Latest Posts (16 found)
pabloecortez 2 days ago

Black Friday for You and Me

Yesterday it was Thanksgiving and I had the privilege of spending the holiday with my family. We have a tradition of doing a toast going around the table and sharing at least one thing for which we are grateful. I want to share with you a story that started last year, in January of 2024, when a family friend named Germán reached out to me for help with a website for his business. Germán is in his 50s, he went to school for mechanical engineering in Mexico and about twenty years ago he moved to the United States. Today he owns a restaurant in Las Vegas with his wife and also runs a logistics company for distributing produce. We met the last week of January, he told me that he was looking to build a website for his restaurant and eventually build up his infrastructure so most of his business could be automated. His current workflow required his two sons to run the business along with him. They managed everything manually on expensive proprietary software. There were lots of things that could be optimized, so I agreed to jump on board and we have been collaborating ever since. What I assumed would be a developer type of position instead became more of a peer-mentorship relationship. Germán is curious, intelligent, and hard working. It didn't take long for me to notice that he didn't just want to have software or services running "in the background" while he occupied himself with other tasks. He wanted to have a thorough understanding of all the software he adopted. "I want to learn but I simply don't have the patience," he told me during one of our first meetings. At first I admit I thought this was a bit of a red flag (sorry Germán haha) but it all began to make sense when he showed me his books. He had paid thousands of dollars for a Wordpress website that only listed his services and contact information. The company he had hired offered an expensive SEO package for a monthly fee. My time in open source and the indieweb had blinded me to how abusive the "web development" industry had become. I'm referring to those local agencies that take advantage of unsuspecting clients and charge them for every little thing. I began making Germán's website and we went back and forth on assets, copy, menus, we began putting together a project and everything went smoothly. He was happy that he got to see how I built things. During this time I would journal through my work on his project and e-mail my notes to him. He loved it. Next came a new proposition. While the static site was nice to have an online presence, what he was after was getting into e-commerce. His wife, Sarah, makes artisanal beauty products and custom clothes. Her friends would message her on Facebook to ask what new stuff she was working on and she would send pictures to them from her phone. She would have benefitted from having a website, but after the bad experience they had had with the agency, they weren't too enthused about the prospect of hiring them for another project. I met with both of them again for this new project and we talked for hours, more like coworkers this time around. We eventually came to the conclusion that it would be more rewarding for them to really learn how to put their own shop together. I acted more as a coach or mentor than a developer. We'd sit together and activate accounts, fill out pages, choose themes. I was providing a safe space for them to be curious about technology, make mistakes, learn from them, and immediately get feedback on technical details so they could stay on a safe path. I'm so grateful for that opportunity afforded to me by Germán and his family. I've thought about how that approach would look if applied to the indieweb. It's always so exciting for me to see what the friends I've made here are working on. I know the open web becomes stronger when more independent projects are released, as we have more options to free ourselves from the corporate web that has stifled so much of the creativity and passion that I love and miss from the internet. I want to keep doing this. If you are building something on your own, have been out of the programming world for a while but want to start again, or maybe you are almost done and need a little boost in confidence (or accountability!) to reach the finish line and ship, I'm here to help. Check out my coaching page to find out more. I'm excited about the prospect of a community of builders who care about self-reliance and releasing software that puts people first. Perhaps this Black Friday you could choose to invest in yourself :-)

web-development Web Development business Business open-source Open Source
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pabloecortez 2 weeks ago

