Digging the creative life
Story time is all the time
Pixar
I recently read The Pixar Touch by David A. Price. It was an accidental purchase. I thought I was getting a storytelling guide that would explain the mechanics behind Pixar’s storytelling success, à la story artist Emma Coates (ex-Pixar) and her 22 rules for storytelling.
What I got instead, was an unofficial account of the origin story of Pixar Inc., which although light on story telling tips, was in no way a disappointment. A few salient points that wowed me:
In the pre-Pixar years when Pixar was just a handful of 3D graphics engineers at Lucasfilm, the idea of making a fully 3D animated feature film was nothing short of delusional. The technology wasn't there, no-one was asking for 3D films, and the idea that this was commercially viable was laughable.
Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith just wanted to keep the engineers they had assembled together for long enough for the tech to improve, so that they could one day make a run at making a 3D film. In the meantime they set fire to huge amounts of investor cash, keeping the lights on by making CGI special effects, working on graphical adverts and building 3D drawing software.
When Steve Jobs bought Pixar, he couldn’t care less about film making, but wanted to augment their expertise to build computer hardware for his personal computer company.
It’s so improbable that Pixar succeeded in the way it did - the guys at the beginning held onto the naive dream that they could make films using 3D animation throughout many years of uncertainty - in doing so, they created a whole new genre of 3D animated film and built a hit machine in Pixar Inc. (shout out to Ratatouille which I think is underrated).
It blows my mind that people like Emma Coates get to tell stories for a living. What a life.
Arsenal
As I write this missive, my beloved Arsenal Football Club are top of the Premier League. After so many years in the wilderness, finishing well out of the Champions League top four places, it is a joy to see my team battle it out for the league title.
Football fandom has become a ludicrous endeavour these days. Watching football matches is just one narrow axis on which to partake in the infinitely complex jigsaw puzzle of being a football fan. It’s like being a junior equity analyst at a bulge bracket bank, where to form an accurate view on the progress of your club, you need to be across a whole number of domains.
Squad profile and player attributes. A working knowledge of sports physiotherapy and psychology. Elite coaching setups and squad management. Youth setups and academy prospects. A bird’s eye view of European transfer talent. In-game models and in-game strategy. A basic understanding of data science. Then the club’s wider commercial performance: brand partnerships and sponsorship deal value, content strategy and comms, commercial strategy, balance sheet analysis, first team contractual terms, wage bill structures. The average modern fan has more chops than a McKinsey consultant.
In the last 4 years, Arsenal have had to improve across every single one of these domains. That’s why watching them bloom on the pitch has been so satisfying. The on pitch performances are really just the tip of the iceberg, the visible point of a whole commercial machinery that has been drastically reconfigured and reoriented toward excellence. Rewatching The Last Dance when the Chicago Bulls win their first championship, Jerry Krause, the Bulls General Manager, doused in champagne in the dressing room manages to splutter out that it’s not just teams that win championships, but organisations. Apparently it wasn’t a well received comment, but it is self-evidently true.
I have a load of friends who are mad Arsenal fans, and Arsenal’s performances at the business end of the season have been ripe for speculation. There are simply too many things to talk about. Our main mode of communication has been the voice note - a wonderfully asynchronous way to have your say. The platform to indefinitely ramble is glorious, uniting stream of consciousness with cathartic splurge. Listening to your mate yammer away for five minutes in your headphones is also a fantastic way to do the shopping.
Here’s an example of Arsenal’s brand equity hitting the high notes - Anne Hathaway is one of us, who knew:
Analogue writing
I’m making progress on the second draft of my novel, which I started about three weeks ago. It’s a bit nerve wracking, because the further along the path I go, the more it feels like there is something at stake, and the more I’m locked into making the project a success (whatever that means).
Having said that, a new writing and editing process is giving me real momentum. I’ve printed and bound Draft One into an A5 book, and done a high level chapter by chapter analysis of where I need to switch things up. Now I’m going through, and copying the first draft into a delightful square lined book from Cambridge Imprint augmented with my edits. At the end of each chapter I copy out this handwritten scrawl into a fresh new Google Doc, and edit again.
It seems to work for me for a few reasons:
Moving from print to analogue and back again creates natural points to reflect and edit, but not in a way that feels overwhelming. It definitely aids creativity as well.
Having an original chunk of text to work with is a confidence booster, rather than having to magic things from pure imagination.
Having an analogue writing part of my process is an excuse to be entirely free from the continual distraction of the laptop.
One might think it’s a bit cumbersome to repeatedly transpose handwriting to a Google Doc, but actually this is the ideal sort of work to do in the weekday before my working day starts.
I think I might have written here before that writing a novel is a bit like learning to build a bridge while walking over it. You have to constantly be alive to what’s working and what isn’t, paying attention to the little voice inside that gauges whether you’re in your groove, and to the process of writing as much as what ends up on the page.
Pulling on a childhood thread
When I was younger I admit that I was a bit of a nerd. I was big on fantasy novels. The Redwall series by Brian Jaques. The Edge Chronicles series which has these unbelievable illustrations by Chris Ridell. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Final Fantasy IX and designing and drawing my own weird fantastical schemas.
Weirdly of late I’ve been digging my history and historical fiction in all mediums. I’ve been fully addicted to Shogun on Disney Plus, set in the Sengoku period and based on the novel by James Clavell, which I am yet to read. It is largely based on true events, and tells the story of an Englishman who washes up on the shores of Japan and gets embroiled in a power struggle between the successors of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, that ultimately leads to the founding of the Tokugawa shogunate.
I’m headed to Rome next week for a holiday and am desperate to stock up on holiday reading: anything on papal mysteries and the weirdnesses of the deep Vatican state. Thus far I’ve plumped for Conclave by Robert Harris and My Father’s house by Joseph O’Connor.
I am one hundred percent sure these two phenomena are linked: my childhood fantasy habit and my growing interest in history / historical fiction. Both genres place the reader as an outsider, or an explorer, stumbling upon some alien land where everything is new and of interest.
The best historical fictions are engaged in the same tightrope walk as the best fantasy novels: weaving world creation in a way that never breaks the illusion of the narrative. When I finish my novel, maybe the fun of this childhood thread is what I’ll pull on next.