Robin Sloan

Make a tool

William Faulkner, media inven­tor:

“I think that nobody can say, ‘I’m going to use stream-​​of-​​consciousness as my method for writ­ing.’ That’s—that’s wrong. He’d get into trou­ble. He must use that sim­ply as a tool, only when noth­ing else will do the work. It’s much bet­ter to show the char­ac­ter in famil­iar terms of—of action, of speech, but some­times that’s not suf­fi­cient. Then you have to use another tool, just as at times the car­pen­ter real­izes that his famil­iar tool is not quite enough to do what he wants to do, so he’s got to stop and make some­thing, make a tool…”

Via Tim.

See also: Haruki Ryu Murakami’s iPad app!

Story shadows

(Cross-​​posted to Snark­mar­ket, where there’s a ter­rific con­ver­sa­tion brew­ing. Just wanted to have it on record here, too.)

The meta-​​inspiration for The Dance Party on Jef­fer­son Avenue was an idea that Geoff at BLDGBLOG threw out a while ago. It went some­thing like this: How about fic­tion com­mis­sioned specif­i­cally for a new build­ing? Imag­ine it: There’s a swank new apart­ment tower going up, and the devel­op­ers pay a writer to com­pose a book of short sto­ries about it. (It would be great arbi­trage: a for­tune in writer-​​terms is a pit­tance in developer-​​terms.) When you move in, there’s a crisp, limited-​​edition copy of that book wait­ing on your polished-​​concrete kitchen counter. The action is all set in and around the build­ing: char­ac­ters move in and out of spaces you rec­og­nize. They walk down your street, shop at your gro­cery store. They have the same view out their win­dow that you do!

Why do I like this? Well, one of the things writ­ers need des­per­ately, I think—especially writ­ers of short fiction—is new venues, new con­texts. General-​​interest mag­a­zines used to pro­vide one (I guess?); the inter­net sort of pro­vides one now, but hon­estly, a short story on the inter­net can be pretty ran­dom. The most vital venue for short fic­tion today is prob­a­bly, uh, school. Which is fine if you’re in the 7th grade, but what about the rest of us? How do you ground a story and—here’s the crux of it—give peo­ple a rea­son to read? (And, option­ally, how do you sup­port the cre­ation of new fic­tion? Where does the money come from?)

So, as one of many pos­si­ble solu­tions, I really love this idea of hook­ing a story to some­thing in the real world, whether it’s a new build­ing or (in this case) a pair of pants. Imag­ine that you took this a step fur­ther, and the story actu­ally came with the pants. You open the trade­mark blue-​​paisley Bono­bos box that just arrived in the mail and there, folded neatly atop your new khakis: a short story to get you started, to fire up your imagination.

What if every prod­uct shipped with a story?

Read on…

Outlining: an unnatural act

I am outlining.

My first con­scious mem­ory of out­lin­ing comes circa sec­ond or third grade. Assign­ment: research paper. Sub­ject: THE SHIPS OF THE WORLD.

It was night, dark out­side; I had my mate­ri­als spread before me on the dining-​​room table, books big and small from the Wat­tles Ele­men­tary School library; and I was par­a­lyzed. I’d pored through the books, looked at the pic­tures and picked my favorites, but I had no idea what to do with that knowl­edge, or what to do next, or how to do any­thing.

My mother approached. “Well,” she said, “why don’t you make an out­line?” And then she explained what an out­line was.

Later, I would scan images of Viking long­boats into our Mac Plus, paste them into my short Word (1.0?) doc­u­ment, and then print it all out on a screech­ing ImageWriter. No one in my class had seen any­thing like it.

33 hours ’til midnight

As of this writ­ing, there are 33 hours left to get in on my Kick­starter project if you haven’t already. Here’s my lat­est post, where I talk about fin­ish­ing the text, share a glimpse of the edited man­u­script, and say thanks.

