3.14…..

life of pi

Maybe you’ve already seen the movie?

I understand it did rather well. And I hear that it is visually spectacular. Having been directed by Ang Lee, I don’t doubt that. Nor do I doubt that it is as faithful as possible to the novel.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I am going to put it at the top of my list, though. And I’m going to use this Friday Find post to tell you that the book is is a FIND.

If you haven’t read life of pi, get thee to a library. Or a bookstore.

This novel is a work of art, destined to be a classic.

A sea story, an adventure yarn, a word painting, a philosophical fascination.

Author Yann Martel has pulled off a miracle.

Compelling plot, beautiful prose, ideas to linger and provoke thought.

This is one of those books that is both dangerous and inspirational to those of us trying to be writers. The inspiration comes from the illustration of what’s possible, the dangling carrot of poetry and plot. The danger comes from the very well-founded fear that I am not capable of transcending my limitations and achieving something close to this.

The hope lies in the story itself.

Pi transcended his limitations.

Maybe we can, too.

Mind Mapping

A cartographer’s nightmare.

Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique used by artists, advertisers, programmers and members of countless other disciplines.

It’s a way to visualize connections among and between things. It’s a way to chart the flow of a process, of a story, of an idea.

I like mind mapping and project management software. For a while now, I have been partial to Personal Brain software—now, I guess, called just The Brain. It’s a great way to tie together a lot of disparate items, allowing you to link to web pages, photographs and other files, notes, etc.

It’s fairly resource intensive, eating up your RAM and disk space, though, to say nothing of the overhead in maintaining it if you really want to use it well.

Still, I like it—if only for the pleasure of saying, “hold on a minute while I open up my brain.”

But I found a simpler, web-based mind mapping tool at bubbl.us.

It’s very easy to use with clear and simple directions.

So, get on over there and start planning your next novel.

When your mind is a blank

You’ve got “Room to Write”

The only thing worse than a blank page (or better?) is a blank mind.

For a writer, however, it can feel like the end of the world. Certainly, of that career that you are still struggling to get off the ground.

With the internet, of course, come lots of websites full of writing prompts. Random. Daily. Whatever you need. And they are all useful—and used.

If you’d like something a little more portable—and, arguably, more substantive, I invite you to take a look at Bonni Goldberg’s Room to Write.

With 200 “daily invitations to a writer’s life,” you ought to be able to find something to jump-start those moments of blankness.

These “invitations” are different from the ordinary prompt in that they are accompanied by mini-essays on writing along with the assignment. Each entry takes up a single page (of this smallish-sized book). There’s the little essay: Goldberg’s own meditation on the day’s prompt. There’s the assignment. And, there’s an applicable quote or two from other writers.

Some of the assignments seem too complex and weighty for me when I’m just looking for a way to get my hand moving across the page. Some don’t interest me. Others are spot-on perfect. And, of course, each entry’s classification changes with time.

You can work your way through in order. Or you can open the book randomly and get to work.

Plenty of free prompts available elsewhere, of course. But this is a useful find.

The King is dead

Long live the King!

Okay. That is a much-exaggerated headline. (I’ve been watching Edward the Seventh on Netflix so you’ll have to forgive the royalist hyperbole. And, may I say—just as an aside—that I had no idea Queen Victoria was such a shrew!)

Anyway, today’s post is about a Friday Find that pleases me immensely.

Once upon a time, before Blackberrys and iPhones, I had a Palm Pilot. (I still have it. I just don’t use it much. Its battery life is practically non-existent at this point, and I haven’t gotten around to finding a replacement.)

I loved the Palm.

Best calendar, address book and task list I’ve yet seen. Entry by handwriting instead of tiny, thumb-driven keyboard.

A lovely instrument. (I must see about that battery.)

Of particular use to me was the task list. It was so easy to categorize items, to schedule them as single or recurring tasks, to make them provide audible and insistent reminders,and, most importantly, to reschedule without having to enter them anew.

