Month: January 2014
If you follow this blog, you know that I’m not a big believer in feedback. By that I mean “notes,” “critiques,” “comments” about one’s work from writing groups or editors or friends or just about any other source. It’s been my experience that very, very few people can read something and tell you accurately what’s wrong with it. And practically nobody can tell you how to fix it. Feedback from anyone else will just screw you up. Here, unexpurgated, is an e-mail exchange between me and a hard-working young writer named Michael G. S. Hesse. Michael has given me his…
Read MoreThis week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Joel Canfield. How do you decide how long to allow for writing a book? Do you set a time goal like one year, or do you let it take as long as it takes and trust the daily writing ritual to keep you on track? Recommended reading: Henry Miller’s Rules of Writing TRANSCRIPT: Steve: I think this is a great question when we’re thinking about organizing a year—and Shawn, jump in on this and Jeff, jump in on this whenever you want to. The key concept here I think,…
Read MoreI was watching a documentary about Lindsey Vonn, the champion ski racer, and she said something really interesting (I’m paraphrasing): The fastest runs are never the perfect ones. Perfect runs are always slow. My friend Christy is a downhill racer herself. I asked her about this. She said, That’s absolutely true. In the runs that are your fastest, you get past the point of control. You’re reacting to the hill in the moment. Maybe a bump throws you off and as you try to recover you find you’re taking a line that you never took before and somehow that line…
Read MoreToday’s Ask Me Anything question comes from John Thomas. How in the world do you keep focused to do the work consistently with outside pressures of family (spouse and four kids who I want to spend time with) and financial pressures? How do you carve out an habitual practice of doing your work? PDF Transcript: Coming Soon Shawn: I have a question here Steve from John Thomas that I think I’d like to take because it’s something that I think we’ve touched on before, but it’s worth going over again. How in the world do you keep focused to do…
Read More“To an engineer, fan belts exist between the crankshaft and the water pump. To a physicist, fan belts exist, briefly, in the intervals between stars.” —George Dyson That’s beautiful, I thought, after reading the quote above. But . . . What’s it really mean? Some background: This quote appears at the end of the following story, in the acknowledgements section of George Dyson’s book Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe: In 1956, at the age of three, I was walking home with my father, physicist Freeman Dyson, from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,…
Read MoreHere’s something I learned from my friend Paul. He has a metric he applies to characters in a book or a movie. He asks, “How close are they to the edge?” What he means is, “How desperate is this character? How capable is he of going to extremes?” Paul’s theory is that, if we want to write a character who is riveting, we have to give that character a moment to perform some extravagant action—the sooner in the story the better. The character has to announce to the audience, “I am hanging on by my fingernails. Don’t take your eyes…
Read MorePDF Transcript: Coming Soon
Read MoreI was having breakfast with a friend and we were talking about Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” You know, the pyramid with food and shelter at the base and self-actualization at the apex. My friend was making the case that before we can take a shot at fulfilling the needs at the top of the pile, we have to have taken care of our other more basic sleep-and-eat needs at the bottom. I respectfully disagreed. I understand what Maslow was saying. He’s absolutely right—and his insights are brilliant and original. But what about you and me as we enter this…
Read More“In an Uber-fied future, fewer people own cars, but everybody has access to them.” —Marcus Wohlsen, Wired (January 2014 issue) In the above quote, “Uber” refers to a company. Set that factoid aside and think about the meaning of the German word uber, translated as above, beyond . . . Substitute the word cars with the word televisions or theaters, or books or radios, or other modes of transporting words and stories and sounds to readers and viewers and listeners. Then, substitute the word them with the corresponding action. For example: “In an uber-fied future, fewer people own televisions, but…
Read MoreAt the gym where I work out, there’s a program called Pro Camp that specializes in training professional athletes. They train basketball players, football players, hockey players, track athletes. And they train high school and college athletes whose ambition is to make it to the pros. I was standing with the chief of Pro Camp, T.R. Goodman, watching a 15-year-old high school football player go through his workout. “He’s a winner,” T.R. said. I was immediately curious. I asked T.R. what he meant. What qualities did he see in this young boy that marked him as an athlete with a…
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