Let me preface this by saying that some of my best friends use moodboards.
I just don’t care for them. Moodboards, that is, not my friends.
Moodboards smack of college dorm room walls: wall-size visual identity crises. “Who am I? Why am I here? What shoes best describe my personality?” All reasonable questions when you’re 17 and have listed your major as “undeclared.” But in a professional context, they appear, to me anyway, as an act of desperation. They are often futile exercises in finding a point of view — by having absolutely no point of view whatsoever.
And I think that’s insulting to us as creative professionals.
Why? Because every creative person has a point of view. Every audience has a point of view. Every client has a point of view. And if you don’t know what all of those are before you start tacking random scraps of magazinery to a piece of foam core, you’ve got much bigger problems than finding an X-Acto knife with which to mutilate last month’s issue of I.D.
Also, by their very nature, moodboards are derivative. It may be true that there are no new ideas. But do we have to be so blatant about it? How can looking at someone else’s interpretation of the soul of a sports car possibly inspire an honest interpretation of the soul of, well, whatever it is we’re trying to find the soul of? I believe that images don’t asexually reproduce from other images. That words don’t grow like mold atop other, older words. I believe creative inspiration is more intangible than that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t all gleefully do our homework. Reading, watching films, listening to music, taking pictures. These are things we do because we need to. We crave creative stimulus. We hunger for art. And as we feed that hunger, we also feed our individual artistic sensibilities. In other words, we find our point of view. From there, it’s just a matter of putting pen to sketch pad or keyboard to cursor. We’re still exploring new territory, but we’re exploring it with a map, some trail mix, and one of those flannel-covered canteens of cool mountain spring water.
Moodboards are Paris in Las Vegas. They are a bad cover version of your favorite song. They are carob chip cookies. They are pale imitations of true inspiration.
I prefer the real thing.
Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I may have just discovered the perfect way to read fiction online.
Billed as “digital fiction from Penguin,” We Tell Stories presents interactive stories from six different authors (or, technically, seven, since Nicci French is “the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French”) over the course of six weeks. Since I rambled on about how difficult it was for me to read long-form fiction online in my last post, I thought I’d give We Tell Stories a try.
And I think Penguin has cracked it.
The first installment, The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, is meant as an homage to John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, and it’s a fast-paced little adventure story accompanied by Google map routes (complete with “secret” messages tagged with green arrows) that follow the protagonist through his exploits. You read The 21 Steps in speech bubbles that serve as “pages,” with anywhere from one word to just a few paragraphs per bubble. The experience of reading a story in these small, bite-sized pieces kept me engrossed, online, for a solid hour. That’s right: Despite my earlier protestations about the inherent distractions of the web, I read a short story online, without interruption, and I enjoyed the crap out of it.
The 21 Steps isn’t high literature. It’s completely plot-driven and scores about zero on the emotional inspiration scale, but as a genre piece, it’d be pretty compelling in print. Combine that with even this most rudimentary form of interaction — following someone’s movements across a map — and you get a little taste of what Wilson called “the incredible power of immersion.” And what do you know? The 21 Steps was designed and built by Six to Start: a company that creates “Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) [that]...use multiple media — the web, email, IM, mobile phones, radio, newspapers, TV and live events — to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people, who can follow and influence the game in real time.”
Six to Start was at SXSW with Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs, but I missed it, and it looks as though a podcast and/or video hasn’t been posted. I’ve yet to play an ARG, and I’m sure it’s exactly the type of thing I could become completely obsessed with for a few months, then burn out and never look back. (Probably exactly why I haven’t played one...). But I could read stories like The 21 Steps all day long. Merely manipulating the presentation of an otherwise fairly straightforward standalone narrative to take advantage of the medium — in this case, the web — may make digital fiction a viable alternative to (though, again, never a substitute for) the book.
I can’t wait for week two.
Alright. I’m about halfway through Print is Dead and I feel like I should say something, especially in light of my last post.
Jeff Gomez can be kind of ham-fisted and just as bitterly sarcastic as the publishing-industry Luddites he criticizes when he argues against ignoring the realities of our digital world in favor of clinging to some antiquated notion that books are precious artifacts that define us as a civilization. (“The Beverly Hills Diet is a book. Does that mean The Beverly Hills Diet is intrinsic to our humanity?”), but I’m beginning to see his point.
As a technophile, I should embrace any means by which ideas are disseminated electronically. And I do. I read online all the time. I even write about reading online. But I still have this block when it comes to reading narrative fiction — and long-form non-fiction — onscreen. It’s not because I feel the computer is impersonal. I freaking love my computer. It’s not because I can’t “curl up” with digital words. I do that all the time. (My MacBook is so nice and warm! So cozy!) What bothers me about reading long-form writing onscreen is that, well, I can’t. I can’t focus for long enough because I’ve subconsciously trained myself to behave differently with onscreen text than I do with text on paper.
Naturally, it’s the Internet’s fault. I spend my entire day flitting between blog post, Flickr photostream, online news article, iChat, and email. The things I read online have to be packaged up in nice, easily digestible maki rolls of information so I can read them in intervals (or read them later). Otherwise, I tune out. There’s too much competing for my attention on that bright, shiny screen. And Gomez’s assertion that the failure of eBooks is a failure to provide digitized books for existing devices (i.e., the iPhone) rings false to me because there’s plenty to distract me even on my iPhone. (Seriously. I’m dropping pins all over the place these days.)
I still love books. I love them in spite of what Gomez seems to think is a foolish attachment to the packaging surrounding ideas, when what we should be treasuring are the ideas themselves. And I’m by no means alone in my love for books. But maybe, just maybe, I’m hopelessly out of touch.
Because, according to Gomez, your average teenager does not love books. She doesn’t give a crap about books. She may still care about ideas, and she may read and read and read those little bits of written information on the web, but she doesn’t read books. I may have pooh-poohed Steve Jobs’s specific “people don’t read” statistic, but I’m not so naive that I believe — in the face of all the evidence — that reading isn’t in serious trouble.
I get indignant about the death of print because I do genuinely believe that the book is still the best, most convenient, least distracting way to disseminate long-form writing. To Gomez’s point, though, that doesn’t matter if the next generation can’t be bothered to read at all. It could be that in order to save reading, we’re going to have to deliver words in a format that the next generation has already adopted and not insist on clinging to the belief that the book is sacred.
I’m not sure this will work. It certainly hasn’t so far. eBooks keep failing just as literacy rates drop. Should we make everything in print available digitally? Absolutely. If it encourages someone who might not otherwise read to do so, by all means. But will someone really read a novel on his iPod or iPhone or laptop when music, video, blogs, email, and text messages can — and will — wrench his attention away at any given moment?
That leaves us with some sort of dedicated reading device, like the Kindle. Except, as I’ve said before, the Kindle doesn’t improve on the book. (Gomez would argue that it does, but I wonder how often he uses the World Clock on his iPod. Just because something has more features doesn’t mean you’re going to use them.) That leaves us with the book. And with self-publishing sites like Lulu.com, who stand to make a lot of cash riding The Long Tail.
I may be forced to eat my words about the book vs. the digital book. I’m prepared to do that. I’m just not prepared to give up my books.
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.