Nothing since the Palm has measured up. (We will not even discuss the Blackberry’s feeble ToDo list.)

Until now.

There’s a free, web-based app that comes very close.

FollowUpThen

It’s totally email based. I can send an email to remind me to write a blog post to tomorrow@followupthen, and I will get a reminder emailed to me tomorrow. I can specify a particular date and/or time. I can choose a specific interval—say, 3 hours or 4 days or 2 weeks. I can create a recurring reminder—every Tuesday, every week, every month. I can create a task which will nag me every 24 hours until I mark it complete.

In addition, I can forward emails I’ve received and get them back at a more appropriate time for follow up. I can blind copy emails I send and be reminded to check with others.

It is the closest I’ve yet found to the—for me—nearly perfect task list functionality of my late, lamented Palm.

The only things it’s missing are the ability to organize upcoming tasks by category, the audible alerts, and an easy way to print the whole list.

The only risks to it seem to be that of any web-based app. The creators could decide to start charging for the base service instead of the premium, or they could suddenly stop supporting it. With software that you purchase or are otherwise allowed to own, you can use it forever—or until your computer dies and you are forced to upgrade to an incompatible operating system. (Anyone knowing where I can get a legal copy of Windows XP against future need will get cake, by the way.)

Meanwhile, registration is easy. Just head over to FollowUpThen and sign up. Then you can email yourself a little reminder to thank me later.

The Secret Door

Artist Dates made easy.

One of the main tools of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the Artist Date, where you take your inner artist on a weekly excursion to spark your imagination. It is, for me, and I think for other people, the most easily overlooked and often skipped of all the components of the 12-week journey back to creativity.

Now, however, for the armchair traveler in all of us, there is The Secret Door.

Using Google Maps street view, a company in the U.K. (selling windows and doors, of course) has built a website that takes you on a random visual excursion all over the world. You won’t always know where you are, but the images are extraordinary.

So, go ahead.

Step through the Secret Door.

The Secret Door is presented by Safestyle UK

Life’s Little Mysteries

Stuff you didn’t even know you should wonder about.

(It pains me to end that sub-head with a preposition. I know it should be “Stuff about which you didn’t even know you should wonder,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to be pedantically correct about a sub-head beginning with the word “Stuff.” Kindly overlook it, please.)

Now, where were we?

Oh, yes. Stuff you didn’t know you should wonder about.

I found this website.

Lifeslittlemysteries.com

It’s full of stuff that fascinates me. Stuff about which I never even thought to wonder.

Why is the glass in airport control towers slanted?

Why have doctors switched from white scrubs to green?

What makes some meat white meat and some meat dark meat?

What makes an Etch-a-Sketch work? (Actually, I think I had figured this out myself at one point—minus the technical details.)

The site is also full of stuff about which I have wondered from time to time.

Why cats hate car rides, for example.

No one who was on that car trip when I helped move my sister from Connecticut to Michigan could help wondering about that. That journey is one of those stories best saved for when I write my screenplay about a road trip—except a) no one would believe it and b) nobody could train a cat to behave that way on camera.

We will draw a veil over that trip except to say that I have been held prisoner by cats in a car, in a hotel room, and in an apartment, and someday, there will be a reckoning.

Anyway, all that is kind of beside the point of this post which is just to introduce you to yet another time-wasting website and/or help to prepare you for your next audition for Jeopardy!

It’s up to you what you do with that info. Proceed with caution.

The answer

To one of the six horrible questions writers get asked.

One of the six horrible questions writers get asked is “Where do you get your ideas?”

My answer, lately, tends to be “I don’t have any ideas,” but I suspect the proper answer for most of us is “god only knows.”

But here’s a thing that could generate ideas. I haven’t used it. I don’t know if the ideas are good ones. But I figure anything that generates some ideas could lead to more ideas, so it’s probably worth a look.

In fact, it’s not just one idea generator, it’s a couple dozen. (Or several. I didn’t actually count.)

