Tag Archives: writing

The Setup

Posted on by jayhathaway
2

How does the saying go? The wallpaper on the desktop in the first act must be changed by the third?

I’m a desktop fidgeter, I confess. Really good wallpaper lasts about a day, and finding a lovely new background is usually my first line of defense against getting any work done. Hell, I’ll change every icon in my Dock to deflect a particularly stubborn project. “If I create a perfect, pristine setup,” I tell myself, “I will produce perfect, pristine words.”

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Instead, it’s come to this: the least distracting, least present settings I could achieve on my Mac, without sacrificing a certain aesthetic appeal. It resists fidgety change because I hardly know it’s there. It doesn’t make my writing any better. It just makes my writing possible.

In case there’s anyone else out there with my precise working tics, here’s a rundown of the current settings:

The Menubar


From left to right: that’s Tweetie, Skitch, SMCFanControl and FuzzyClock.

The Tweetie menubar icon will modestly shift to blue when I get new mentions or direct messages on Twitter. It makes a highlighted dock icon or a Growl notification look as audacious as a big-top ringmaster. I’ll get to it when I notice it, thankyewverymuch.

Skitch’s menubar icon serves a practical purpose: you can use it to snap a selection without changing window focus. This turns out to be important in the software-blogging part of my work.

SMCFanControl warns me when my MacBook looks like it might go all Mount Vesuvius on me, and lets me crank up the fans accordingly. I keep the icon there because I find it attractive, and because SMCFanControl offers no option to turn it off.

FuzzyClock: because you don’t actually need to know the time down to the minute, so you may as well stop being a self-important jerk about it.

You may notice some missing icons:

Volume: I already controlled it via keyboard 9 times out of 10, so I ditched the icon.

Airport: When I’m in-office, there’s no need to quickly change my wifi settings.

Bluetooth: Why?

Spotlight: I never use it. Instead, I use Quicksilver. Disabling the Spotlight icon takes a little more work than the previous three I’ve listed — which all have checkboxes in their respective preference panes — but you can get rid of it. Try this tip from MacOSXHints. (It’s labeled 10.4, but works on Leopard and Snow Leopard, too.)

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Cold Content Farm

Posted on by jayhathaway
14
winterfarm-1.jpg

It’s more reliable than any bus in town.

“What do you do?”

Me, I write. Constantly. Nights, weekends. If I am not currently holding a drink and being asked what I do, I’m writing. So I say, “Me? I write.”

Then comes the look. I’m hoping for a little interest, somewhere around the corners of the mouth. A quick chorus-line kick of the eyebrow will do. That’ll get me going, because it lets me know you love words, and I absolutely must know which words you love. I’m hoping we can do the dance of giddy reminiscence, about novels, about stories and, hell, even about blogs. It’s one of my favorite dances.

Lately, it’s been the other look that shows up more often. The rolling eyes, the slumping shoulders, the scan around the room for someone in a respectable profession. Now we’re doing another dance altogether. Now you’re stepping on my feet. Now you’re asking me, “Oh, so you do content?“

Content: that most formless, most beige, most indifferent of nouns. You’re comfortable with “content,” because what’s actually contained is irrelevant to you. You don’t wonder whether it’s writing, because you don’t intend to read it. You don’t care whether anyone else reads it, either. Words aren’t for reading; they’re for indexing, clicking on, optimizing. They fill that space under the banner and left of the text ads. They’re not even fast food, they’re bot fodder.

Perhaps there’s good money to be made shunting keywords around, writing articles that aren’t meant to be read, but that’s money I’m leaving on the table. I want to write something honest, something inexpert, something search-engine-unoptimized. I want to write what makes me hurt, what gets me off, what gets me out of bed every morning, and what makes me stay longer than I should. I want writing with skinned knees.

You want me to sell advertising.

Do you know how many keyword-grinding, content-farming replicants it takes to equal a Gruber or a Rands? How about a Haruki Murakami? Trick question. When Murakami describes the pleasures of owning a perfect sofa, or when Rands explains how geeks approach games, they’re not writing for a teeming nest of Google spiders. Writers don’t “create content,” they fucking write. What’s contained does matter to them. The right words matter. Not the keywords, not acai berries or vacuum cleaners or whatever the ad people can “monetize” today. Sometimes, the right words keep them up nights.

You may be a writer if: the right words keep you up nights.

I’m not Murakami, I’m painfully certain. I’m not Faulkner or Kerouac or Gruber or Rands or Mark riverboatin’ Twain. Everyone’s got stories, though, and I’m thrilled and terrified at the possibility that I might have it in me to tell one deftly and honestly. You advise me against that, though, because it probably wouldn’t be good for my pagerank, and you’re not sure how I intend to profit from these messy aspirations of mine.

I’m not sure, either, but I promise I won’t do it by leaving the web — or the print publishing world, for that matter — worse than I found it. Resolved, then, as I look away and pretend to be infinitely fascinated by the way the light hits my glass: I will keep working to get better at what I do. I will keep losing sleep, keep looking for the right words, keep reading real writing. I will stick by the people who love a good story. Life’s too short to dance with ad hucksters, get-rich-quickers, bot-feeders and human acronyms.

“Oh, so you do content?”

No.

[Photo: James Jordan]

Thoughts on a Runner-Up Personality

Posted on by jayhathaway
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Momus recently spent some time at Click Opera chewing on an idea that really bothers me. He calls it “runner-up-ization,” and it refers to a situation where people or cultures, instead of succeeding at being themselves, rate as runners-up at being someone else. As examples, Momus points to Indian fashion magazines that feature western-looking models and styles more prominently than local ones, and to the novelist Tao Lin, whose distinctive style inspires readers to wish they could write like him.

Runner-up-ization is real and frightening to me, as a relatively inexperienced writer with hopes of contributing something compelling, original or fun to the world. I spend a lot of my time, energy and passion digesting the creative output of people I see as first-place versions of themselves. I try to figure out how they do what they do, and how I can do it, too. When you admire people for their uniqueness, though, emulating them too precisely just misses the point.

And yet, there’s something there that’s worth emulating. Figuring out what lessons my heroes might teach me about myself keeps me up nights. It’s tempting to muddle everything together into a derivative recipe, to strive to be “one part” this guy, or “the next” that guy. That would sure be easier than working out what resonates with me about, for example, Matt Fraction’s writing on Casanova, and how I can use my limited ability to make something of my own that leaves me with that same kind of feeling.
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