Eliot Peper's Blog, page 4

How to do interesting work

If you want to do interesting work, a great starting point is to work on things you find interesting. Instead of trying to optimize for what you think others are likely to find interesting—chasing the market is a Sisyphean task—just keep digging deeper into what you find interesting.

That way, making your work interesting to others is simply a matter of sharing your enthusiasm. I took a geology class my freshman year of college. It’s easy to imagine how boring a class about rocks could be. But my professor loved rocks. She had contributed to the discovery of plate tectonics. She took us up into the mountains and showed us how you could decode geological layers laid bare by erosion to reveal the violence and wonder of how the Earth took shape. She could forge a path through the entire universe starting from a single grain of sand. Another professor could have taught the same curriculum to no effect. My professor’s love for the material brought it to life. She used her enthusiasm to ignite our curiosity.

But working on things you find interesting is not sufficient to make your work interesting to other people. We’ve all been bored to death by experts who speak in impenetrable acronyms or super-fans who get lost in their own rabbit holes. Their individual interest in the material may be genuine, but it isn’t contagious because they lack empathy. You (probably) wouldn’t tell a dirty joke to your grandmother in the same way you’d tell it to your best friend. Empathy is meeting people where they are so you can take them someplace new. That’s why rock stars shout out the name of the city they happen to be performing in. Despite her academic fame and scientific expertise, my geology professor didn’t get stuck in solipsistic obsession. Instead, she used her enthusiasm as a tool to inspire her students, to pry open new worlds for us. As a result, we found her work tremendously interesting.

So doing interesting work doesn’t require guessing what others might like or a benevolent hiring manager offering you your dream job. Doing interesting work requires working on things you find interesting, and then cultivating sufficient empathy to find effective ways to share your enthusiasm with the right people. Empathy is the catalyst that makes curiosity contagious. You’ll know you’re doing it right when the people you seek to reach find your work at least as interesting as you do.

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Complement with Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite, Lasting value, and Creativity is a choice.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

A pop band that talks about complicated emotions

"At the heart of Sylvan Esso is this really fun argument —Nick wants things to sound unsettling, but I want you take your shirt off and dance," says Amelia Meath of the band she cofounded in 2012 that now boasts two million monthly listeners on Spotify. "We're trying to make pop songs that aren't on the radio, because they're too weird. It's a pop band, but we're talking about complicated emotions."
Not only does this pithy description perfectly capture Sylvan Esso's wonderfully distinctive music, it subverts the false distinction between "high" and "low" art —adjectives that themselves reveal an underlying bias.
Many literary novelists eschew genre-fiction labels or the idea that their book might be read to ease the discomfort of a long flight, rather than to delve into life's grand questions. Conversely, many mystery, romance, and science-fiction writers view literary fiction as unreadably pretentious and boring. As an author, my goal has always been to bridge that gap. I seek to write thrillers that make you think and leave you changed.
That's why I love Sylvan Esso's mission so much: They make music that you actually want to listen to and that challenges you at the same time. You don't have to choose between fun and depth.
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Complement with Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite, Finding your voice, and this deep-dive into the creative process behind an award-winning internet art project.
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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Silence

Turn it off.

The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used it to place bets. Physicists used it to explore the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Farmers used it to grow food. Kindergarteners used it to learn the alphabet. The feed was power, water, transportation, communication, entertainment, public services, relationships, industry, media, government, security, finance, and education. Without it the churning torrent of human civilization would cease. The feed was lightning captured in grains of sand, a miracle of science, engineering, and culture that wove the entire world into a single digital tapestry of unparalleled beauty and complexity.

Efficacy bred dependency. Turning it off was madness.

The lights in the conference room went dark. The gentle background hum of the building's internal processes died. Diana's files vanished from the shared feed. No, not just her files. The feed itself was gone. It was as if Diana had just stepped through the red satin curtains, Nell's sure grip leading her into the exotic feedlessness of Analog.

