Mark Helprin offers up some great advice to writers in Skip the Paris Cafés And Get a Good Pen, but it’s advice that works just as well for all creative pursuits:

Your most important tools will be your honesty, labor, courage, practice, luck and utter concentration. […] More valuable than speed or being struck by what you think is lightning (and others usually do not) is concentration. When asked how he managed to come up with the calculus, surely one of the greatest achievements possible for the mortal mind, Newton replied, “I thought of nothing else.”

I love the writing style in this piece. For example, while expanding on his advice not to try to be Hemingway by writing in cafés all over Europe:

Literary skill, much less greatness, cannot be had with a pose, and exhibitionism extorts the price of failure. Also, have pity on the weary Parisians who have wanted only a citron pressé but have been unable to find a café where every single seat is not occupied by an American publicly carrying on a torrid affair with his moleskin.

When I grow up, I want to write like that.

Adam Kirsch’s Neverending stories is a very interesting exploration of fairy tales, and why they’ve had such longevity in our culture. The essay struggles to find its way in the first half, but it picks up steam when Adam starts to speculate about why these ancient stories continue to be so popular. I especially like this theory:

Rather, what fairy tales obsessively conjure up is a world of mutability, in which things and people are not immured in their nature. The frog becomes a prince, the wolf becomes a grandmother, the little mermaid becomes a woman, the beast becomes a handsome man, the 12 brothers become a flock of ravens. So much of the appeal of these stories, in a preliterate, premodern culture, must have been simply in their demonstration of the power of words to defy the laws of nature. In this way, the storyteller enacts the magic powers he describes and possesses the wealth he fantasises about.

All good writing conjures up thoughts and images that go beyond the immediate realities of the story that is being told.

I recently finished reading Paul Soulellis’s essay in Issue #3 of The Manual called “Design Humility”. I’ll write about it more at some point, but for now, phrases like “walking slow, but looking hard” and “amplified vulnerability” are racing through my mind at such speed that I don’t know what to do with it all yet. I love writing like that. Writing that makes you dizzy with sudden understanding and new ideas. Writing that defies the laws of nature.

I’m often amazed at how the people I follow online tend to talk about the same things, even if they are most likely not connected to each other. It happened again this week, with three articles about the value of starting (and finishing) something, even if you’re not sure how it’s going to work out.

First, there’s I cannot design or code a responsive website by Nick Jones:

I didn’t know how to do it right, so first I did it wrong. After I had done it wrong a few times, things started to work. It’s not perfect, but it works. I still don’t know the right way to do anything but I don’t worry about that anymore. Now I just hack and hack and trust that I’ll arrive at a solution. Sometimes it even makes sense.

By ignoring my doubts and trusting my instinct, I made myself vulnerable to attack. The attacks never came. They only ever existed inside my head. It turns out, the guys I was afraid would laugh at my new site, were the first to give respect. Most of my fears were a waste of energy. So are yours. What if you shut out all the noise and just got started?

Then Alex Maughan wrote a great piece called Making is Momentum:

I need to do more and self-criticise less. Critical analysis of oneself is of course important, but it needs to be done with a positive end in mind. I’ve just been beating the crap out of myself. There’s a big difference. It’s not only about replacing the stick with carrots, it’s also about constantly making sure I’m buying the right carrots from sources that prove themselves to be the most trustworthy and wholesome. […]

I need to start being nicer, both to myself and those around me. Making is momentum. Perfection is spurious and stifling.

And finally, here’s Brian Bailey in The Smallest Way Forward:

In the case of a creative project like a novel, the most important thing to do is to write another page. It will be that way every day until it is finished. To be successful, though, you have to allow for other ways to make progress. Pauses are healthy, but it’s important to pause a specific task like writing the next chapter or implementing payment processing, without pausing the project itself.

It’s not the most important thing each day; it’s anything that moves you forward, that brings this new thing a little closer to being a real thing.

That’s three essays in the space of one week, all about the same thing. About not letting the fear of failure or defeat or imperfection stand in the way of creating something. Perhaps we can sum up this whole topic using the King’s words in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

Frank Chimero speaks the truth about writing:

Most writers are frauds. We are ignorant and learning out-loud. The written piece is the useful by-product of figuring things out, like how churning butter makes buttermilk. More writing comes from doubt than expertise.

I’ll add that this is a good thing — this doubt. I write when I’m uncertain about something, because it helps to clarify my thinking. Sometimes the words become an argument I believe in, and I hit Publish. But often the foundations start to crumble after a few paragraphs, and I hit Delete instead.

