The Doug

another word

nobody@vox.com(The Doug) — Mon, 05 May 2008 04:06:51 -0700

From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses. He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts. And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller. He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events. He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet. I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling.

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right? Working in the unknown. Creating something nobody has seen. It's going to be a struggle. Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.

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soak it up

nobody@vox.com(The Doug) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:11:23 -0800

Bob Dylan hadn't set out to write songs. He played folk songs written by others until new songs just came out of him.

Tolkein absorbed epic poems and tales and wrote his own version of them.

Soak up the real, pure water--movies and stories themselves. Never mind "the rules"--theories applied to existing art but not used to create that art.

Soak it up until your own story bursts out.

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Vox Hunt: Arts & Crafts - I'd Love To Learn This

nobody@vox.com(The Doug) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:34:47 -0700

Show us a type of art or craft that you'd like to learn.

Can't show it yet...stay tuned...

I'm really vague on this now, but I have a seed of an idea in my heart. I want to buy old radios, clocks, toasters...anything with interesting user interface items. I want to take all of those knobs, sliders, controls, and displays and turn them into functional devices with a completely new twist on the human-machine interaction.

For example, a clock that uses a slider to indicate the hour and a selector knob to indicate the minutes. If I can get the whole thing to work with gears, that would be interesting. Otherwise I will program a one-chip computer to control stepper motors.

I've been browsing antique shops trying to find interesting components that will drive my imagination.

The idea is forming...becoming clearer...

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