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“I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.” From Lily King’s “Writers and Lovers”

The whole process of creating my own blog/home outside Substack feels like RollerCoaster Tycoon. I’m inviting people into the park, but nothing is actually built, and everybody is going to be vomiting up the side. Truth be told, I haven’t even started to invite people. I haven’t opened the park. I kind of don’t want to. I sort of want it to feel like a park you have to stumble upon to use the parlance of an old URL. But then I am also creating the loops and I do want to move people through them. I just have a lot of doubt about that. ...

There’s a special magic when someone writes something based on an idea you shared with them. That’s what happened when Debbie wrote about the ideas from my funny/vulnerable workshop. Alex explained that this is called a “tilt” – it’s when things get interesting. We talked about tilts a lot; they’re a common feature of improv comedy. It’s when you’ve got an established scene (two people on a park bench, for example), and then one says something that “tilts” the scene into absurdity. Tilts can happen in writing even when it’s not humor writing, per se. They’re what turn the “boring and obvious” into something surprising and intriguing. ...

From Tom White’s piece Everything Has Been Said (But Not By You) Because truth doesn’t live on the page. IIt lives in the speaking. IIn the wrestling. IIn the failing and the finding your way back. It dies in repetition without revelation, iin articulation without authenticity. Anyone can carry a tune. Only you can give it meaning. So say it again. Say it like you mean it. Say it until it’s yours.

I wrote that recently in a little note about prepping for a workshop. I love seeing past me being so giddy about something. About enjoying the process of creating slides for my presentations. And it’s true - I remember the feeling - it’s like this different form of basically writing where I’m creating something and using the medium’s tools to make it as funny and good and weird as I can. ...

Almost every day that there’s a BATWRITE, I think about how I can back out of it. I’ll just say I’m too busy. Or I’ll tell people I don’t feel good. I can’t do it, I just can’t. And then, I do. I’m in one right now, as I write this, and it’s going great. They always do. So what’s up with the fear? Is it just the normal stagefright that I feel before doing basically anything? Like how before going to hang out with my friends I’ll think, ‘ugh I don’t want to do this’ even though I very much do? ...

While reading it, you start to think and write in the voice of that book. That happened fast with Lily King’s “Heart the Lover." Because then I’m still going to be 99% me or 90%, but that adjustment is so cool. That’s one of the best things books can do, especially when you read it first thing in the morning. I think that’s a big part of why that worked this morning - it was the first thing i read this morning.

Source: Book : SL夢幻 / La Scene de la Locomotive a Vapeur Photo : 廣田　尚敬 / Naotaka Hirota (shared by: this isn’t happiness)

I’m reading this book - a classic in the marketing world, apparently, called Positioning. Here’s a lil bit from the intro: from the book Positioning has changed the way the advertising game is being played today. “We’re the third largest-selling coffee in America,” say the Sanka radio commercials. The third largest? Whatever happened to those good old advertising words like “first” and “best” and “finest”? Well, the good old advertising days are gone forever and so are the words. Today you find comparatives, not superlatives. ...

Soooo this actor and writer Richard Ayoade wrote a book called The Unfinished Harauld Hughes which is about a writer of books and screenplays and other things. And as part of writing that book, Ayoade also wrote and published actual books by his fictional character Harauld Hughes!!! Here’s Wallace Shawn explaining what Ayoade did: _many writers have invented characters who are writers—but do you know any other writer who has not only invented a character who is a writer but who has then gone on to actually write and publish that imaginary writer’s complete works? Richard Ayoade has done that, and if you take out your Kindle and look up Harauld Hughes, Faber will be glad to send you Hughes’s collected plays, poems, prose pieces, and screenplays, all in fact written by Richard Ayoade. ...