Advice

Aggretsuko, Style, And Experiences

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

I’ve just run a marathon of Aggretsuko for a bunch of friends.  If you haven’t seen or heard of this Sanrio cute-dark office comedy, it’s worth checking out.  It’s the story of a twenty-something office worker, her lousy job, her friends, and her attempts to do more in her life – and the tales of the people around her.

The obvious part of why you want to check it out is that it’s well-acted, surprisingly deep in its look at pathological office environments and people being supportive of each other, and more.  The fact it’s all done cute makes dealing with the horrific parts of life more palatable – until you realize what you just saw is something that should have depressed you.

But what stood out for me was not just the content – it was the style.  Aggretsuko has lots of brilliant stylistic choices, tricks, callbacks, and more.  Such as:

  • Using Avatar The Last Airbender like mystic visions (yes, in the middle of a dark office comedy).
  • Callbacks to anime/martial arts – for death metal karoke (and how music is like comedy).
  • Use of mask metaphors in animation for people’s interpretations of others.
  • Very effective use of character body languages – with simple and cutsey characters, how you use body language is both limited and enhanced.
  • Even the dub makes certain choices of translation to give context – it’s not word-for-word, but instead smartly thinks of the audience and makes appropriate pop culture callbacks.

Many of these stylistic choices, many derived from other media, work well in service of a story.  Music can be combat.  We do wear masks – but we put them on others.  Aggretskuo is clearly made by people who understand other forms of media and learned from them.

All in the service of a cute animal dark office comedy.

The show thus becomes a lesson that my friend Serdar has often repeated; to be good at any form of media you need to learn from many forms of media.  Each influence, no matter how unexpected, or odd, or not related to the media you make is a chance to grow, get insights, and get lessons to apply.

Aggretsuko could have just done cute animals and dark comedy.  It may have been amusing or insightful, but it wouldn’t have had the impact it had.  It used lessons from other media to tell its story to make it more impactful and more powerful – everyone I watched it with was relating to it and taken by it and we had fruitful discussions of what we took from it.

Always be sure to try and experience new media – and be open to learning from one form of media to use in another.  A few examples for myself:

  • Dave Barry, the comedic/commentary writer has influenced my fiction writing.  His style dovetails well with my Pratchett/Aspirin influences, but also he has a gift for commenting on the human condition.
  • I use comics as a way to visualize fiction, how things may appear or be described.  It also helps me determine what I might be missing.
  • Witty writing in a Dragon Quest game had some stylistic choices with alliteration I tried in my nonfiction.

You’ve probably learned more from other media than you realize – what more can you learn when you’re aware of it?

– Steve

Finishing Flawed Fiction And Processing Piecemeal Prescriptions

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As I edit A Bridge To The Quiet Planet to get it ready for my awesome professional editor, I reflected on what I went through to write the book.  I see now this could have been faster if I hadn’t spent time editing as I went, chapter by chapter until the halfway point.  In short, I actually aimed for quality too early.

At first this violated my expectations.  Being into Agile, I figured that doing it piece by piece, making chapters available to prereaders, would result in better quality.  It’s something I’ve read about authors doing before, and I’d read several articles on how instructional writing (which I’ve done for awhile) can be released in modules.  Shouldn’t a story be something you can release chapter by chapter and get good feedback?

Not entirely.

Now I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to make fiction available to prereaders in parts, but I’ve come to the conclusion that’s of very limited value.  Here’s why.

Instructional and nonfiction works are often something we can break down – and indeed, should break down – into pieces that almost anyone could edit.  Yes, some may miss context or seem borderline useless on their own, but nonfiction is often very modular.  We process instructions, history, documentation, etc. in discreet chunks – we think step-by-step.

Nonfiction works are a lot like modular software or dishes where you can sample individual ingredients and get an idea of their combined taste.

But fictional works?  They’re different.

Fictional works are much more of a whole.  They’re intellectual and emotional and literary, requiring many modes of thought and feeling to appreciate them.  They often have mysteries and callbacks and references – indeed, deception is part of some some fiction writing.  Fiction is hard to evaluate apart from the whole of the work – to truly “get” it you need the whole experience a complete work.  Finally, as fiction involves imagination, you often discover your work as you write it.

Fictional works are like software that requires a lot of code to be done before it functions or a crude alpha before it can be evaluated.  They’re like a dish that you can’t appreciate until it’s done, or ones requiring careful tweaking to get “just right.”

I now realize that I could be delivering A Bridge To The Quiet Planet to you quicker if I’d decided, as opposed to editing chapter by chapter, I’d just run on and pushed myself to finish the thing and accepted it wasn’t perfect – maybe put out one or two chapters to get my groove.  Now that I have a complete work, all the edits are far more richer, far more revealing, far more coherent – and much of my best edits were made when it was done and I could see the whole thing.

