Writing

Work Tired

by TomLaPille on May 15, 2011

I am very tired.

Today, I went to an SCA fight practice. I was fighting on and off for about two and a half hours in thirty pounds of armor. We were practicing one on one fights, in which my weapon of choice is a greatsword. Everyone I was practicing with was fighting sword and shield. In the greatsword versus sword-and-shield matchup, their goal is to use their shield to close as fast as possible to negate my range advantage, and they were correctly charging me at the beginning of each fight. To win, I needed to use my greater mobility to attack them from the side, or just keep them at range and whack away until I scored something. Despite the extra armor weight, I had to move quickly if I wanted a chance at success. The day took a lot out of me, but I had a mental breakthrough that I suspect will be important later, so I’m happy I went.

I just got home from having dinner at some friends’ apartment, where I nearly fell asleep on their couch before realizing that I should probably just go home.

There is a large part of me that doesn’t want to write this post.

Yet, here I am. Why?

First, I committed to posting six days a week. I want to prove to myself that I can do that. I spent my one cheat day a week this past Thursday, so fulfilling my commitment to myself means posting something tonight.

Second, I want to build discipline. I need to write regularly to practice, so I want to train my brain that daily writing is not an optional activity.

Those two factors sound nice, but they weren’t enough to get me to post. The deciding factor was the idea that I could make today an experiment. How little effort could I put into a post before it was publishable?

Why would I do this? Let’s take a detour into the land of martial arts. One of the textbooks that we study at the kenjutsu dojo I am attending discusses the three stages of learning any technique, from the most basic vertical cut to sophisticated entering techniques that require split-second timing. I’ll use the basic vertical cut as my example.

The first stage is learning how to do the technique at all. The motions must be programmed into your body. Move the sword from center gaurd to above your head with a snap, then move your hands forward before snapping the sword on the way back down. Stop the power as soon as the snap is finished so that you don’t overextend your wrists. If we can do all this without prompting, no matter how slow or unrealistic it looks, we’ve satisfied this criteria.

I know how to write, and I’ve created several five hundred to one thousand word blog entries in the past few weeks.

The second stage is learning how to do it without thinking about it. To execute a vertical cut in combat, you need to be familiar enough with the technique that your brain can reproduce it while it is focusing on other things. Deciding whether or not a vertical cut is a good idea right now takes up a lot of energy, and can take up all the mental space you once used to remember how to do it at all. In martial arts, we develop this ability with tons and tons of repetition. I find that I get to this level with a technique at around the thousandth repetition.

I haven’t written a thousand blog posts, but I’m getting better at identifying whether an idea will work well in a blog post and what the structure should be before I start writing. I still have more work to do, but I can feel this coming.

The third stage, and the most challenging part, is to learn how to do it while expending the minimum required energy. Once you transcend your brain as a limitation on doing the technique, we move on to your body. Physical energy is a resource, and hurting someone with an attack requires power. Our goal is to spend as little energy as possible on each attack so that we don’t run out of energy before we run out of things that need to be attacked. To develop this skill in martial arts, we execute the technique over and over again until we are exhausted, then keep going. When we’re tired, we force our bodies to do things in the most efficient way possible, because there simply isn’t energy to do it any other way. Once we find this way, we can use it when we are fresh, and we’ll get tired more slowly.

I currently have trouble writing for more than three or four hours before getting fatigued, and quality starts to suffer after an hour or two. I want to develop the ability to keep going longer than that. This is a chance to practice writing tired, and when I cast it that way, it was obvious that I needed to write.

I may be exhausted, but to my eye, I was able to write something that is readable and delivers value.

I’m calling that a win. Then, I’m going to sleep.

Make Me Cry

by TomLaPille on May 9, 2011

A long time ago, I read Old Yeller. I was very young, so I don’t remember much. What I do remember is that it involves a dog, that the author takes great pains to make us like said dog, that the author dwells a great deal on the main human character’s friendship with said dog, and that (spoiler alert!) the dog dies violently at the end.

I vividly recall my reaction to this last bit. I couldn’t handle it. I cried.

The next day, I told my seventh grade teacher that I didn’t like the book. When asked why, I said that it had made me cry. She smiled, then said something that has stuck with me since then: “That means it was a good book.”

