virtualDavis

In addition to the “write every day” and “create a routine” stuff by which so many other writers swear, Connolly stresses the need for flexibility. “There are many ways to get from start to finish,” he says. The key is to allow each project to be its own thing and deal with it in the way it ought to be dealt instead of tackling a uniform approach.(Kieron Connolly’s Newspaper Novel-Plotting Game)

This kernel of wisdom from Irish writer Kieron Connolly — the author of Water Sign, There is A House and Harold — was harvested during a novel writing workshop at the American Book Center in The Hague by  Avery Oslo. It appealed to me for its candor and an almost unorthodox willingness to step away from the routine, routine, routine mantra which pervades much writerly advice.

Each new work is unique, and its creation may well require different routines, different methods and habits and rhythms than previous creations. This will to adapt the creative process per the needs of each new creation is not only more realistic than the systematic, procrustean assembly line model, it’s more exciting. Each new creative experience should be an adventure. A journey. An exploration. This is what makes creating and telling a story so damned interesting!

I wasn’t surprised that Avery Oslo (@AveryOslo on Twitter) had been inspired by Kieron Connolly, and yet I’ve never met either one. Chalk it up to Twitter. Again.

I don’t recall how I stumbled upon Oslo, but I suspect it may have been a retweet shared by a mutual acquaintance. A familiar “digital introduction”, followed by a visit to Avery Oslo’s blog where I read this:

I was raised by nomads (proper nomads. The kind that pick up and move every year at least once) and that makes me a native of nowhere (but also of everywhere!). I am most comfortable in mobile groups of other travelers and transplants. Everything I write addresses some aspect of being transient, at a crossroads, or otherwise in a state of flux. My characters often deal in the currencies of movement and future dreams. If you can relate to that, you might like what I write. (Avery Oslo)

I can relate to that!

Update:

After posting this blog, I received the following tweet, adding another interesting Twitter twist:

The greatest benefit of social media for indie authors is the chance to make and build connections with other authors, readers and publishing industry professionals. The quality of these connections (how consistent, how useful, how deep, how much trust. how good is your actual product/book/service?) will determine how many of your social media pals actually “convert” i.e. buy your book, interview you, review your book, give you a contract, share your posts etc.

This where your advantage lies because you, one man/woman writing publishing phenom that you are, can build deeper connections than the Stephen King’s and Susan Collins of this world.  Success and popularity can often decrease the depth of social media connections simply by dint of the numbers involved. Elite twitterati like Neil Gaiman and Paul Coehlo have mostly one way relationships with their followers because they can’t afford to read what all those followers have to say in turn.You don’t have that problem. (penswithcojones.com)

Check out the Movellas backstory! (via youtube.com)

Have you heard about Movellas? New to me, a curiosity fished out of my Twitter stream… But intriguing. Attractive video. Simple, straightforward site. Unfortunately this Danish startup seems to attracting primarily (almost exclusively?) non-English language storytellers. So, I’m not able to vouch for the quality of the “mobile novel” ostensibly born of at Movellas. I searched for a language filter to sort out novels I could read. Doesn’t seem possible at this time. I’ll check back…

The New York Times has a great online brand and business… [but the print newspaper business] is imploding and dragging down the rest of the company.

Sounds like a familiar problem these days, right? All too familiar. But here’s the interesting twist. The New York Times is a social media rockstar! This morning, for example, the New York Times Twitter acount (@nytimes) has almost 2.7 million followers! You read that right. That’s the big leagues. Idon’t play in the big leagues. The farm leagues, perhaps! In relative terms, @nytimes has approximately 831 times more followers than I do… And I’m one of those 2.7 million followers because I value the real-time information soundbites, article leads, etc.

To put this into perspective, that’s more than twice as large as the New York Times’ print circulation, which is slightly under a million copies for the daily copy of the paper.

