Author’s Note: These are my notes from #twchat done in much the same way as I post notes from #blogchat on Sundays, and as such will be missing pieces of the conversation. I try to be thorough, but you’ve got to maintain your point of view, right? So – read the notes, and please by all means weigh in. Especially if you read the transcript appended to this post.
Tonight’s Thoughtwrestling Chat was all about bringing ideas to their fullness and giving them a sense of completion.
The night began with some thoughts about the tools we use to bring ideas to life. Tasks lists seemed to be one of the key tools most people were using – although there is of course a wide variety of ways to use tasks lists. Even with this small tool, little tricks can help us keep going; I shared a tip Marketing Sensei gave me – if you highlight the things you’ve completed, rather than striking them through, it does something different psychologically. You’re reinforcing completion, rather than negating responsibility. Positivity and achievement, even on this scale, makes a bigger difference than we expect.
The Resistance. The Lizard Brain. The major subject of Seth Godin’s book Linchpin came up – which of course can be an entire discourse on its own. We talked about how to approach the idea of the Resistance – the idea that fear of success (or, perhaps, the fear of being noticed in a negative way because of success) can flip the self-sabotage switch in many of us. I think this one may need more discussion on its own – it’s a big subject.
The last part of the chat I noticed – and there is of course more, which is why we’re providing the transcript – was a debate about sharing the burden of ideas. When an idea is new, it’s easy to get excited. However, there is the weight that we put on others when intimating our ideas. We may encourage them to buy in, to critique, to support. Is this beneficial in all cases?
What do you think? Were you on the chat? Have we missed anything? What else can we talk about, to help each other bring our ideas toward completion?
Transcript: What the Hashtag – Transcript for #twchat, July 7th 2010
Participants’ list: TweepML #twchat July 7th 2010
Learn more about #twchat on our Community page!
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[...] Notes from #twchat for July 7th, 2010 – Idea Completion [...]
Scanning the transcript, it appears it was a good chat — sorry I missed it. I noticed Rebecca mentioned first drafts and there was some discussion about just getting the ideas out there. That reminded me of a post I read and commented on a while back. The blog is called “Living the Romantic Comedy,” by Billy Mernit, a guy who works in Hollywood (for Universal I think) and reads scripts, his focus being on romantic comedy. He also teaches at UCLA. The post I’m thinking of is titled You and Your Shitty First Draft.
He talks about how reluctant some people are to do/show a first draft, particularly beginning writers. It’s worth reading. One of the comments I left read in part:
“Samuel R. Delany … has what I think is a great observation about writing in an essay called ‘Thickening the Plot.’ He says of writing:
“‘I distrust the word ‘plot’ … (it) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading … Talking about plot, or theme, or setting to a beginning writer is like giving the last three years’ movie reviews from the Sunday New York Times to a novice filmmaker. A camera manual … would be more help. In short, a vocabulary that has grown from a discussion of effects is only of limited use in a discussion of causes.’
“He goes on to talk about the story revealing and developing before our eyes as we write, how each word, each choice, reveals more of the story, just as each word removed alters it.
“When talking about something like an outline, it seems to me that is an attempt to determine effects before seeing what the causes are, which are revealed in the writing process – as it happens, so to speak. So the whole business of worrying about shitty first drafts is kind of … I dunno. Maybe a worry less about writing than about how we might appear. (‘What a shitty writer! Did you SEE that draft?’)”
My whole point is that for me, if I’m going to do an outline, it’s only after I’ve written that first draft. The first draft is about getting the ideas out and on the table. The outline is, for me, reviewing what came up and deciding what goes where – in story terms, determining who is in the story and what that story is. Outlines come after first drafts.
Sorry this comment was SO long!
Screwed something up in my coding. You and Your Shitty First Draft:
http://livingromcom.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/06/you-and-your-shitty-draft.html
No problem, Bill, this is a very interesting addition!
“What’s the THAC0 on the plot?”
“13.”
“I rolled a 2.”
“The plot… Twists. And, ah, gets out of the way?”
Sometimes, first drafts are awesome – sometimes they’re hell. Same with outlines. Love the quote, too – I read it as; discussing things in language based on achievement is less helpful for someone who’s never achieved.
+1,000,000 points for geeky AD&D reference
Yes, that’s how I read it too.