt's question, but it is also mine.)
The way I think about it, it's not a matter of our tastes being "better" than the next guy in the same way that we can, say, achieve a higher bowling score or a lower golf score. What matters is being self-aware — knowing why we have the prefere...
January 19, 2016
Them's Fighting Words Dept.
More from yesterday. I promised I would talk more about the terms "elitist" and "pretentious."
"Elitist" and "pretentious" are such thought-stoppers, aren't they? I suspect that's the idea — all you have to do to pretend you don't have to engage with a particular thing is to stick such a label on it, and that seals it over as thoroughly as Pandora's Box wasn't.
Plugging One's Ears Dept.
My friend Matt Buscemi had something sharp to say about my previous post: "You get to ignore stupid feedback when you're read enough and gotten enough feedback to know that the feedback giver's advice comes from an experience narrower than your own."
I think at this point I've earned the right to ignore feedback I think is foolish, because I've had at least some practice at determining what kinds of feedback are suited to making a given thing better.
January 17, 2016
I Did It My Way Dept.
At some point in every writer's career, I imagine, there comes a moment when they say something to the effect of"I wrote it that way for a reason."
I'm still on the fence as to whether this is the sign of a writer finally coming into his own, or a mudpit that can engulf the boots of someone at most any stage in their career.
January 15, 2016
Make Something Dept.
why the lucky stiff on Why You Should Create
when you dont create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
It isn't a panacea. I've known creators whose tastes were, if anything, even more narrow and exclusionary than the people they were catering to.
But it's good medicine. For all I know, those creators may well have been fostered in an environment where their creativity was defined more by what they were against t...
January 8, 2016
Eat The Rich Or Soak Them? Dept.
Paul Graham's essay about how addressing economic inequalities will only end up hurting entrepreneurs has already been bisected, dissected, and cross-shredded more ways than I have fingers to count on. But this particular line is a winner:
Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten — Medium
You end up going to absurd lengths to rationalize mediocre ideas because they happen to make tons of money instead of questioning the legitimacy of a system that confers so much value on to stupid things. To...
January 5, 2016
Am I Blu? Dept.
When the CD was still relatively new, Steve Albini of Big Black dubbed it "the rich man's eight track". I giggled at that sobriquet, because the popularity of the format, even with indie record companies, was its own refutation of such a snarky label.
Now, I giggle a little less. The compact disc has become something of a historical curiosity, although less because of actual technological obsolescence than because people simply find downloads more convenient than ripping. The massive gains in...
January 3, 2016
You've Got Thirty Seconds To Sell Me On This Dept.
The other week, I finished the firstvery messy,very crude outline forAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.I've learned not to let such things bother me; the initial steps with anything new (especially something this much of a left turn for me) need to be messy and undisciplined, the better to let them come into whatever full flower they have to bloom into. Let that happen first,then prune.
Next week, and through January perhaps, I'll be rewriting the outline and making it into something that s...
January 2, 2016
Stuporheroes Dept.
The missus and I watched the newAvengers andTerminator movies back-to-back over New Years' Eve, and afterwards I repeated a line I've said to other people quite often: It's not that I don't want this stuff, it's that I don't wantanything but this stuff.