Both outcomes are fine. One gives me the confidence to expose my thinking to the fires of public scrutiny. The other ensures I don’t make a complete fool out of myself by starting a thought that I realize too late has absolutely nowhere to go.

Yesterday I read an opinion piece on a local news site that was just one long, scathing attack on the writer of another opinion piece on the site. No substance at all. You don’t have to go far on the web to see that kind of behavior. There is something about the false sense of anonymity provided by web sites, blogs, and comment sections that just bring out the worst in us.

Don’t get me wrong — I love disagreements. I believe that an essential quality of a good designer is the ability to balance his or her confidence in their proposed solution with an openness that they might be wrong. But we don’t disagree online any more, we just attack. I’ve often thought that new users of the Internet should be forced to read Paul Graham’s How to Disagree before they’re allowed to go any further. When it comes to online discourse we are, for all intents and purposes, locked in an Eternal September.

It is with these types of thoughts on my mind that I wrote a talk about how I think we can do better. I also turned the talk into an article for Smashing Magazine, which was published today under the title Making A Better Internet. The summary:

In this essay, I’ll weave together a story about the current state of Internet discourse. At the end, I’ll tell you how I think we can make it better. And then, we’ll most likely all go back to what we were doing and forget about it. Despite the probable futility of this exercise, I’ll carry it out anyway, because I love the Web and I really don’t want us to destroy it.

I don’t know what the reaction to this piece is going to be. I’m quite nervous about it, but we’ll see how it goes. If you’d like to see the slides from the talk, which I gave at a recent Cape Town Content Strategy Meetup, they are embedded below:

Read article on Smashing Magazine | View slides on Speaker Deck | Discuss on Google+

I’m a big fan of Clive Thompson’s writing, and in The Hidden Truth of Counterintuition he explores the increased popularity of what he calls “a seemingly unending series of tomes claiming to upend everything we believe about talent (Talent Is Overrated), decisionmaking (The Upside of Irrationality), motivation (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us), personality (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement), and dozens of other subjects.” He ultimately believes that the popularity of these books is a good thing:

Perhaps our willingness to have our basic beliefs overturned is a sign of intellectual health. This mindset is, after all, key to the scientific method. Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all purveyors of a “hidden side” to reality, right? (The Principia could have been subtitled Why Everything You Know About Gravity Is Wrong.) Good scientists understand that there’s a good chance today’s knowledge will eventually be proven wrong. And the really good scientists welcome that prospect — they’re thrilled by it.

Even though I usually agree with Clive, In this particular case I’m going to side with Callum J Hackett’s counterargument entitled The Popularity of Counterintuition:

First, it’s important to distinguish between two conceptions of “skepticism” that are often conflated. There is ‘Skepticism’ as a mode of rational inquiry — the kind that relies on logic, evidence, and varieties of scientific consensus — and then there is ‘skepticism’, almost synonymous with ‘cynicism’, that is a mere compulsion to question everything, no matter what logic and evidence underpins it. This is an undiscerning, shotgun skepticism — it questions sound scientific knowledge as much as bad ideas, and is perhaps the cause of problems like climate-change denial in reasonably well-educated people.

If the readers Thompson is talking about have any kind of skepticism, it’s only cynical skepticism — it’s not driven by the urge to reveal the truth without bias, it’s driven by that same urge which craves the unmasking of conspiracies wherever they can conceivably exist.

I recommend both articles, if for no other reason than to witness how it’s possible to disagree respectfully with another human being on the Internet.

Birth of a Book is a beautiful video of a book being created using traditional printing methods. Watch it before you continue reading:

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Merlin Mann often defines a priority as an activity you both care about, and are willing to sacrifice something for. That phrase — care and sacrifice — immediately sprung to mind as I watched this video. You can sense the care that goes into the book’s creation, and you can easily imagine the time sacrifice needed to make sure it comes out perfect.

I am not on some kind of crusade against ebooks. I read way more ebooks than traditional books. But there is still something exciting about opening and reading physical copies of books like The Shape of Design or The Manual. The level of care and sacrifice becomes tangible, and transfers from creator to consumer. It’s why I still buy vinyl, and prefer a manual coffee making process.

As much as I live online, I recognise that there is a level of tangible craftsmanship to certain physical things that can inspire us in ways that an Instagram filter just can’t do.

(video via Daily Exhaust)

NextDraft is one of my favorite things on the Internet at the moment. It’s a daily newsletter with 10 interesting news stories, written by the brilliant Dave Pell. It also made me like email again, which I didn’t expect to be possible. But it makes sense now that I’ve read this great interview with Dave where he explains why email is still relevant:

Email has always been a great medium. It’s the content of most emails that’s problematic.

