Pablo Picasso: “I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”

The greatest challenge of anyone trying to tell a story visually is to try and figure how to tell the story. For a comic artist, it’s a question of what do I put in the frame, what is its relationship to other things around it, and how close am I going to be to my subject? For the writer, it’s a question of what do I describe, and which and how many words should I use to do so. For film makers and animators, the questions include motion, sound, and the manipulation of time.

So how do you make your choices? There are an infinite amount of possibilities at any moment of your story, and the human brain is physically incapable of analyzing all of those possibilities and selecting a candidate for the best idea. But the human brain is also very good at generalizing and finding simplified heuristic models to understand how any system works. For artists, this is called a theory.

The thing is, every artist operates on their own theory, whether they know it or not, and depending on their theory, their art will be shallow and unoriginal or deeply profound and unique.  Michael Bay’s theory of film making can be summed up in one question: “Is It Awesome?” It’s a theory based entirely on spectacle and resonance with pop-culture and is a common guide of the novice. The other two novice theories are the “make it different” and “do it like them” theories. Either, you are trying to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or you are copying something cool you saw someone else do. None of these theories are bad theories, in fact I think the best storytellers follow them to a certain extent, but I also think the very best storytellers have a much more important underlying theory guiding what they do.

And here’s what it is: Empathy.

The best artists know, that at its root, storytelling is about understanding the experiences of someone else.

And the tool that the greats use to create empathy is point-of-view.

In 2002, I had the opportunity of participating in Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Bootcamp. Previous to the Bootcamp, I was assigned to read Characters & Viewpoint by Mr. Card which discusses the importance of point-of-view and particularly the superiority of the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator in writing. Like most people I understood point-of-view at a surface level-1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person ect. It just means who is telling the story, right?  But it wasn’t until I was in the workshop that I really understood the importance of point-of-view to telling a story.

He gave us some writing samples to read. They were very descriptive passages of landscapes and sunsets and details of clothing, but they were boring as hell. Why? Because the descriptions were too objective. It was like a robot describing a photograph-there was no humanity to the words. Then we read some other passages that were vibrant, gritty and funny. The difference was point-of-view. The writing communicated an attitude, not just a description. That’s why the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator is such a powerful tool, because it communicates attitude so well. (For a masterful example of 3PLON, look no further than George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes.

The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time.

When the Thief tells his version of the story, it’s all bravado and adventure. When the victim tells the story, it’s nightmarish thuggery, and when the guy hiding in the bush tells the story, we see a pathetic struggle for survival. (By the way, the third act of Rashomon includes the truest fight scene in the history of cinema.)

So, point-of-view is not only an important tool, it’s the most important thing to consider when telling a story, and can better help you decide what artistic decisions to make than any other rubric. If you want to do something awesome, unique or traditional go right ahead, but it’ll be a thousand times more powerful if you can also make it support a specific point-of-view.

Lastly, I want to point you to this clip by Improv Everywhere. If you have the means or the desire, contrast it with the subway scene in Borat. We are seeing the same thing through two very different attitudes. Neither one is “true”, they are simply choices. Ultimately you have the power to choose a point-of-view that will show others how you see the world.

Perhaps that’s the most important choice of all.

My Dad gets up at 6 AM every morning, and I know for a fact that my Dad hates getting up early in the morning. But he does it almost every day, like clockwork. So why does he do it? More importantly: how does he do it?

Well, I’m gonna have to ask him that sometime. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what works for me. I am terrible getting up early in the morning, but I’m very good at doing other things, like working on my comic every day. So how do I do it?

Much of it can be summed up in an interview with John Norcross on Science Friday on keeping resolutions. I’ll sum up the important points and add some of my own thoughts.

1. Take the One Seat. I stole this idea from Buddhism. The idea is that salvation is as simple as doing one thing — sitting down and meditating. Creating is similar. Find your one thing to do every day. Stop trying to write a screenplay, plan a performance piece and start an NGO at the same time. Choose ONE thing.