But this wasn't Analog. This was Commonwealth headquarters, the nerve center of the feed. Just a moment before, Diana had been a key node in the deluge of global attention, and now she was standing in the middle of an empty stadium, her teammates vanished, the crowd abruptly absent, the cameras off, nothing but the frantic beating of her terrified heart and a distant ball rolling to a stop in the grass. The millions of voices that were her constant companion, always there, murmuring just below the threshold of hearing, had been silenced. The humble drinking cup that she constantly dipped into the font of all human knowledge had been slapped away. Her access to the vast prosthetic mind whose presence she had long since taken for granted had been severed.

The lights in every window in every skyscraper around them shut off, rippling out across the city, the state, the country, the world, as feed-enabled electric grids failed. Every car in sight, from the streets of downtown to the Bay Bridge, froze as if captured in a still photograph. The container ships and yachts plying the bay coasted to a stop, their bow waves dissipating and their wakes catching up to make them bob where they sat marooned on the open water.

The ominous swarm of drones and helicopters converging on them came to a halt in midair and then descended to land on the nearest patch of clear ground they could find per their emergency backup protocols. The convoy of trucks died along with all the civilian cars, their lights going dark and their sirens quiet.

Diana imagined transoceanic flights automatically detouring to make emergency landings, surgeons whose equipment failed mid-craniotomy, soap operas dissolving in the midst of transcendent plot twists, control panels winking out before terrified astronauts, newsrooms descending into an unprecedented hush, nuclear power plants shutting down, a vocal track evaporating to reveal a pop star was lip-synching to a packed arena, a trail map fading from an endurance runner's vision, ovens shutting off before the lasagna was ready, students cursing as their research papers melted away, Wall Street's algorithmic ballet extinguished right in front of traders' eyes, a hidden sniper pulling the trigger to no effect, factories grinding to a halt, pumps ceasing to push wastewater through treatment facilities, and tourists at the Louvre being thrown into utter darkness. The world was a windup toy that had unexpectedly exhausted its clockwork motor.

The feed was gone.

Silence reigned.

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An excerpt from Borderless.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite

There’s a school of advice that claims good writing is the result of endless, painstaking, comprehensive rewrites that iterate toward perfection, but I’ve learned much more about craft writing and publishing nine novels than I ever would have rewriting my first novel nine times.

Quality versus quantity is a false dichotomy. Quantity is a route to quality. Not the route. There is no the route when it comes to making good art or software or podcasts or sourdough. There is probably someone out there who would learn more from rewriting their first novel nine times than writing and publishing nine novels.

But there are few routes as simple, difficult, and effective as doing work you believe in for people you care about, gleaning what you can from the process, and then rolling up your sleeves and starting all over again.

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Complement with Italo Calvino on what makes great writing great, five lessons I learned writing Cumulus, and my advice for authors.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly newsletter documenting his journey as a reader and writer, tweets more than he probably should, and lives in Oakland, CA.

Granular verisimilitude

You know you have a good editor—thanks Tim!—when they point out that the narratively-necessary-but-totally-arbitrary-8-digit number in your novel manuscript is unlikely to have the unique digits you thought would make it appear random because among the 100 million 8-digit numbers, there are only about 1.8 million whose digits are all different. So your number is an outlier in that particular sense; not only might the reader find it hard to imagine that anyone could know a number to that precision, but it smells like a made-up number.

Engineering the suspension of disbelief is all in the details.

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Complement with a brief anatomy of story, the surprising plausibility of Russian Doll, and my advice for authors.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

The Science of Fiction on Veil

Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding essay exploring the implications of the near future extrapolated in my latest novel:

Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe—maybe both. It raises hard questions about what sorts of sacrifices humanity may have to make for the greater good and who gets to decide; questions that beg for nuanced conversations about the social, environmental, and political risks and rewards.

