And yet, the movie makes sense. There’s a logic of violence and parable established in the opening scene. There are people in this film that are nearly impossible to kill, they stroll through rooms casually dismembering men with machine guns. AK 47s are no match against someone who knows how to use a knife. Once you’ve accepted this (and the excessive gore that accompanies it) the film never deviates. Which, if you think about it, is the opposite of Inception, where new rules were continually being introduced to make the story tenable. First you have to believe they can enter your dreams. Then, you can die in your dreams. Eventually, when it’s convenient, you have to believe that time moves slower the deeper your dream state. You also have to believe that only Leonardo Di Caprio has demons. Two thirds of Inception was spent explaining Inception. Machete never explains itself. This is the world you are in.

To be honest, I’m writing this post before I even finish reading Stephen’s email because his delivery method seems so brilliant and simple at the same time. Most of us have so many demands on our time (what percentage of my friends, most of them readers, has been able to finish more than one book this summer?) and so many social feeds competing for our fleeting attention that we don’t give content its due.

But email. If I care enough to subscribe to you, I’ll spend the time to open the email, read the first paragraph to see if I’m drawn in, and, shit, I might even write a response. You aren’t needy. You aren’t asking me to go searching for you. And if I don’t feel like reading you today, no big deal. You’ll give me another try tomorrow.

Of course, there are readers and RSS aggregators and other ways to gather massive amounts of content to you. But even those get clogged and require tending, like some garden where it’s easy to plant everything under the sun, but much harder to do the reaping.

So, kudos to Stephen Elliott for doing two things well: creating excellent work every day, and making it very easy to get your hands on that content.

Now I’ve got to finish reading my first delivery.

And re. that. Sage isn’t sold on the idea. It seemed interesting at first, but essentially this project asks her to take the same photograph at the same time every day, with the idea that some small and potentially revealing details will change both in the short- and long-terms. I’m looking for those tiny changes and trying to build a personality around the act of noticing. For Sage, though, one wonders where the relevance lies. Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps this project will die very soon. Who knows.

We decided to try something collaborative, and I’m hoping it turns out like this: Sage takes a photograph of the Mississippi and Shaver Avenues intersection, same time of day, same general area. She sends the photograph to me and I write a very short story about one subject I find in the image. Perhaps it’s a piece of litter, or a dog wandering by himself, or a woman with a coffee. It’s half a rip-off of Joe Wendroth’s excellent “Letters to Wendy’s,” excerpts of which you can read here. The conceit is this: Wendroth has created a persona that writes some profound or disturbing or plainly bizarre piece of wizdom on the little comment cards you find at Wendy’s restaurants. A real picture begins to emergy, within just a few comments, of what a fringe person is behind the writings.

It’s worth picking up, and might be one of my favorite bathroom books of all time. You can simply flip to any page and, even if you’ve read it before, find something interesting to read. About food and sex and violence and just about everything you could want in an American book.

So you silo your work and you protect your spaces (physical and mental) carefully.

For me it’s fairly straightforward: when I’m writing a story or part of a chapter in the novel, I need to push out any lingering distractions. That’s why establishing the writing dungeon was such a high priority, and also why my best writing happens in the morning when I wake up, keep work thoughts at bay, stand over my stove until the hot water is ready to make coffee, and slink downstairs to write for a couple of hours. It’s also why my work computer has and will never cross the threshold of that room. It’s a little silly how vehement I am about that rule, but it’s served me well so far.

Of course, the fact that so many excellent writers never had the desire or the opportunity to protect a physical space for writing makes me wary of my own need, and, to be honest, makes me wonder why exactly I have that need in the first place, but whatever the case my current situation is working out and I’m not rushing to change a functioning setup.

As for Jewel, sounds like she’s looking for a way to have similar divisions online: a space for her personal writing and photography, a place for her professional consulting portfolio, and a place for her professional photography. Sounds like the same practice of division will work well for her, instead of trying to clump all of her public-facing work into a single presence (I predicted yesterday that such a clumped arrangement would lead to a persistent confusion about what projects she was focusing on when).

Anything that improves productivity, right?

Over the next few months I’ll be training down there, sort of like a runner, with longer and longer periods of writing-exclusive time. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, in the vein of “A Cave of One’s Own.”

Yesterday I wrote about my plan to stop worrying and love the outline. In short, the idea was that, since going through my graduate program in creative writing, I’ve avoided the process of actually sitting down and laying out scenes on paper or in, for example, an application specifically designed for creating outlines (OmniOutliner is a strong candidate at the moment).

I did not mean to imply that writing programs in general or my own specifically encouraged the writer to sit down, head blank, and head in some unknown direction. Instead, the idea was that the writer should have an “idea” of where the story was headed (where this idea existed, other than the memory, is unknown to me) and allow the words to flow. The dreadful things that might happen if you didn’t heed this advice are aluded to in the previous post.

So my only revelation, if it may be called that, is that I actually need to have real, no-kidding outlines. Almost like a storyboard, if you will, complete with scene location, characters, purpose of the scene (gasp!), and notes for the future me who will actually sit down and write the thing out.

Anything to help you out, future me.

As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree, going to school to become a better writer burdens you with at least a few bad habits that can take years to shake. Having graduated some three years ago now I feel that my process should be clear of that cruft, but I keep finding new things that slow me down or send me down the wrong path. The fear of overplanning is the latest example.

In school I was taught that to outline was to kill innovation and the ability to jump on new narrative threads as they emerge, as if chapters and characters would jump out from some typo or rambling passage and take over the best threads in the whole story. The idea, as overplayed as it is trite, is that your characters will surprise you. I bought that for a long time, and I still think there’s some truth to the phrase, but what I didn’t consider is what that logic implies (and which I think is incorrect); namely, that to plan out a chapter is necessarily devoid of creativity, surprise, fertile tangents. The other night I came face to face with a chapter that I’ve been working on for months. Yes, months. And part of my inability to move forward is a lack of visualization on how the central scene progresses, ends. In short, I don’t know where I’m going here. So I dusted off some old outline notes and got to work.

Let me go back a step, because I’ve been thinking about this problem of process from a variety of angles, one of which comes from the world of software development. I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about how to build process around software development as a service (hourly rates for developers to solve specific problems and produce working code). To project manage such work, one needs to have discrete goals that developers can complete, with every day (hour, fraction of an hour) bringing the whole closer to fruition. So I tried to apply that thinking to my own writing process, given that the results I generally produce in a given hour of writing would be absolutely anathema to the software project manager. Like, I’d get fired. What is my excuse for spending an entire day–a day that I’ve dedicated to my own writing, my own book–at the desk and not moving the book closer to completion? There is no reason. I decided to project manage myself and keep tabs on how the story is progressing.

Hence the plan. How am I supposed to check off goals if I haven’t created them? This evening I was talking to my brother Peter about his process when working on the first issue of his comic. He’s having a similar problem in that he’ll sit down to work on the comic and end up working on something else. His solution, at this point, is to find and mimic the process of a successful artist, and I think that’s a great idea. (That process is to write, ink, and color one page at a time, taking care to finish one page per day. That’s measurable progress.)

So I’ll end this post by declaring my new dedication to and focus on process as a central (critical) means for moving the novel to completion. And if that involves outlines, diagrams of narrative pace, and other analytical tools, so be it. Besides, who said the act of writing an outline can’t be a creative, surprising act in and of itself?