I haven’t seen Django Unchained yet (though I want to, and I loved Inglorious Basterds), but I found this insight into Tarantino’s process very interesting. From a New York Times interview with the director:
I have a writer’s journey going on and a filmmaker’s journey going on, and obviously they’re symbiotic, but they also are separate. When I write my scripts it’s not really about the movie per se, it is about the page. It’s supposed to be literature. I write stuff that’s never going to make it in the movie and stuff that I know wouldn’t even be right for the movie, but I’ll put it in the screenplay. We’ll decide later do we shoot it, do we not shoot it, whatever, but it’s important for the written work.
I think about this at Percolate sometimes and always err on the side of over-documentation. I like the idea of building a narrative around something that extends far beyond what’s necessary, as the additional context creates an important background for decisions. In Tarantino’s case, I have to imagine part of the reason he gets such good performances out of the actors in his films is that they’re given such a rich text to work with.
FilmmakingMOVIESQuentin TarantinoWRITINGJanuary 4, 2013
I really enjoyed this FT review of a few books on the origin of words and misspellings. Especially interesting was this note on how dictionaries came to represent current language:
Why did the editors of Webster’s Third drop this lexicographic A-bomb (another addition to the dictionary)? Because views on dictionaries, indeed on language itself, had changed. Instead of laying down rules on how people should write and speak, dictionaries became records of how people did write and speak. And that meant all the people, not just those who spoke the educated language of New England. The new trends in lexicography went along with the growth of scientific method and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: lexicographers observed what was happening to the language, rather than handing down precepts.
dictionaryevolutionlanguagewordsWRITINGDecember 23, 2012
Felix Salmon gives his take on what really made Nate Silver such a phenomenom: First, he can explain complicated math simply and second, he gave people fodder for conversation. Felix explains:
The thing that Silver and the Obama campaign have in common, then, is that they used their databases to tell stories. Or, more to the point, their databases and models were used so that Americans could tell stories to each other. Silver’s site became a virtual watercooler, especially towards the end of the campaign — a place where people would gather to talk about what was possible and what was likely. Nate’s voice helped to guide the discussions, but the real reason that he got such astonishing traffic was not that people wanted to read what he was writing, so much as that people were using his model as a framework within which to hold their own idiosyncratic discussions.
Now I’m not sure that this is really unique. People consume, at least in part, to talk about what they read. This is especially true in the realm of politics as evidenced by the nonstop conversation over the last three months. But I still think Felix is very right and it’s interesting to think about the role of statistics here. Are statistics actually better conversational fodder than punditry because they still allow the reader to make observations and decisions? Not sure, but I like the thought.
electionNate SilverpoliticsStatisticsWRITINGNovember 8, 2012
So apparently Jonah Lehrer plagiarize himself (or something like that). I’ve read a bit about it (not enough to have an opinion), but of course Felix Salmon has and takes the opportunity to dive into a comment from Josh Levin at Slate that Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex blog (one of my favorites) is to blame. The argument, essentially, is that if you’re “an idea man” like Lehrer a blog places too much stress on content creation.
Felix, as is frequently the case, disagrees: “Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.” What’s more, he dives in on a few suggestions for what to do with the blog and in turn makes some really interesting comments about blogging generally. I especially like his first point:
Firstly, think of it as reading, rather than writing. Lehrer is a wide-ranging polymath: he is sent, and stumbles across, all manner of interesting things every day. Right now, I suspect, he files those things away somewhere and wonders whether one day he might be able to use them for another Big Idea piece. Make the blog the place where you file them away. Those posts can be much shorter than the things Lehrer’s writing right now: basically, just an excited “hey look at this”, with maybe a short description of why it’s interesting. It’s OK if the meat of what you’re blogging is elsewhere, rather than on your own blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.
I always thought of this blog as a thing I use to think out loud. It doesn’t overwhelm me because it helps me think through ideas (and in turn create new ones).
bloggingFelix SalmonideasJonah LehrerJosh LevinWRITINGJune 20, 2012
I really like this quote about writing (the context is apps that are popping up to help writers concentrate in small increments):
If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head. Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all. It’s not as comfy as writing a thousand words in half an hour, but it seems to work OK, so long as you think of it as part of a process of writing rather than writer’s block.
[Via The Awl]
ideasWRITINGJune 15, 2012
Apparently Bloomberg’s styleguide banned the word “but” from its stories:
Seth Mnookin’s piece on Bloomberg News, in this month’s Vanity Fair, quotes from the company’s stylebook, “The Bloomberg Way,” saying that Bloomberg banned the word “but” from its stories because it required readers “to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence.” It’s a little hard to tell from the context whether this rule is still in effect or not, but (there I go again) I can guarantee I will now be looking for “but”s or “however”s in every Bloomberg story I read.
bloombergStyleWRITINGMarch 4, 2012
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