On the hunt for magic
Sometimes when I get sad or angry, and often after that emotion has passed, I realise the feeling was not so much about anything specific that happened or did not happen. I have just not gone on the hunt for magic for a while.
The mind is rather interesting, and almost all our beliefs about it are false. We treat energy, willpower and inspiration as finite resources that arise from being in specific situations, or like a daily reserve that replenishes and depletes. Some portion of the daily reserve idea is correct - we seem to need hydration, sleep, food, exercise to keep and replenish this reserve. But the radical idea here is simply that we’re interest-driven machines1. Your energy is not depleted by 2pm, your energy for writing that report is depleted by 2pm, because you’re bored of it! And because you equate energy with food, you reach for a snack (hello, onion murukku) when what you actually need is a concentrated vial of interestingness.
I often go looking for these interestingness snacks on Youtube, Marginal Revolution and Telborg, occasionally Twitter, and on the bookshelf. Of course, my own mind can do part of the job now, when it suddenly starts playing SRK, Kajol and Rani dancing in my head, while I’m editing a code file. (Anyone feel like the movies you’ve seen when you were younger are more vivid in your mind, and the more recent stuff you barely seem to remember?)
Another realisation that arises after writing 250,000+ words is you can manufacture magic, on demand, through the movement of your fingers across the keyboard. The doing is key here. The ideas do not arise before. I’m not transcribing. They seem to form as the fingers move, and often I don’t know what the next sentence will be. And you get addicted to this new form of generating interestingness - what will emerge from my mind today?
Another false belief I’d held forever was - you need to have something to write about. This is true to a certain extent. JK Rowling gives an incredible analogy here - the lake and the shed. The lake throws up ideas, and the shed is where you work them. And you can tell when the writer didn’t have enough ideas, or didn’t work on them enough. But if you look closely enough, and keep trying for long enough (yours truly has been attempting to write for 4+ yrs) you begin to believe Nora Ephron’s maxim Everything is Copy2. Whatever makes you feel something today can be the subject of some writing tomorrow, should you choose to put it there.
It’s 8pm, and I’m again on the hunt for magic, what should I pick that will light me up inside? I swivel on my writing chair and skim the bookshelf. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom catches the eye, but not today. Oh, Neal Gabler’s bio of Walt Disney3. I started this many months ago and return to it now and again.
And yet even though Walt could neither animate, nor write, nor direct, he was the undisputed power at the studio, not only in the sense that he was the boss but also in the more important sense that his sensibility governed everything the studio produced. At first blush he was an unlikely dictator. He was young, though many of his employees now were even younger. He was unprepossessing. “He looked like just a nice, young American man, good looking, but in a healthy rather than a handsome way,” said one animator, while another described him as exceptionally thin - he was five feet ten inches tall and weighed 150 pounds - and “rodent-faced”. He didn’t naturally exude power or charisma and didn’t seem to mind.
…Still, the studio bent to his will and his alone… it wasn’t Walt’s analysis that imprinted itself on the cartoons as much as his uncanny ability to inhabit the character and enter the situation. Walt thought like Mickey or Donald or Pluto. “If Walt said to me, ‘Mickey wouldn’t think this way,’” said storyman Leo Salkin, “who knows how Mickey would think? But in Walt’s mind, this is what Mickey would think or feel, and it was valid.”
Alexey Guzey wrote You are a morale-driven machine, but I’ve realised interest is upstream of morale.
Nora inherited this from her mother, who was also a writer. It also served as an excellent antidote to self-pity when Nora and her sisters were growing up - whatever’s hurt you today will be writing-worthy tomorrow, and Nora Ephron took this quite literally and wrote a novel based on her failed 2nd marriage.
h/t Brian Chesky