Real-​​time writing and Facebook memorials

A lit­tle writ­ing exper­i­ment here. I was so taken with this new Face­book fea­ture today—the abil­ity to turn a pro­file into a memo­r­ial after some­one dies, and the info that Face­book asks for in the process—that I just felt 100% com­pelled to write some­thing. No time to do a full story, so I dashed off a quick scene, a setup.

(You can skip straight to it if these process notes don’t inter­est you.)

The fun part is that I asked peo­ple for some quick feed­back on Twit­ter and wow—they deliv­ered! Using this form, I got six­teen really thought­ful responses in a mat­ter of min­utes. (I’d show them to you, but I never indi­cated to my on-​​demand review­ers that their responses would be made pub­lic, so I’m going to honor the assump­tion of pri­vacy. Seri­ously, though: so thoughtful.)

None of the feed­back said “meh” or “blech” so I decided to spend just a bit more time on it and address some of the prob­lems that peo­ple iden­ti­fied. I am not assum­ing that any­one will actu­ally want to com­pare these, but just for the sake of shar­ing the process: here’s v1 in Google Docs, the result of about 40 min­utes of rushed typ­ing; and here’s v2, with about another 40 min­utes of work put into it.

Any­way, I’m not sug­gest­ing this is great lit­er­a­ture, but I had fun with the process, and I actu­ally think there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about being able to “metab­o­lize” stuff that’s very in-​​the-​​moment and make a story (or story-​​stub) out of it. And that really means being able to ask for feed­back, and get it, in near-​​real-​​time.

I wish I could keep writ­ing this story—I’m curi­ous to know what hap­pens next—but I’ve got to fin­ish this book and I’ve already spent an irre­spon­si­bly large amount of time on this today.

Any­way! Enough meta-​​discussion. On to the story-​​stub.

Read on…

Cock rock spirit flow ape macro one sage emo

Quickly, just for fun:

I take a lot of notes—words or phrases I see and like, things I over­hear, quarter-​​baked ideas. I have a giant folder of these in Gmail and, if you looked through it, you would prob­a­bly think I was a crazy per­son. But it’s super-​​valuable. For instance, it’s where I squir­reled away the Smith­son­ian fac­toids that found their way, months later, into The Wrong Plane.

Now, the iPhone has been a rev­o­lu­tion in note-​​taking affairs. Before that, I would sort of inef­fec­tu­ally text notes to myself. And before that, I would use mnemon­ics.

The eas­i­est way to explain what I mean is just to share the one I used this morn­ing. I for­got my phone at home while I was out for cof­fee, and for what­ever rea­son, dur­ing the walk my brain was really per­co­lat­ing with things I wanted to remem­ber. So, for each one, I chose a tag; these formed a grow­ing string in my head, up and down the street.

This mnemonic trick is like magic. As long as you can remem­ber the string, it’s easy to “decom­press” it back into words and phrases, ideas and bits of weird­ness when you’re finally in front of a computer.

So, the string was: cock rock spirit flow ape macro one sage emo. Let’s unpack it:

Read on…

Ninety-​​three pages

Man­u­script complete!

Which is not to say book com­plete. Or even text com­plete. Mostly it just means I have a coher­ent brick of paper I can give to peo­ple. Which I did, tonight, in tidy lit­tle golden envelopes.

You win this round, reality

The Wrong Plane is a story about weird carry-​​on lug­gage. At the same time I was fly­ing (and writ­ing) from SFO to JFK, Dan Reetz was wing­ing his way in from North Dakota—with even cooler cargo than what I imag­ined. (You have got to see these pic­tures.)