You have way to many things to think about. So take the thinking and planning out of the equation, and just find something you can just do. If you’re not interested in doing something artsy, just find something to do every day religiously. For Twyla Tharp, her ritual is going to the gym every day. Notice that her ritual isn’t directly related to her profession – choreography – but it’s the thing that commits her to her labors every day.

A daily ritual becomes an anchor in your life. You can depend on it. It clarifies and focuses your attention, and it gives your day-to-day life meaning.

2. Start Small. Start with a length of time that you know you can commit to. I would recommend 20 to 30 minutes max. I would even set limits. You don’t need to make monumental efforts. You’ll be amazed how much you can accomplish after a year of doing something every day for a couple of minutes.

If you feel very confident about doing more, do more, but don’t do it out of guilt or ego. Do only as much as you are positive you can do every day.

3. Be Persistent. It’s more important to be persistent than consistent. Most people that keep resolutions, have resets along the way. Don’t worry about yesterday. Just do your thing today.

4. Be Willing to Suck. No end goals here. Your job is to just do your thing whether its good or not. Recently, my buddy Kohl shared this nugget of wisdom with me :

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

(original link)

Ira Glass and Jerzy Drozd seem to think the same thing. Just focus on doing the one thing. You’ll get better over time.

5. Be Willing to Be a Little Miserable. Sometimes doing your one thing will be miserable. But here’s the thing: Misery comes and goes, but your work will still be there after the misery is gone. This is why you keep it short and simple. Even if its miserable, at least its only 20 to 30 minutes.

6. Have Fun. This is kind of a two-parter. First, whatever thing you choose to do, make sure it’s something that has an inherent reward in it. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do, but that it is fun, peaceful, enlightening, engaging or somehow rewarding for you. There should be some nugget in it that keeps you coming back.

It’s very important that the reward is inherent. While there may be external incentives to doing your thing, you must find something that is rewarding just from doing it.

I think this has a lot to do with why my Dad gets up early in the morning every day, even though he hates it. He loves his job. He’s a doctor and he loves his work far more than I will ever love doing art. And so getting up early in the morning is a small sacrifice.

The second part of this is to have fun when you’re not doing your thing. Once you’ve done it, check it off your one-item check list and enjoy life a bit – without feeling guilty about it. Go to the beach, play with your kid, or read a book. Stuart Brown has some really good things to say about this: Play

So what’s the secret of motivation? It’s not a whoosh of  feeling, or an inherent get r’ done attitude. Motivation is habit. It’s creating those practices that make it as easy and rewarding as possible for you to do your thing every day.

If  you still find large psychological barriers to doing your thing, I highly recommend Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit. It’s one of the few books on procrastination that gets past the drill sergeant answers to the deeper issues that can sometimes paralyze the otherwise well intentioned soul.

I was reading some interesting thoughts on motivation the other day on Regarding Design. These two snippets were particularly interesting:

For any who call themselves “creatives,” a need for inspiration would signal a very bad thing…

What the real issue is “motivation.” The very word by definition means “to move.”

I think this is a really important distinction. Particularly for folks out there who want desperately to get off their butts and do something meaningful, but who lack the “motivation”.

There’s this concept of the “tortured artist” that we love to romanticize in popular culture– the self destructive, other-worldly artist that’s so full of genius they can’t lick a postage stamp, but in fits of god-inspired passion, create beauty beyond the comprehension of mortals.

While Vincent VanGogh and Daniel Johnston make great stories, they are not great role models. They are, for the most part, tragic figures that were able to create something beautiful despite immense challenges.

Was cutting off your ear really necessary?

But still, we glamorize this vision of the artist and spend our days watching Dr. Phil and playing Team Fortress while we wait upon the finger of God to touch us with “inspiration”.

The truth is, we have it backwards. Work always precedes inspiration (we can go into a  definition of “work” later).