Email is still the killer app. It looks great on all your devices and the user experience is always exactly what you’ve come to expect. Look at the rise of Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket. People love plain, glorious, readable text. Email is also a technology that everyone understands, and it’s personal (if someone wants to respond to me, all they have to do is hit reply).

Tweets and status updates flow by and disappear into the black hole that is the Internet of five minutes ago. Interesting links and stories you find in an email newsletter are always right where you left them.

Also check out the NextDraft iPhone app. It’s fantastic.

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.

— Samsung’s statement in response to their patent case loss

Conflation is the practice of “treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings, as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts.” This is one of the things that’s happening with the Apple v Samsung patent case. Saying that Apple won the case against Samsung because OMG PATENTS ARE BROKEN is conflating two separate arguments.

No one in their right mind is arguing that the current patent system promotes innovation (as it was originally intended). If, for some reason, you are still trying to make this argument, just have a listen to the This American Life episode When Patents Attack! It’s sure to change your mind.

So, we agree that the patent system is broken. But this begs the question: How should Apple (and any other company) go about protecting their intellectual property? Is there another way except through the (yes, broken!) patent system?

Let’s say you have to be somewhere, and the only way to get there is on a crappy gravel road full of potholes. What do you do? Do you say “ah, screw it” and turn around, or do you rent a Land Rover and grit your teeth through the wobbles? “This road is horrible” and “I got to my destination” are not mutually exclusive truths in that scenario. Likewise, it’s completely legitimate to say “The patent system is broken”, and in the same breath, “We were able to stop Samsung from copying us”.

Please, let’s stop conflating these arguments. We have to work to reform the patent system, while we simultaneously work to stop blatant copying. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

I recently tweeted that I’m fairly convinced that the most valuable (and most difficult) metric to grow in online publishing is RSS subscribers. I’d like to explore that idea a bit further.

The RSS publishing experience

Over the past few days I’ve done quite a bit of investigation to see if my hunch about the value of RSS subscribers is correct — at least on my own site. Apart from just typing in the URL, there are currently three ways to subscribe to updates on my blog: Twitter, a weekly email, and RSS. I’d like to share some metrics on each of those methods.

Since Twitter doesn’t have analytics on t.co links yet, I had to look at the bitly links on my main Twitter account as a proxy. On average, the clickthrough rate on links I post on bitly is between 2% and 3%. That’s really low. It’s also worth noting that bitly did some analysis that showed that the mean half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours. That is an extremely short time before whatever you tweet pretty much disappears forever.

The weekly email performs a bit better. The open rate on that email hovers just under 20%, on average. That’s pretty decent, I think — certainly much better than posting links on Twitter.

On the RSS feed, the average reach (the total number of people who have viewed or clicked on the content in the feed) is 28%. This is by far the most engaged group of the three methods I provide to get updates on the site’s content.

From a publishing perspective, RSS subscribers are like magazine subscribers. When they invite you into their reader it means that they place some value on the content you create. They are also the people who share your content, and care enough to give constructive feedback when you suck. So if you have to look at metrics for your site or online publication, that’s where I think you should look for a reflection of its quality.

The RSS reading experience

I also want to make a few points about the RSS reading experience, and why I think it’s superior to other methods. There’s no way to keep up with all the links that come across my Twitter feed every day. But whenever I read something I like, I always go to the site’s home page to read some other posts. If I like the general theme I subscribe to the RSS feed and relax, because I don’t have to worry about accidentally missing a new post. RSS is a very “Slow Web” way of keeping up with content you don’t want to miss.

The other reason I’m such a fan of RSS is that it is a completely open platform (not Android “open” — real open). There are a multitude of ways to publish and consume feeds, and there is no lock-in whatsoever. This is why RSS has remained so strong. Dave Winer sums it up best, of course, in Protocols don’t mean much:

RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. That’s what I say about specs. Show me content I can get at through the protocol, and I’ll say something.

Towards on open social network

I do see one big problem with RSS: there is no way to build a community around the people who subscribe to your feed. Feedburner tells me how many people are subscribed, and there is some basic aggregated demographic information, but that’s it. I’d love for RSS to give users the option to reveal their names and/or email addresses when they subscribe to a feed. This might sound creepy, but if it’s an optional setting (with an ethical default as private), I think this could be really powerful.

There are many sites that I subscribe to that I won’t mind if they know who I am. Publishers could use this information to kick off forums or email discussions around certain topics, organise local meetups, or any number of community interaction initiatives. For all this talk about “open” social networks, the idea of loose connections around an open protocol seems pretty appealing to me.

Or am I crazy?