It’s also a story about a strange group of pas­sen­gers. But in a com­ment, Nina Simon shares a real-​​life scene that’s—well, if not stranger, exactly, then maybe just better:

I once was on a flight seated around a group of Greek per­form­ers, sit­ting next to a very large man who described him­self as the body­guard to “the Michael Jack­son of Greece.” They had just played Carnegie Hall and were headed to LA for more shows. Halfway through the flight, they pulled many unusual instru­ments out of the bulk­heads and began to ser­e­nade the whole plane, clap­ping and singing loudly. I danced with the body­guard in the aisle. It was a mag­i­cal moment when an entire plane­ful of peo­ple agreed, as if by mass hyp­no­sis, to embrace aber­ra­tion in the form of art.

It’s tough to out-​​weird real­ity when real­ity is at its weird­est. But, I don’t mean to set it up as such a com­pe­ti­tion; in fact, I love it that writ­ing The Wrong Plane made me extra-​​sensitive to the magic of Dan Reetz’s carry-​​on, and that post­ing it prompted Nina to share her story.

Stories about our time, over time

Super-​​thoughtful notes on Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store by Nav over at his blog Scrawled in Wax. Read­ing them, and the thread that fol­lows, I found myself think­ing: Ooh, can’t wait to fold this into the next ver­sion of the story.

Then I real­ized that what seems com­pletely obvi­ous and nat­ural at this point—“the next ver­sion of the story”—is pretty atyp­i­cal, historically.

Or is it? Are there any writ­ers famous for revis­ing, for releas­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the same story?

In any case: I’m tak­ing notes for Mr. Penum­bra 2.0. It’s not an imme­di­ate pri­or­ity, but I’ll do it at some point. And I can’t wait.

The $10,000 short-​​story throw-​​down in the sky

This is going to be fun: I’m writ­ing a 2,500 (very) short story dur­ing my flight from SFO to JFK on Wednesday.

First glimpse of Fog City

I read a small sec­tion from the story-​​in-​​progress into the cam­era over at Kick­starter. Watch closely; there’s a clue.

(Also, I made that sound effect myself, and I’m pretty proud of it!)

Also: Cara Pow­ers writes a nice post about the project.

Naming characters with Google AdWords

Here’s a new trick.

In this book, I’m try­ing to craft a cen­tral char­ac­ter with some of that same iconic strange­ness that makes Sher­lock Holmes so appeal­ing. There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sher­lock Holmes. It leaves an indeli­ble mark on the brain.

So, I have a name in mind for this char­ac­ter, and I was look­ing for a mean­ing­ful way to test it out—without giv­ing it away.

That’s where AdWords comes in.

Read on…

Ready, steady, go

Okay, now that I’ve launched my Kick­starter project (already 60% funded!) I’m going to kick the tempo up a bit here on robinsloan​.com.

Just a reminder that you can find links to art and jour­nal­ism I like, as well as var­i­ous meta-​​media mus­ings, over at Snark­mar­ket, along­side lots of smart stuff from Tim and Matt. (If you’re not sub­scribed to the feed, you should be.)

And I’m still not sure exactly what I’m doing with Twit­ter, but, er, yeah.

So, what’s this site? I’m going to use it as a kind of live writ­ing note­book. I’ll post some things to Kick­starter, too, but when I do I’ll include a link here as well.

Next up: sta­tis­ti­cal char­ac­ter naming.

Kickstarter launch: I’m writing a book

It begins! I’m writ­ing a book, and I’m doing it through Kick­starter.

Here’s the core of it: I’m going to take the techno-​​spooky vibe of Mr. Penumbra’s San Fran­cisco and deepen it—darken it—build it out into some­thing big­ger and better.

There’s a video intro, so come take a peek.

I have to say, build­ing this project has been an oppor­tu­nity to explore Kick­starter more deeply, and wow: I am so impressed. It’s seri­ously becom­ing a data­base of dreams. I’m par­tic­u­larly taken with the projects put forth by peo­ple who clearly aren’t hard-​​core web self-​​promoters. They tend to be sort of ten­ta­tive: “Er, hello? Any­body out there?”

I’m telling you: Find one of those projects, drop a dol­lar or five in the bucket, and you will have made somebody’s day—week—month—life.