And, let’s face it. The disparity between these two circulation figures will only grow as time goes on. So what’s the point? I tend to agree with [most of] the following:

we think those two numbers are such a symbol of the NYT’s current, bittersweet situation:

• Print is dying;
• The NYT is going to have to restructure and reorient its business in a major way;
• But the NYT is actually hugely successful online and has all the assets it needs to build a huge, lasting online brand instead of letting itself be disrupted by nimbler outfits like the Huffington Post.

(Business Insider)

I’m not ready to foretell the death of print. Not totally. Not yet. Books, in particular, will keep print alive, but (as I’ve said before) print books will become an increasingly niche subset of publishing. However, newspapers alre already stepping away from print. The businees model simply isn’t sustainable. I read virtually all of my news on the web at this point. Living oversees made me an early adopter. Universal access. Instantaneous access. And nothing to throw away. Nothing to smudge all over my fingers. Easy to search. In my opinion, digital journalism has already discplaced print, and we’ll continue to see print newspapers shuttered in the days ahead. Twitter won’t replace nytimes.com but the website will replace the print paper. Etc.

For years I’ve been talking about stories and storytelling. For years people have rolled their eyes and reminded me that storytelling is for kids. Okay, that’s not quite true. I’ve managed to win over a few along the way who’re willing to admit that stories and storytelling are among the most vital building blocks of community, of education, of entertainment, of marketing, of sales… Especially in the last few years. Finally folks seem interested in storytelling. Storytelling is cool! This makes cocktail parties a little more exciting for me, and it encourages me to explore further, question more, dream bigger.

This morning I woke up thinking about the intersection of storytelling and technology. My mind was racing. My rumination included various dissimilar but related ingredients including:

• Intersect – a site where people can share stories and chart them by time and place to see where their paths might cross.
• Storify – a next-generation storytelling platform that lets you build stories from social media.
• Hacks/Hackers – “a network of people interested in Web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism.”
• Paper.li – a newspaper-style interface for curating and accessing Twitter content.
• Apture – a tool enabling readers to search and explore rich content and media from the web without even leaving the page
• Mrs. Farnsworth – A.R. Gurney’s comedy in which I’ve been playing the part of Gordon Bell.

On the one hand, last night I performed in Mrs. Farnthsworth at the Old Mill Studio in Elizabethtown. Community theater. Amateur. Fun. Short run. We started out at BlueSeed in Saranac Lake and we head up to SUNY Plattsburgh later this week. The show dishes up plenty of political snarkiness and the audience is the final judge of what is true and what is fabrication. This Thursday and Friday you can judge Mrs. Farnsworth for yourself.

I haven’t acted in a few years, and my first inclination was to decline when I was approached last winter. But then I read the play. And I reconsidered. Not because of the politics. Not even because of the uncanny coincidence that my character was also a creative writing teacher. Two stronger reasons compelled me, a longstanding fascination with acting as a form of storytelling and the notion that remembering how a play is produced (as seen from the inside out) might serve to make me a better president of the Depot Theatre board. I’ll weigh in again on this once we conclude our run.

Last night was our fourth performance of six. Not out best. That was Friday. We really aced it on Friday. Actors were at the top of their game, and the packed audience didn’t miss a beat. Such fun. Virtual reality in the oldest sense! It’s a quirky play, especially fun for me to play Gordon since I’m both a teacher and a writer. Reminded me of moments in the classroom when a lesson was really humming along, students were totally in the zone and ideas were popping. An amazing experience. Addictive. Just ask a teacher. It also reminded me that my first moment in a classroom was storytelling… But that tale for another day.

On the other hand, I spent yesterday experimenting with Intersect’s story sharing platform, and urging Storify to let me “alpha preview” their storytelling platform. Both services offer so much promise! I really enjoy the stripped down simplicity of Intersect, but I’m fascinated with the curatorial potential of Storify. Both platforms are still mere glimmers of what they might become, not exactly prenatal, but early, early in their development. That said, these two technologies offer two of the essentail ingredients for the future of journalism: intersection and curating. I don’t just mean sharing content easily and across multiple platforms. I don’t just mean offering a clumsy threaded link list to interested story followers. I mean that convergence of these two platforms could literally reinvent journalism, collaborative, real time reporting and storytelling.