And I’m not the only one saying this. Veteran creators like Steven Pressfield , Stephen King , and Twyla Tharp, all write about the “muses” in mythical, almost religious tones, but they all affirm that the inspiration comes only after you’ve laid your sacrifice on the altar. And what is your sacrifice? It’s doing your work, whatever it is, every day. Cory Doctorow does it, So does Michael Chabon:

In 2000, Chabon told The New York Times that he kept a strict schedule, writing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday.^[13] He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, “There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them….[T]he best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.”^[9]

So, now the question is how do they do it. That’s where motivation comes in, but that’s the topic for another post…

Action directors take note:
Jackie Chan knows how to make an awesome fight scene better than anyone else in the world.

Better than Michael Bay, better than the Wachowski Brothers, and even better than Christopher Nolan. Yes, even with everything brilliant that Mr. Nolan did with Batman, his ability to direct a fight scene pales in comparison to Jackie Chan.

I recently had an excuse to revisit Police Force and Drunken Master II. And let me tell you, if the only Jackie Chan movies you’ve ever seen had Chris Tucker or Jennifer Love Hewitt in them, you have no idea how amazing Jackie Chan can be.

It may have something to with Hollywood insurance and that he’s no young buck anymore, but all of Jackie Chan’s masterpieces were made long before he became the Asian Nick Nolte.

Take a look at the fight scenes in films like Police Force, The Legend of Drunken Master, and Super Cop. They’re amazing. And there’s still nothing out there that compares.

There are a couple of tricks that JC has figured out that make his fight scenes so awesome:

1. The Nice Guy. Jackie Chan’s characters are never stoic bad-ass kung-fu masters. They are basically Asian Jimmy Stewarts — nice guys that end up in a mess and try their darnedest to get out of it. This is immensely important, but action directors always miss this. A bad-ass kung-fu master eats ninjas for breakfast. He might as well just be playing croquet. A nice guy hates to fight, isn’t that great at it, and gets beat up a lot. He has to struggle to win. And watching a struggle is much more interesting than watching a croquet game.

This is exactly why Jackie Chan likes to make fun of himself. Bad-asses never look stupid, because then they stop being bad-ass. Jackie Chan makes fun of himself so we know he’s vulnerable, and fallible just like us. That way, when he does win a fight, it’s way more amazing.

3. No Cables Needed. The Forbidden Kingdom may be the exception, but for the most part JC eschews the Hong Kong action practice of choreographing scenes with cables. It’s another one those things that helps to raise the stakes. Cables soften gravity. They make a fight scene feel like it’s happening on a trampoline. Take away the cables, and it feels like a world where gravity can introduce your face to a concrete floor. For the same reason JC likes to the play the nice guy he likes to leave out the cables. When your hero is vulnerable you care a lot more about him when he’s in danger.4. Clever tricks. This is one of the biggest innovations that JC has brought to action directing. A fight scene doesn’t just involve fists and kicks, but every movable and immovable object within the vicinity of the fight. Not only has revitalized the fight scene with this, but also covertly resurrected the brilliance of Gene Kelly. Check out Signing in the Rain and imagine all of the dance scenes were fight scenes. It’s basically just a Jackie Chan film (albeit at half speed).

5. The Cornered Animal aka Beet Face. This is the book-end to The Nice Guy. While JC always likes to play the nice guy, he’s always a nice guy that by the climax of the film is pushed to the boiling point. JC knows that if you start with an awesome fight scene you have to finish with an awesomer fight scene. The first fight scene will be the nice guy scrambling for survival, and final fight scene will be the nice guy transformed into cornered animal who destroys everything in his path. You can always tell when a JC movie reaches this point because his face turns bright red ( or purple in the case of Drunken Master 2) and he gets really, really pissed.

The final fight scene in Drunken Master 2 is a great example of all of thee above, and probably the greatest fight scene of all time. Please partake:

Drunken Master 2