You can read the web seasonally

What if you read things around the web the way you watch movies or listen to music? A couple of days ago I made a post on Mastodon introducing lettrss.com, a project I made that takes a book in the public domain and sends one chapter a day to your RSS reader. Xinit replied with a great point about RSS feed management: This is fascinating, but I know how it would go based on the thousands of unread RSS feeds I've had, and the thousands of unheard podcasts I subscribed to. I'd end up with an RSS of unread chapters, representing a whole book in short order. Regardless of my inability to deal, it remains a great idea, and I will absolutely recommend while hiding my shame of a non-zero inbox. When I first started using RSS, I thought I'd found this great tool for keeping tabs on news, current events, and stuff I should and do care about. After adding newspapers, blogs, magazines, publications, YouTube channels and release notes from software I use, I felt a false sense of accomplishment, like I'd finally been able to wrangle the craziness of the internet into a single app, like I had rebelled against the algorithm™️. But it didn't take long to accumulate hundreds of posts, most of which I had no true desire to read, and soon after I abandoned my RSS reader. I came back to check on it from time to time, but its dreadful little indicator of unread posts felt like a personal failure, so eventually I deleted it entirely. Will Hopkins wrote a great post on this exact feeling. I don't actually like to read later : I used Instapaper back in the day, quite heavily. I built up a massive backlog of items that I'd read occasionally on my OG iPod Touch. At some point, I fell off the wagon, and Instapaper fell by the wayside. [...] The same thing has happened with todo apps over the years, and feed readers. They become graveyards of good intentions and self-imposed obligations. Each item is a snapshot in time of my aspirations for myself, but they don't comport to the reality of who I am. I couldn't have said it better myself. This only happens with long-form writing, whenever I come across an essay or blog post that I know will either require my full attention or a bit more time than I'm willing to give it in the moment. I've never had that issue with music. Music is more discrete. It's got a timestamp. I listen to music through moods and seasons, so much so that I make a playlist for every month of the year like a musical scrapbook. What if we took this approach to RSS feeds? Here's what I replied to Xinit: This is something I find myself struggling with too. I think I'm okay knowing some RSS feeds are seasonal, same as music genres throughout the year. Some days I want rock, others I want jazz. Similarly with RSS feeds, I've become comfortable archiving and resurfacing feeds. For reference, I follow around 10 feeds at any given time, and the feeds I follow on my phone are different from the ones on my desktop. You shouldn't feel guilty about removing feeds from your RSS readers. It's not a personal failure, it's an allocation of resources like time and attention.

data-analysis Data Analysis tutorial Tutorial web-development Web Development
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pabloecortez 2 weeks ago

Read a book via RSS with lettrss.com

If you picked a book and sent one chapter a day to my RSS reader, I'm sure I'd read it all. I'll be putting this to the test with lettrss.com , a project I built to syndicate books in the public domain via RSS. lettrss - read public domain books via RSS Since the second part of the Wicked movie is coming out on November 21 in the United States, I thought it’d be fun to start this RSS project with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

books Books open-source Open Source web-development Web Development
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pabloecortez 3 weeks ago

The Devil Needs No Advocate

Unless you're wealthy enough to bribe a small country or have personally received an invitation to Epstein's island, you have no business advocating for billionaires. Surely there must be a thrill in an ethics of contrarianism, something to make docile subservience an exciting prospect. "Ohh look at me, I'm so naughty because I'm not like everyone else", thinks the contrarian while shooting a sideways glance towards the working class, hoping to one day share a meal with wealthy industrialists, completely oblivious to the fact that among the working class is where he will always be kept. Did anyone ever find a friend in the kid who played "devil's advocate" in school? I want to share with you an unbelievable paragraph I read today. It was written by an American professor of philosophy, in an essay arguing that there is no moral objection to AI art. I call it unbelievable because it's hard to believe how badly it mischaracterizes the artist's rejection of generative AI. Imagine an artist in a patriarchal society complaining when women are allowed into the art museum for the first time: “I never gave permission for women to view my art!” This artist has no legitimate moral complaint, I’d say, because he has no moral right to make his work accessible only to men. Likewise, artists have no moral right to make their work accessible only to humans. They have no legitimate complaint if an AI trains on the work they post online, any more than they can complain about a young human artist “training on” (or learning from) their work. Take a minute to read that one again. "Babe, I thought of a great way to advance an instrumentalist view of agency that attributes mental states and intentionality to generative AI systems. First you pretend women and computer software are equivalent and then..." To philosophers it must be exciting to think of Artificial Intelligence as its own ontological class, a sui generis marvel of modern engineering. The truth is that no such thing exists yet, and marketing in Silicon Valley is powerful. Women have agency. AI has no agency. That's why this is a silly comparison and not even at all what the rejection of generative AI is about. When an artist pushes back against the use of generative AI tools, what they are saying is something like this: I do not approve of technology corporations amassing wealth by exploiting my work as an artist without consent . There's no artist saying they don't want the literal software processing their data because it's software. It's about who owns the software and what they do with it. The rejection of generative AI is not about programming languages, package managers, libraries, large language models and application programming interfaces. It's about technocrats building programs, using marketing terms like "learning" to make you think they have agency, and then the working class pretending they do because the marketing got so good. The devil needs no advocate.