Stories, by their very nature are rhizomic. Instead of simply converting traditional print journalism and storytelling to digital (most of what the large media outlets have undertaken so far), the future isn’t flat. Nor is it linear. Nor is it ever in final format. The future is fluid. Information is viral, mutable, shareable. Collaboration is critical. Content affinity is critical. Similar and/or complementary content must connect. And as the massive proliferation of content overwhelms us, curating and aggregating and reviewing/commenting and fact checking become essential. Information strata and intertextuality and multimodal media must interlink, be sortable, trackable. Trying to flatten this future model of journalism, of storytelling into one dimensional print interface will not only be more and more challenging, it will also be less and less necessary, less and less desirable.

Although it’s a somewhat restricted example of the sort of story aggregation and curatorship that could be possible with next generation tools, Tim Carmody’s (@tcarmody on Twitter) “Lobbying for Followers on Twitter: A Love Story” offers an amusing and powerful example of where we’re headed. Add video, audio, slide shows, comments, forums, etc. to the equation, and it’s staggering what you wind up with. How will we navigate, sort, verify, absorb, enjoy this new content interface? Verdict’s still out, but I can’t wait to begin experimenting.

Which takes me back to the video and to Tristan Harris, the CEO of Apture, who waxes enthusiastic but befuddled about the need for a convergence in technology and storytelling:

“You need people from a computational background and from a storytelling background to be able to satisfy the interest of say a publisher who is trying to tell stories and the people who consume information while also satisfying the… and leveraging, I guess, the technology of the medium itself that let’s us do innovative things that we couldn’t do before.”

Yes, we need those people. And we need them to imagine and build and support the next generation of storytelling tools. In the mean time, I’m going to keep exploring their efforts while telling my own stories. And I’m going to continue enjoying the fact that folks finally know (and care) what I’m talking about at cocktail parties!

Why do I love Twitter? Let me count the ways… Okay, there are some Twitter cons (ie: a tempting time suck!) but the Twitter pros so totally outweigh them. There’s a fascinating sort of rhizomic community building that is unique from Facebook, Google Buzz, etc. But there’s something more compelling and yet more ellusive: the “twitter stream”. Sure, this reference gets bandied about in a variety of ways, and maybe some of the water metaphor’s sex appeal has been diluted along the way, but nobody seems to have coined a more apt alternative.

In just such an aqua-twitter mood the other day, I retweeted this: “just to drift… to be like a river…it is so important!” (RT @t2van via @conscire) Familiar allusions. Not earth shattering. Just a feeling, a yearning sent out into the either that resonated with others, that for a few brief seconds connected strangers. A common dream, a shared aspiration.

Shortly thereafter I received this response from Laura Munson(@Lauramunson):

“Read the Jim Harrison poem, Cabin Poem. Much to say about rivers in just a few perfect words.” ~ Laura Munson

It was Friday afternoon and I was headed off to opening night of Mrs. Farnsworth in Saranac Lake. I was running lines in my mind, driving through the Adirondack’s High Peaks. I wasn’t tweeting. Not much anyway! And I didn’t have time to look for Jim’s Harrison’s “Cabin Poem”. This morning I did. With two performances complete, and a tsunami of family and houseguests moving back out to sea, I’ve had time to sit down at my desk and begin catching up. And in the midst of catching up, I rememberd Laura’s recommendation, so I Googled Jim Harrison’s, “Cabin Poem” and read the brief but reflective poetry. Then reread it. Again and again. Then pushed my seat back from my cluttered desk and walked across my study to an arm chair, warm in the morning sun, and settled in to ponder while listening to the waves crashing against our dock house beyond the open window…

I’ve decided to make up my mind 
about nothing, to assume the water mask, 
to finish my life disguised as a creek, 
an eddy, joining at night the full, 
sweet flow, to absorb the sky, 
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon 
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
~ Jim Harrison, Cabin Poem