You should check it out.

Seventh Sanctum^TM

I suppose there may be some of you out there all worried that using an idea generator leads to a lack of originality.

Maybe.

But remember when we were discussing the One Plot?

You can’t have an original idea.

But you can execute an idea with originality.

What is Pygmalion and My Fair Lady but a recycling of an idea? That one’s easy, right? But here’s one you may not have considered. Isn’t The Karate Kid a Pygmalion story? Dirty Dancing? You probably didn’t think “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait” had anything in common with “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” but it does. Is drilling “the rain in Spain” really so far afield from “wax on, wax off?”

The movie Dave is The Prisoner of Zenda.

There are no new ideas. We all have to do the best we can with the old ones.

So, if you can find a tool that suggests some possibilities to you, I say use it. Idea generators are launching pads. Diving boards. The struck match just before it lights the fuse.

Dynamite not included.

Not so dumb

I can’t speak for “little.”

I’m talking about the blog, Dumb Little Man.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know who is behind this blog. There’s no “About” page that I can find. There’s no entry in Wikipedia.

All I know is the content.

(UPDATE: Thanks to my good friend, Michelle, for finding the “About” page. Here it is!)

The subheading of the blog is “Tips for Life.”

That’s what’s in it.

Tips.

Tips for motivation, for increasing creativity, for organizing your life, simplifying it, making it better.

Almost all of them are good advice. Clear, cogent, well-written. The site is well-designed. Easy to read. Easy to search.

The headlines to each post are masterful. “Ten ways to do this.” “Thirty secrets to that.” I’m a sucker for lists, so I love that. I figure, in a list of ten, there will almost certainly be at least one useful thing.

I like this blog so much, it’s one of the ones I have emailed to me on a daily basis. And that I actually read. There are a few blogs I get because they seemed promising, but now I skim the subject line and delete more often than not. But I read Dumb Little Man. I save a few of them. Implementation…that’s another story, but we can always hope.

I could go on citing examples, but I’d really rather you went on over to Dumb Little Man and spent your reading time there.

It will do you more good.

Say it with flowers

The easy way

Today’s find isn’t one of the incredibly useful publications I sometimes tout. Nor is it a fabulous musicion or a crackerjack piece of software.

It’s just a bit of fun.

Courtesy of a German web services company. I think they are German, anyway. Their main web page pops up in German. And their contact address includes the word Zugerstrasse. I remember just enough of my high school German to be reliably certain that “strasse” means “street.”

On the other hand, the company might not be in Germany so much as any German-speaking country.

And none of that matters, because the web page I’m going to show you does not care what language you speak.

That’s because, in one sense, it speaks the language of flowers.

What it actually does is let you draw or write with flowers. You can change the color, you can change the size, you can change the number of petals, but if you hold your mouse button and drag the mouse across the screen, you’ll get something like this:

(It looks better on a big screen.)

Anyway, try it. You’ll like it.

Just click here.

A whack

On the side of the head.

That’s what today’s Friday Find is all about.

In fact, that’s the name of it. A Whack on the Side of the Head is a book by Roger von Oech. It’s probably his most well-known book, and the reason I’m bringing it to your attention today is its subtitle:

“How You Can Be More Creative”

I don’t know about you—well, actually, I do know about you. There isn’t a person alive who wouldn’t like to be more creative. In my particular circle, it’s a mortal lock.

Actors, writers, directors, painters, programmers, parents. Everybody can benefit from an increase in creativity.

This book can help.

It’s an easy read. Large type, plenty of illustrations, lots of white space.

And, the content is good.

It’s a whack on the side of the head. New ways to think about things. Exercises to shake things up, questions to ask.

Advice, like give yourself permission to be foolish or reverse your perspective.

Stuff many of us have heard before, since and in other places, but it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of it in different ways and in different words.

It’s a book I keep on my shelves and ought to re-read more often!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Friday Finds