When I write fiction in the future, I think I need to accept that my initial effort is basically going to be like a piece of alpha software.  Good planning and thought can make it a very good alpha, but my focus should be to get it done so I have enough to work from.  Many things in fiction writing only become apparent once you have the whole picture.

Again, I don’t think this means you can’t put unfinished fiction up for review.  I just think people need to accept the limits of such things – and ask what delivers the most value for them and the audience.

I also find this very satisfying to think of.  I can accept that fiction starts imperfect because of all its factors and charge ahead, admitting it won’t be perfect.  It’s just that when the imperfect version is done, the perfect version follows more easily.

(By the way that title took me forever to come up with so I hope you appreciate the attention to alliteration.)

– Steve

Work That Isn’t Work

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Last month started productively – but then got brutal. I got sick, I had to reprioritize, and was annoyed a side project had to get delayed (sorry, no spoilers). Something felt off about what was going on, so as I sat there battling allergies and a cold I caught because of allergies (really, that kind of week), I wanted to figure what was off.

Why did I feel bad, overpressured, and even when sick not want to do my fun projects like writing and generators?

I used the “Five Whys” technique. This is a good one to learn, but in case you don’t care, you ask “why” about your situation, then “why” to your answer, then “why to that answer,” and so on. Eventually you get an idea of what’s wrong and how to solve it. It’s like having a helpful child in your head to pester you until you explain something, and like talking to a child, it’s a way to realize how smart or how stupid you are.

I’m quite fond of it.

This took more than the supposed “Five” whys, but I realized something amazing and liberating – I had lumped all my “work” in a month into the same pot. Cooking and working out was the same priority, a fun piece of writing was just as important as my weekly budget. All the things I wanted to accomplish were sitting in one pile saying “do me,” so I began treating all things the same.

The problem with treating all things you have to do as the same is that you don’t prioritize (or in Agile terms, you forget their value). In fact, you sort of end up with a worst-common denominator effect where you treat everything as a collection of the worst – often conflicting – traits. Everything was a boring and overwhelming must-do task that was also not important.

At that point I realized my organization had killed my motivation. So how did I solve this? I broke them up by relevance and changed them on my own Big Visible Chart.  OK it’s a spreadsheet, but still.

First, are the must-do tasks for a month. These are important life tasks that I want to do and do as soon as possible and most are repeating.. My motivation is “I really better do these.” Now I know what has to get done, and I’m motivated to do them out of importance. Also there’s less than I thought so that helped. In my list of work I marked them “hot” colors – yellow for do at the start of the month, orange in the middle, red at the end.

Second are the important things to do for a month that are kind of regular maintenance; blog posts, cooking, working out, and maybe some lower-priority stuff that’s added for the month. These things can shift around, but are also the “daily grind.” Seeing this made me realize a lot of them can be done reguarly and over time – in fact many have to be (I’m not going to cook 80 meals at once or workout for 15 hours in one day). I saw that these could be paced, that they didn’t need to build up – and that I should never see this as a giant task to surmount, but one that’d be done over time.

Third but not finally is my creative work – books, the Sanctum, other projects. These are things that I do in addition to “life” stuff – and they’re the fun things. I didn’t overload this for the month of April, but may add more. In my chart they’re green.

Seeing it like this made me see what I’d done wrong:

  • Trying to spread out my most vial (“hot” colors) work as opposed to getting it out of the way or just doing it at the right time and not worrying about it. I had a gut feel that this was wrong, but this helped me put it into words.
  • Being unsure how to pace my more regular tasks like cooking and so forth (blue). Because there was so much, I kept trying to do all of it and feeling overwhelmed by this big pile of “stuff”. Really the pile would decrease over time.
  • Viewing my more fun work (green) as labor by conflating it with regular tasks. I had treated it like other work, trying to fit it into other things to do. Now I could see this wasn’t a grind – this was stuff to do when the other work is done, caught up, or has just bored me.

So what solutions did this give beyond solving my issue:

  • For the vital work that has to be done at the start of the month, my goal is to get it over with early, even if it’s a bit of a haul.
  • For vital work due other times in the month, I don’t worry about it until I have to.
  • For the regular grind, pace myself. Don’t let it overwhelm me, or try to get too far ahead of it.
  • For the fun stuff, I realized now that I’m aware of it, I can make space to do it when I want to relax, when I want to get it done, or when I’m caught up on the other work.

Ironically, I think I’ll get more done since I’ll be less stressed, less juggling work, and have better priorities.

So your takeaway, know your priorities and what work means to you. It’ll help you get the vital things done so you’re not distracted, pace yourself with the regular grind, and be aware when you can/will/want/should do your fun stuff.

– Steve