The strong Buddhist undertone aside, don’t you hear the Twitter overtone? I’ve certainly allowed myself to be swallowed in Twitter’s “ceaseless flow” more times than I care to keep track of. Which takes us back to where I started, to the pros and cons of this curious phenomenon called Twitter. It can be a tempting time suck. Yes. And sometimes that’s what we want and/or need, even when we resist admitting it. Swimming in a massive conversation about ideas that interest us, that connect us with others who are interested, interesting, challenging, educating, inspiring. Submitting to the “sweet flow”…

If you’re new to Twitter (or puffing out your chest for resisting that pointless waste of time) then you might not have had the opportunity to evaluate the rewards, the sheer joy of the sort of tweetalogue I’ve just recounted. Clearly Laura Munson, who I’ve never met, feels otherwise. And I’m grateful and richer for it! Thanks for guiding me to this insightful poem.

What is the “rhythm of stillness”? An oxymoron? An invitation to pause and ponder? A whimsical poetic conundrum?

Annie Q. Syed is drawn to the rhythm of stillness experienced in those “quiet hours of the early morning before a city, town, or village takes a big yawn and stretches itself into your routine.” She dubs these rare but sacred moments Still Sundays:

“These mornings are especially unique in New York because the City doesn’t sleep but she just takes naps. And the longest naps are on Sunday mornings. I love Sunday mornings in NYC. I try my best not to have anything planned, not even a yoga class, before 12:00 p.m. If my mind is quiet enough I borrow the stillness and share some thoughts with a few friends or family members via email or a phone conversation. Some mornings I  simply wrap the stillness of a Sunday morning around a pen and put fragments on a paper.“

Are you making time to be still? To listen to the stillness? This past Sunday Syed pondered a conversation she’d had with a friend who decried the perpetual frenzy and commotion of life in New York City. She wondered if, how and why stillness is possible (essential?) amidst the whirring, screeching, bumping, jackhammering, phone ringing, car door slamming, elevator bell dinging “city that never sleeps”. It is. She knows it is, and she wandered toward the reason why. Her reason why.

“New York didn’t define me; I defined New York. I believe the stillness I speak of is borne out of that carving. I can hear a steady beat inside the multi-rhythmic pulsating blend of music that can’t easily be tuned out. The tempo matches my heart. Stillness then is a cadence of choice.“

At least most of the time. Carving out a space for stillness amidst the throng will open up the possibility of stillness. But there must also be room for chance, for stumbling accidentally upon these somewhat paradoxical interstices, and then honoring them. Syed doesn’t say this, not explicitly, but she recounts an anecdote that trumps any explanation.Tucked into her familiar routine of yoga class followed by pizza at an Upper West Side pizzeria, a fleeting encounter with Nina — a 78 year old Greek lady dressed in a pink skirt suit — offers an invitation to wander into the unfamiliar. Syed accepts the invitation.

If the rhythm of stillness seems to be drowned out by din and routine, it might not be New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago that have picked up the pace or turned up the volume. It might be that we forget to stop, to listen, to wonder. It might be that we’re not quite as receptive as we could be. Should be.

I’ve lived in New York City. I’ve lived in Washington, DC and Paris and Rome as well. Plenty of busy-busy in all of them. And so many reasons to ignore the old bat who says “Hello,” at the pizzeria or asks you how to find the Jardin des Tuileries. No time to stop and wonder at the thousands of tiny black birds painting paisleys in the sky above the Colosseum. Too busy to pause and listen to the girl practicing her cello at Abe’s left foot in the Lincoln Memorial. But, as Syed reminds us, there’s an opportunity lurking beneath the quotidian. Whether it’s an early Sunday morning while the “To Do” list is still snoozing, or squeezed in between a slice of pizza and a bus ride, there’s rhythm in the stillness. Will you stop to listen? To sing along? To dance?

