Lab Notes
Stuff I’m thinking about that have something to do with writing and creating.
The thinking machine
For me, there’s nothing more exciting than spending time in quiet thought. Hear me out. I know it’s not on par with paragliding.
If you ever read a crime novel dying to find out who did it or watched a film that kept you glued to the screen, you’ll know the feeling I’m talking about. It’s that natural desire to find out what happened, to explore unknowns, to know what goes bump in the night. It’s at the basis of storytelling, it’s the hook or the inciting incident that gets you interested in something.
Sometimes, it looks like something that catches your attention while passing under everyone else’s radar.
‘Thinking’ might include:
Entertaining inarticulate thoughts you just can’t seem to push aside
Daydreaming
Finding relevant articles
Making notes out of what I noticed (this also reinforces memory, especially if the notes are handwritten)
Taking a different point of view
Going back and forth
Making new connections
Learning from available case studies
Testing out concepts
Digging through academic sources
Making hypotheses
Making projections
Being aware of what I know
Being painfully aware of what I don’t know
It’s very similar to what we think ancient Greek philosophers were doing when they were trying to make sense of the physical and the metaphysical world. Only you don’t get to have philosophical discussions on the streets anymore. Today, you have to get a job and go to work for that.
The best thinking machine today isn’t a calculator or an AI computer. It’s your own mind.
The common thread to producing great work, whether it’s an oil painting, a philosophical thesis, or a piece of code is the thinking that needs to be invested for the work to get made. Whenever I see people trying to skip the thinking part, which is the hard part (naturally, because using your brain makes you tired), it doesn’t end well, ever. The road to hell is paved in shortcuts.
Humans are natural thinkers, it’s what helped our ancestors survive and got us to where we are today. Maybe you’ll get an adrenaline rush when you jump out of a plane, but you’ll also get a dopamine reward when you get to the bottom of something you pursued because of your natural-born curiosity.
Transferable skills
Way back when, I used to train dance and performance semi-professionally. Anyone who meets me today would never guess, but when I would take a pilates or martial arts class, I would be arguably better than an average person of the same experience level.
Why? Because I already had coordination skills and knew precisely where my body was in space in relation to other bodies in that same space.
Fast forward a couple of years later, in the trenches of being a freelance writer. When I would apply to some gigs, sometimes I’d get a rejection saying I’m not the right kind of a writer. They were looking for a particular kind of specialization, and I wasn’t it, or they just didn’t see that I was, in fact, “it”.
Now specializations are a thing. But they are a thing that has something to do with knowledge. And knowledge, friends, is something attainable, especially when you know what you’re doing and where you need to look.
Today, I don’t perform modern dance on a stage anymore and I’m sure my knees would say thanks if they could. Instead, I started to work in marketing and events, then on computer games, and then on software products, all in the capacity of, basically, a writer.
How did I manage all those quick leaps? And how did I learn stuff in marketing that helped me be a narrative designer and how did narrative design help me be a UX writer… not to mention how useful screenwriting ended up to be when there’s a sudden need to produce a video, but make it very fast.
Here’s the thing. When I learn something new, I spend a lot of time on a single skill and that’s expensive because it’s time you never get back. It better be worth it, right? So I never learn something that I can’t apply to many other aspects of my work. Wherever I look, I look for connections. Here cometh the lesson:
Context to a writer is what physical space is to a dancer. As in recognizing what’s the situation and what it needs from you. It’s the key that unlocks your brain.
A lot of people like to work on repeat and think others do too, that’s what’s good with specializations. But specialists are not that safe of a bet. You need to be on the lookout for people who know what to do when they see something new. This is what it means to have a transferable skill.
How to make a game or movie trailer
Learn how to write and direct a trailer that will both inform and entrance audiences.
A lot of trailers will suffer from one of these afflictions:
it will tell you the whole story up front, spoilers included, instead of getting you interested to find out more
no pace, very flat, no tension, nothing really happens
pretending to be what it isn’t (for example, Joker: Folie À Deux where you feel like you’re watching something very different from what the trailer and the marketing promised – and it is reflected in how the audiences reacted to the movie and the reviews from cinema-goers).
A good trailer can…
drive interest for viewers and players to consume the work, with enthusiasm and social praise.
It can present the work to big festivals, judges, and investors.
It’s a promise to an audience, it’s a way to define what to expect, and this can affect how good the end product will be considered.
But, what makes a trailer good? Better yet, how should you make a trailer if you’re not an editor or can’t hire one before you raise more money?