ai AI
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pabloecortez 3 weeks ago

How I discover new (and old) blogs and websites

One of the great things about having a blog is that you get a space that is entirely yours, where you share whatever you want and you make it look exactly how you want it to look. It's a labor of creativity and self-expression. An encouraging aspect of having a blog is also being read by others. I love receiving emails from people who liked a post. It's just nice to know I'm not shouting into the void! But take for instance posts I wrote last year or many years ago. How do those get discovered? Perhaps you wrote an awesome essay on your favorite topic back in 2022. How can I or anyone else stumble upon your work? Making it easy to discover hidden gems from the indie web was my motivation for making powRSS . powRSS is a public RSS feed aggregator to help you find the side of the internet that seldom appears on corporate search engines. It surfaces posts and blogs going all the way back to 1995. You never know what you're going to find and I think it's really fun. Today I made a video showing how it works.

open-source Open Source writing Writing web-development Web Development
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pabloecortez 1 months ago

What I read this week #1

Some interesting stuff I read this week. Mirrored from ENOCC.com The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent by Oliver Burkeman This one I discovered in Sal's blog . The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it. And if you’re 70% confident you’ve got what it takes to do something that might make a positive difference to the increasingly alarming era we seem to inhabit? Go ahead and do that thing. (Please!) Investing in RSS by Tim Kadlec Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has. There’s more room for nuance and thoughtfulness, and I feel more in control of what I choose to read, and what I don’t. The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself. long time no blog; thinking about collective action in view from the present Yet I find myself wondering if social media - precisely the thing we need to collectively push to meaningfully change - isn't purpose-built to prevent us from banding together collectively for meaningful change. I don't just mean its attention-fragmenting, privacy-obliterating features; I also mean its tendency to convince us that slacktivism is all we need. You don't need to go out and organize! Just share this video and like that post, see, you did the thing, you are a Good Person who is Fighting the Good Fight. Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence by Jarrett Fuller, Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University The paradox of designing for the web is that the simplicity of building a website with basic tools means it can adapt to the changing technology around it. “For those of us who’ve had our websites for years, each version tells a story about us from a different era,” Schwulst says. “With my new site, the goal was to build a structure that could last for years.” This is not a nostalgia for a web long gone or a resistance to change, but a reminder for those of us working in digital spaces: Legacy is not a bad word. Process World, Object-Oriented Mind by Marco Giancotti Marco Giancotti writes an exploration of the rise and fall of Object Oriented Programming for Aether Mug and makes references to the models of cognition which in turn influence software engineering paradigms. I'm surprised there was no mention of Platonism, which was a clear influence on one of the first Object Oriented programming languages, Smalltalk. Here is Alan Kay talking about this in his paper The Early History of Smalltalk : Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts— Ideas —from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke. You Can Make A Website by Coyote If you have any doubts, then you're the target audience of this guide. Many people hesitate or even write off the possibility of making a website due to common misconceptions, poorly-written instructions, or simply feeling unsure where to start. So to help you over those hurdles, this guide is designed to address some of those misconceptions, walk you through resolving certain mental blocks, and present you with some tutorials to help get you on your way. Pro-craft by Jared White I would like to propose we start using the term "pro-craft" to describe our movement, rather than anti-AI. craft as a verb: to make or manufacture (an object or product) with skill and careful attention to detail craft as a descriptive noun: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill I am not "anti-AI"…I am pro-craft. I've dedicated my life to being a good craftsperson, in a variety of disciplines, and I'll be damned if I let craft be devalued or dismissed.

