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- The Wire: Writing Into Your ArcSeptember 25
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Important
While this article about The Wire deliberately contains as few actual spoilers about the show as possible, it does contains many links to pages with information that will tell you critical spoiler information about the stories and fates of the show’s characters. The article also contains language and links that are very much not safe for work. Please proceed with caution on all fronts.
In the time since I gallantly announced what makes a good blog, I’ve had time to think more about the qualities of work that endures.
Not thinking just of personal blogs here, or solely in terms of the ways that we can improve online publishing and social media —although clearly these are areas that could stand some improvement. I’m talking about the extent to which some of those qualities that I mentioned in that article relate to broader ideas around all creative work and the process behind how it gets made well and consistently by an auteur who’s only incidentally a merchant.
And it’s especially got me thinking about how any thing we choose to make today can contribute to, for lack of a better phrase, an arc.
So, naturally, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Wire.
First, understand that I’m an unapologetic superfan of and evangelist for The Wire, which is David Simon’s epic, 5-season HBO drama about the life and work of a lot of very flawed characters in contemporary Baltimore. This is neither the first nor last time that I’ll quote Simon’s excellent description of the show’s theme, which is taken from his DVD commentary of the very first scene of s01e01:
[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how … whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.
Much has been written about the dense, literary quality of the show (read Kottke for context and great links), so it may not surprise you to learn I’m one of the many people who consider The Wire to be the best series that’s ever appeared on television; my wife and I have watched the first (and, in my opinion, best) four seasons at least three times.
Yeah, that’s a plug for you to give The Wire a chance, but it’s not exactly my point.
Ok. So, why The Wire?
My point is that one big reason why The Wire was so good is its endlessly satisfying story arc, which is composed of many smaller, complementary arcs inside the big arc. That’s where a good story becomes a much more engrossing narrative that’s ultimately about more than itself.
Like any creative work that connects with the people who enjoy it, The Wire tells a story. And, to some extent, every story is about change.
Something happened. Or something is going to happen. Or something that everybody expected to happen hasn’t happened. But, it’s a change, and it’s having an impact on the lives of people we care about. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s basically the bones and teeth of every story from Adam & Eve through Harold & Kumar. Something changed, and now people have to deal.
How that dealing spins out over the life of a project, how the story is told, and what the story says about the world are the sorts of questions we’re only encouraged to ask about Big Important Things like very old books and Bergman films. Which, of course, is bullshit.
There’s no reason you can’t look at the lifetime of any good piece of story-telling — and, yes, why not, let’s say that could include blogs, Twitter accounts, and Flickr streams — and be able to see what the change is.
Yes: if it’s any good, I can look at one page or one photo or one 140-character post and enjoy it for its value as one independent thing in the world. But over time, all those potentially thousands of pieces can and do snap together, often without our even realizing it. The question is, what story is it that we’re telling? What is the arc?
And, that’s where I look to an example of middlebrow culture that falls somewhere between Bergman’s Death playing chess with Man on a beach and Scoble’s latest shaky video of a guy who likes golf speaking in press releases. But, The Wire is a piece of popular culture that beautifully illustrates how satisfying all those seemingly unrelated pieces of an arc can be — and how much richer they each become when the audience is engaged, challenged, and rewarded by the effort of giving the work 100% of their attention. Of course, it also helps if the creator is talented, tries really hard, and doesn’t treat the audience like a bunch of bored imbeciles. But, I digress.
Like any story, The Wire has characters, settings, and things that happen over time. Example? Let’s start with a single, one-minute scene from s01e05 — an episode called “The Pager,” that’s from right around the time when the series really started cooking. Which, not coincidentally, was also when the intersecting arcs started to reveal themselves.
The Scene
Meet Jimmy McNulty.
Jimmy’s a talented, politically deaf, pain-in-the-ass homicide detective and drunk who’s estranged from the mother of the two children he adores. One night, in the shitty little apartment he’s recently moved into, Jimmy’s too wasted on cheap scotch to properly assemble the Ikea furniture that he bought for his kids’ imminent visit. Jimmy is a mess, because he’s dealing with change. In his own inimitable way.
But, see, you don’t really even need to know all this to just enjoy the scene. (Please watch from 0:09-1:25)
- 43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative WorkSeptember 10
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[“what is this?”]
Here’s something I wrote last week for this site’s new “About” page:
43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
Call it a motto, or a charter, or — if you have to — a “mission statement.” But, for both of us, it’s a stake in the ground that keeps me focused on what I feel best suited to do for you with this site right now.
I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.
R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n
Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.
Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solvi
- Four YearsSeptember 8
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[“what is this?”]
Four years ago last Monday, I started 43 Folders with a TypePad account and no idea what I was doing.
The obsessions that brought me here struck me as fascinating and under-reported — if almost entirely unrelated, one to the other. And, talking about the stuff I was really bad at often made me feel less awful about it. Sometimes it even helped me to rehabilitate the triggering, sucky behavior. On a number of levels, this felt really good.Even though I never really knew where I was heading, I tried to remain candid that the primary reason the site existed at all was because it helped me — a strident preacher, clutching the pulpit in one hand and a book about Next Actions in the other. But, by even a week in, I realized I was writing to a growing audience and found myself daring to hope for a little dough to come my way as a result. Someday.
But, to this day, almost everything I’m proud to have written on 43 Folders started as a letter to myself. No shit.
I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about m
- How to Use 43 FoldersSeptember 5
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A very simple guide to leaving here quickly to go make something awesome.
Ask yourself…
Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?
This is not an insult or put-down. It’s a useful question. Please, think about it, then search the site to see if we have anything that might inspire you to make something awesome today.
What Sucks?
Looking for specific answers to what sucks for you today?
- Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive HeuristicsAugust 27
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People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading. On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with.
It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.
For each question, my preferred answer would be “No.” Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.
- At the highest level, is this book’s topic based on the typical “zeitgeist” product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom finishes reading the 1,000-word “features” found in in-flight magazines?
- Does the book have one of those irksome, “Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!” titles?
- Is the autho