Acknowledgment: Special thanks to Annie Q. Syed (@so_you_know on Twitter) who’s inspired me plenty in recent months, and who is is one of the reasons I believe that Twitter is a midwife for real friendship! And a hat tip to the late Paul Zweig who’s The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World is where I first stumbled upon this idea of interstices.

This isn’t a new question (or a new answer, for that matter), but Misty Belardo (@mistygirl on Twitter) underscores her affirmation with five pointers for how to stack the odds in your favor.

Twitter is a great social networking platform. It lets you communicate with people from all over the world 24/7 real time. We are always told that you cannot have real friends online and that it is impossible to have meaningful friendships with your Twitter friends. I would like to disagree. I believe that you can have real friends. There are a lot of people that I have become close with that I met on Twitter. They are a source of encouragement and a true source of joy. You may think I am nuts… It is really not hard finding wonderful people on Twitter, you just need to know how to be open to friendships as well.

1. Don’t follow just for numbers – Twitter is your chance to really get to know real people.  The numbers may be worthless if you cannot connect and inspire others.
2. They are not mere avatars – They are human beings that live and breath.  Twitter is full of real people that you can communicate and share with 140 characters at a time.
3. Be Yourself – Don’t be pretentious.  People will recognize that you are being that way. Just be who you are in real life.  If they see that you are genuine, people will warm up to you.
4. Don’t be afraid to say hello – Just like in real life, friendships begin with a HELLO, so don’t be afraid to speak out. It does not matter how many followers that person has, they will reply to you if they see that you are friendly, share wonderful info and are open to communicating.
5. Introduce others you know – I know the coolest people and the most engaging ones because I was introduced to them by other people. I also, in turn, introduce the people I know. Giving is always much more fun, don’t you think?

via Can You Have Real Friends on Twitter?

I’ve frankly been a little surprised at the sort of friendships which can develop out of Twitter. I was a reluctant latecomer to the Twitterfest (“Tweet, Tweet, Tweet”), and I initially considered Twitter to be little more than a playful, less personal alternative to Facebook. The 140 character limit was a fun challenge, and the communications were quirkier (and often more clever) than the updates on other social networks. And the open, searchable sea of tweets was intriguing. I began to find myself “polling” twitter to find the pulse on topics that I normally would have used Google news for. Raw, unfiltered, real time information. Real people. Real social web! Sort of an open source social network. I got hooked.

I enjoyed posting more and more. And I enjoyed following other interesting posters more and more. I honed down the niches which really compelled me (ie: @virtualDavis) and began “stumbling” upon fascinating individuals all around the world who shared (or despised) the ideas, activities, ambitions, curiosities, etc. which tug my attention. Often bizarre, sometimes inspiring and ocassionally critical dialogue (trialogue, quintialogue,…) evolved. And in several cases, these virtual conversations — 140 character ping pong matches — have germinated into friendships. Real friends. So, are Twitter friends real friends? They can be. But just like the non-Twitter realm, friendship is rare, special and takes some effort. Twitter just ramps up the diversity and geography of your potential friends. What are you waiting for?

After many months, I’ve finally updated the little profile blurb under my photo on Facebook. It used to read, “Those who can, meander. Those who can’t, gallivant.” This genious clot of words encapsulate a mountain of wisdom! I borrowed it from @lexiconehead last winter, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to update it. Nothing worthy! Or worthier… Until today. At last, a new shimmering drip of wisdom has fallen from the twitter spigot to replace my facebook uberstatus: “Storytelling reveals meaning without defining it.” (Hannah Arendt) Eureka! Amen.

Flying Fingers (Photo credit: The Hamster Factor)

Plenty of keyboard clatter of late, but less productive than I need to be. To Do lists remain long. The “I’ll get right to that” pile is growing. The Twitter chatter is excessive. Time to knuckle down and knock out an outline, another chapter, a running commentary for 15k+ photographs. So if I vanish from the blogosphere for a few days, please celebrate. If you find me back in the banter, remind me not-so-gently to get my posterior back to work.