This Week's Main Course#
Long time no see, I'm back to writing.
To put it nicely, writing is called "writing", and as soon as you change the word, you immediately feel that what you're going to talk about is different, as if all the actions around writing have become sacred. In fact, compared to writing, I used to prefer drawing. The main reason was that I told myself: a picture is worth a thousand words, so why write a bunch of words when you can explain something with just one painting?
Oh my, how naive I was, completely unable to understand the power behind words. Then, I got into university by drawing and continued to learn how to draw on the computer. I discovered that a large image could take up several hundred megabytes of data space, while the entire Harry Potter series in pure text e-books was only a few megabytes, which further strengthened this belief of mine.
I don't think drawing has to be more sophisticated than writing. It's just that I feel more skilled at drawing and not good at speaking, so I avoided what I wasn't good at.
But then, as I continued to draw, I started to feel something was off. Because every time I shared a drawing, I was asked to write a "description of the work". It wasn't until I went abroad to study for my master's degree that I realized the seriousness of the problem. Besides images, it turned out that there were people who needed to see the thoughts I expressed on the canvas through words.
Before going abroad, when I was working at the TV station, I also started a public account to write some things in my spare time. But the reasons for writing at that time were mainly twofold: one was that everyone was starting a public account, and there was an element of going with the flow; the other was a deep-rooted resistance to traditional media work from the depths of my soul. So, the motivation for me to start writing didn't come from myself. After resigning and going abroad to study, there was naturally no reason to continue writing. The public account was abandoned, and now when I look back at the backups on my computer, my eyes hurt too much to bear.
After returning from studying abroad, the time I had at my disposal was still divided among various work tasks, leaving very little time. In this era of information explosion, these moments are like a hot pot splashed with water.
From my own experience, I found that compared to video content, written content consumes more of my energy and time. With videos, you can fast forward, change the playback speed, and decide whether to continue watching in less than a minute. But with text, it's different. If you read a word wrong, the meaning you understand can be completely different. So, how to handle these sources of textual information that give me a headache gradually became a top priority. Initially, my strategy was:
- Step 1: Limit input. The goal is to reduce the number of apps that consume content to no more than 3. For example, I unfollowed all public accounts on WeChat and transferred the professional and work-related public accounts to WeChat Reading. WeChat is just a messaging app, purely for socializing.
- Step 2: Consolidate other interesting content. The solution I found was RSS. I subscribed and aggregated all the content I was interested in. As for the authors who publish high-quality content on specific platforms, let them be. As a side note, I guess not many post-2000s have heard of RSS, which was a way of subscribing to and receiving information in the ancient era of the Internet. It can be said to be the predecessor of "remember to follow" for family members. It's quite interesting. When I first started using computers, I didn't know anything about these things. I must write an article later to talk about how to deal with information overload.
- Step 3: With this, the only apps left for consuming textual content were WeChat, RSS feeds, and Kindle. Another side note, I'm not very optimistic about Kindle's potential for development in China recently. Maybe it just doesn't fit well with the local market.
After going through this series of steps, I saw more high-quality written content, which naturally gave me more time for thinking and less energy to refresh those algorithmic recommendations that change every second. It's quite magical. Even though they are both subscriptions, public accounts didn't give me the same sense of solidity. Perhaps this is due to the different forms of the products. So, when I purely follow my own interests and come across interesting content, I naturally have many ideas that make me excited. Over time (about a year), these ideas take root and sprout in my mind, creating wonderful connections with each other. As far as I know, the inspiration and creativity that lead the world also gradually emerge through this process. Since that's the case, I might as well record them, just in case, right?
So now, as you can see, I obediently came back to writing.
Fragments of Creation#
Recently, I've been designing character expressions and storyboards for an animation. There are still about 40 sketches left to draw, and I hope to finish them within a week.
In terms of time, the progress of the preliminary work has been very slow due to the constant revisions of the script. (Oh, by the way, I wrote the script too.) Half of this year has passed in the blink of an eye, so I need to hurry up.
Another difficulty is the creative process. I feel that storyboarding is just as challenging as scriptwriting. It's hard to score above 60 if you don't tell a good story, but even a bad story can score 80 if told well. Drawing storyboards is like reverse engineering through pictures. Well, once something becomes a profession, there's no such thing as relaxation.
When writing the script, I found myself falling into a trap. To summarize briefly, once I attach great importance to something, I try to make every step perfect. This makes it difficult for me to let myself go mentally. As a result, the progress of the whole project becomes painfully slow.
The solution I found now is quite interesting. It's to break down the steps that need to be done, make a list, and do them one by one. If you carefully consider each item on the list when making it, then once you've completed them, you can completely ignore them. It's actually a kind of positive psychological inducement.
If you've had similar problems and have better solutions, please let me know.
Weekly Highlights#
- Books
- This week, I'm reading "Get Things Done". It's the originator of GTD and a powerful tool that helped me break free from the vortex of slow progress. I'm currently putting it into practice.
- Videos
- I recommend this video by Ali Abdaal, which indirectly influenced me to build this website.
How To Build A Website in 2022
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Quote:
When you're writing, do not even think about what the world is gonna be interested in, just do what interests you, and get to the place where you’re writing about super niche topics. I mean if there’s any lesson of the internet, it is that you are not the only person interested in whatever it is that you’re interested in. Like we know that and the niches topics, honestly are the ones that are going to get you the best benefits of meeting cool people and having interesting things happen.
—— David Perell
Oh, by the way, the other half of the title is "Goodbye Shanxi". It means that I'm flying back to Kunming tomorrow, ending my three-month-long annual leave. It's quite miserable...
I hope the roads to the airport won't be closed this time. See you next week.