Yet in science fiction, geoengineering tends to get treated with all the nuance of Thor’s hammer striking a rock monster. Which is why Eliot Peper’s recent novel Veil, set on a near future Earth beset by climate crises, is such a refreshing read. This book gets geoengineering right by showing that there are no obvious right answers.

Part book review, part geoengineering primer, part creative process x-ray, Maddie assembles a whole greater than the sum of those parts in the latest edition of her wonderful newsletter, The Science of Fiction, about how science shapes stories about the future and how stories about the future shape science. Go read the whole thing.

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Complement with five lessons I learned writing Veil, my interview in Andrew Liptak's Transfer Orbit, and this OneZero excerpt.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

The Mad King

The mad king’s madness was the source of his power, for by wrongly ascribing subtle reason to his actions, his enemies defeated themselves.

But having vanquished his enemies, his victory proved Pyrrhic, for the mad king’s madness stoked internecine feuds just as surely as it had undermined his foes.

The mad king was never dethroned, for those that displaced him cared not for his moldering kingdom of lies and ash, and instead built a new kingdom of their own, a kingdom worth fighting for, worth believing in, worth sharing.

Now the mad king rules only his own madness—or is ruled by it—and children look upon him not with fear, nor even recrimination, but pity.

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Complement with True Blue, what my secret agent grandmother taught me, and how to kill a dragon.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a monthly reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Italo Calvino on what makes great writing great

 From Six Memos for the New Millennium:

From its beginnings, my work as a writer has aimed to follow the lightning-fast course of mental circuits that capture and link points that are far apart in space and time. In my fondness for adventure stories and fairy tales, I have always sought something like an inner energy, a motion of the mind. I have focused on the image and on the motion that springs naturally from the image, knowing all the while that one cannot speak of a literary result until this stream of imagination becomes words. As for the writer of verse, so for the writer of prose: success is in the felicity of verbal expression, which can sometimes be achieved by a flash of inspiration but which normally entails a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which no word can be replaced, for the most efficient and semantically dense arrangements of sounds and ideas. I am convinced that writing prose should be no different from writing poetry; both seek a mode of expression that is necessary, singular, dense, concise, and memorable.

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Complement with John McPhee on writing as selection, cultivating a sense of presence, and five lessons I learned writing Veil.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Making machines human-readable

The widening gap in basic computer literacy is dangerous. 

As software eats the world, it becomes ever more important for nontechnical people to grok the fundamentals of how computers work. Users and policy-makers don't need to be able to read code, but they need to understand its implications or we’ll wind up with counterproductive laws and norms.

What might help bridge the gap? More science fiction that grapples with how the internet shapes social, economic, and political incentives as opposed to popular but less illuminating tropes like, for example, anthropomorphizing AI. Tech companies acknowledging that political risk is the greatest threat they face, and deciding that the best way to address it over the long run is to invest dramatically more in communicating key technical concepts as broadly as possible. Schools recognizing that students need to better understand computers for personal, professional, and civic reasons, and reforming curriculums to advance tech literacy at every level from kindergarten to post graduate. Venture capital firms sponsoring Youtubers that popularize basic computer science principles. Internet firms investing directly in stories and ideas a la Stripe Press. Workshops like NASA’s Launch Pad that orient writers within various technical disciplines.

We're making humans progressively more machine-readable, we need to make machines more human-readable.

Complement with how to make sense of complex ideas, using science fiction to understand the future of the web, and why business leaders need to read more science fiction.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.

Lasting value

One filter I use for choosing creative projects is: will this be of lasting value? Only time will tell, but asking the question helps weed out what the internet is overflowing with: fleeting commentary on current affairs.

Your entire world and life are your material. Seek out patterns. Explore what lies beneath.

Complement with creativity is a choice, cultivating a sense of presence, and how we made True Blue.

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Eliot Peper is the author of nine novels, including Cumulus , Bandwidth , and, most recently, Veil . He sends a reading recommendation newsletter and lives in Oakland, CA.

This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become a member.