I don’t think of Old Yeller as a literary classic, but as children’s books go, it’s fairly well-read. I expect that it has a similar effect on most young readers who put some effort into reading it as it had on me. If it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t still read it.

Although I have forgotten that teacher’s name, her words remain. Perhaps thanks to her, my attitude has flipped. I want to experience art that makes me cry.

I still appreciate fiction that makes me cry. Patrick Rothfuss’s fantasy debut The Name of the Wind is one such work. Despite some structural problems, The Name of the Wind has some of the tightest prose I’ve ever read in a novel. The penultimate chapter explodes the relationship between the two main characters in a deliciously tragic way, and the last chapter is a gorgeous prose poem. Not a single word is wasted in either. When I finished the book, I cried.

This effect is not limited to fiction. The most recent work of art to make me cry was The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Probably the best book I’ve read in the past two years, it is a manifesto that addresses the inner demons that plague anyone who creates. He has fought them for years, understands them, and wants you to defeat them. His expression is succinct, poetic, and inspiring. If you make things on a regular basis, read this book. It will help you create. It may also make you cry.

Several films have made me cry. Kurosawa is particularly good at this; the closing scenes of both Seven Samurai and Kagemusha got me, as did the fifteen minute battle scene at the center of Ran. I also sometimes cry when I watch the OK Go music video for “End Love”.

Most people have been stirred to tears at some point or another by movies and books. What about other forms of art?

Years ago, I was a member of the American Coaster Enthusiasts. I’ve ridden hundreds of roller coasters, but only two have made me cry. The more remarkable one of the two is Busch Gardens Tampa’s Montu. Like all Bolliger and Mabillard-designed coasters, it is smooth and has interesting elements from start to finish. Montu is a unique creature, though. Many coasters feel constrained, as though they were built to be maximally space efficient on some oddly shaped plot of land. Montu was given an enormous footprint, and that gives it a leisurely feel that few coasters give me. Each element feels like it was placed exactly where it would have the most effect, even if that required more track. As a rider, I feel that few concessions were made to space in the layout. It seems likely to me that concessions were made in the other direction. More than any other coaster I’ve ridden, it felt like a pure expression of the designers’ vision. I cried the first time I rode it in the front seat.

Products can also be art. I can think of several that qualify, but my favorite example is the MacBook Pro that I am typing this on. Unlike every Windows laptop I’ve ever owned, the object itself is beautiful. However, the real beauty of this machine is that it works exactly how I expect, all the time, every time. My windows laptops did bizarre things on a regular basis, but in about a year of use, this computer has unpleasantly surprised me exactly once. The people who made it love it, and they want me to love it just as much as they do. When I realized that the first time, I cried.

There are two common threads between all of these things. The first is an emotional connection-I have to care about the same thing that the creator does. The second is skilled craftsmanship-the creator has to love the work as much as I do, and a creator can only love something he or she is proud of.

You don’t make my cry by phoning it in. You don’t make me cry by giving me what I expect. You make me cry by getting a good idea, then buckling down, working hard, and making the most remarkable thing you know how to make.

Today, I read the book Little Bets by Peter Sims. A compact business book, it talks about the power of being willing to fail on a small scale in order to discover ideas that can succeed on a grand scale. The author gives several examples of success stories that came about through making little bets: Starbucks, Chris Rock, Pixar. All of the examples were household names. I’m mildly glad I read it. It had some reasonable ideas. It never made me sit up and take notice. It did not make me cry.

I wanted to cry.

I am typing this on an Apple Macbook Pro. I am listening to OK Go. Earlier on this flight, I read a book on my Kindle, an e-book reader clearly designed by people who love reading books and want me to love it too. All of these things, at one point or another, have made me cry with appreciation.

Make me cry. If you don’t, I’m not buying.

Long-Term Discipline and the Cheat Day

April 29, 2011

For the past four months, I’ve eaten the slow-carb diet from Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body. The diet can be stated simply as follows: six days a week, eat lots of protein and vegetables, no dairy, and no carbohydrates that can be white, including bread, rice, corn, and sugar. On the seventh day, eat whatever [...]

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