Me, I will always look at the underlying structure and that’s how I’ll start to work on one. To get quality down, you need a vision with a super solid structure first, and surface-level work second.
This is what I mean, in as few steps as possible.
List all interesting, memorable, or exciting moments that don’t uncover the whole story or spoil anything when taken out of context. This is all the material you have to work with. Use a folder on your computer, a list in a notes app, or cardboard cards to do this.
Rearrange your material from less intensive to more intensive.
Decide on the pace in advance, and that pace will depend on what kind of a project you’re working on, what’s the theme and genre. Pace is rhythm, how fast and how intense things happen, if they go from 0 to 10 or from 2 to 5 before they go back down to 2 and then to 8 and 10 before they drop again. If your thing is a slow burn gothic drama, of course you’re going to reflect that in the trailer by picking the proper rhythm.
The first moment is always an intro to the ordinary, everyday world in the context of your game or movie. Although it’s something ordinary for your characters, it’s going to be out of the ordinary for your audiences, have those two perspectives in mind.
After that, you want to show when something happens that changes everything and it’s this wild ride you’re promising to the viewer.
Continue riding that wave by intensifying the pressure, the mystery, the core theme behind everything. Make sure that you’re posing a question you will only partially answer by the end of the trailer. Leave room for mystery, always.
Think about these steps by watching the trailer for Stranger Things. Pay special attention to the amount of withheld information.
Watch:
Season 1 dropped out of nowhere, audiences had no knowledge about the world or characters.
Season 5 is working with an established fanbase so the newest trailer will be able to use that as leverage. Meaning, having less worldbuilding info to communicate and focus on the action and vibes a lot more, we’ll see what happens when Netflix decides to drop it.
Worry ruins the work
How to stand your ground against doubt in the writing process.
Have you ever worked on something for a while, thinking it’s good progress, just to start asking too many questions at the wrong times?
Writing on your own
Using those questions to make changes you didn’t really think are in character with what you had planned at the beginning. Bit by bit … until the work stopped raising doubts about how it would appear in the public’s eye, but it didn’t feel good anymore.
That’s called overthinking and it’s a trap.
Asking the wrong type of question too early, questions fueled by emotional shortcomings and hidden fears, before the work had a chance to stand on its own legs, is a recipe for disaster in any line of work.
I’ve seen the same thing come up both in creative writing groups and in corporate settings where people may think they are above the pitfalls non-professional enthusiasts fall in. On the contrary, the dynamics of self-doubt affect humans pretty much everywhere. We’re all susceptible.
The secret of working with or in spite of doubt is to treat it no different than drinking a cup of coffee. You need to feel comfortable in dealing with the unknown. Working on anything, the next big American novel, a triple A game, a productivity app, it all involves a lot of unknowns.
The unknown is your best friend.
It feels counterintuitive, but the right thing to do here is to stay calm and not let panic control your actions. You let that energy of the unknown wash all over you, give you ideas, present bumps on the road. The thing with energy is it never goes away, it shifts from one form to another. So instead of panicking, being afraid, or worse, throwing things away, you keep riding that wave, using the energy to produce something of actual worth.
Debilitating doubt is a symptom of not being in control of the self. It feels like fuzz in the mind. Like an unknown entity telling you what to think, what to do. That’s your internal critic.
By all means, do not ignore it. Voice the worry you have, to get it outside of yourself. To take power away from it. But don’t let it take control of the work.
You’re always the one who’s in control.
Working in a group
Especially, be careful in group settings. To a group, voicing concern can behave like wildfire. A virus that takes over every member of a group through a set of social conventions and the cavemen instinct of needing to mimic belonging.
When it comes to other people, the worst type of critic is a vocal, confident one, without experience of their own or a single argument to stand on. You need to learn to shut voices like that down. Whether that means ignoring them completely, or opposing them with your own confidence backed up by actual experience.
I’ve always thought about reviewing, criticism, and groupthink like this:
You can talk anything down as a bad idea. And if not everyone is aware of that, bad things will happen.
A lot of good ideas die very early on as a result of self-doubt or groupthink.
When the group gets tired of talking everything they see down, suddenly the first other thing that gets shown ends up being “good enough.” Why? Nobody minds it.
It doesn’t make people uncomfortable. It doesn’t create impressions or reactions. Usually that’s a symptom of being mid-ground, something everybody can say it’s okay, but it’s not great or the best or the worst.
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
Something you publish ends up being not good enough. So what? Most things are.
Did it still produce a good result? Did you learn something from the experience? Did it lead to a new opportunity?
Aurora borealis by NOAA from their photo library, here to symbolize the unknown.