programming Programming
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pabloecortez 1 months ago

It's insulting to read your AI-generated blog post

It seems so rude and careless to make me, a person with thoughts, ideas, humor, contradictions and life experience to read something spit out by the equivalent of a lexical bingo machine because you were too lazy to write it yourself. Do you not enjoy the pride that comes with attaching your name to something you made on your own? It's great! No, don't use it to fix your grammar, or for translations, or for whatever else you think you are incapable of doing. Make the mistake. Feel embarrassed. Learn from it. Why? Because that's what makes us human! Everyone wants to help each other. And people are far kinder than you may think. By adding a sterile robo-liaison between yourself and your readers, you don't give us a chance to engage with you. Here is a secret: most people want to help you succeed. The problem is that you, yes, you are too afraid to ask for help. You think smart, capable people don't ask for help because they should know it all. Wrooooooooong. On the contrary, smart people know when to ask for help and when to give it too. They create mutually beneficial relationships with the people surrounding them. I ask you, human to human, both as beings capable of love and fear and humor and all the other great feelings we have cultivated for thousands of years: leave the AI to your quantitative tasks if you have to use it at all. Face the world with your thoughts and enrich them through real-world experience. The best thoughts are the ones that have been felt , anyway.

ai AI writing Writing
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pabloecortez 1 months ago

Here is a blogging challenge for you

These past few days I've been writing e-mails to some of my favorite bloggers, simply sending them a message letting them know that they have a reader in me. I've been spending a lot of time reading people's blogs this year while working on powRSS , to the point where I'm talking about what goes on in their life with my own friends! "Hey did you catch Herman's post last week about smartphones?" Simple stuff like that. A lot of the posts you write here do make an impact on my real life, whether it's an anecdote, a reflection, or simply reading a slice of life chapter of whatever is happening in your world. So, I think it'd be a great blogging challenge to send an e-mail / guestbook entry to those blogs that we read frequently. It's always nice to know our words are being read by others.

Blogging writing Writing
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pabloecortez 6 months ago

A first update on powRSS

There are still a few days left until my birthday (May 31, baby!) but the warm welcome powRSS has received is a great present already. Thank you to everyone who has checked out the project! A special thank you goes to those who have submitted their blogs and sites too, I'm humbled at the amount of talented writers putting their words out there and trusting independent readers to find them. I can't wait to come across your writing soon! Throughout this weekend it became evident that discovering new sites and blogs is both the most difficult yet rewarding aspect of the independent web. Most of us are subject to algorithms in the platforms we frequent, and this means missing out on a lot of good stuff that matters. I have now found even more software tools that work towards alleviating this, but the funny thing is that my discovery of them came from first-hand recommendations via e-mail. People are still using e-mail! Do I sound surprised? That's because I am. This morning alone I had 53 unread e-mails— 51 of those from actual humans —where someone took the time to type out a response to something I had written or to share their website. I love it when people are proud of their work, and I didn't realize that this weekend project would give me the chance to provide an outlet for people to share that with others. I think most of us feel the same way towards yet another technology, yet another algorithm, yet another platform and filter to figure out. I mention this because one of the e-mails I received asked me how the sorting algorithm worked on powRSS and when was the best time to post. There is no special algorithm because the feed is in chronological order . "Is it instant?" Nope . It updates at least once (up to four times a day) but only when someone visits the site . Processing only takes place when actual humans need info, not when a machine decides it's time to consume processing resources :-) So, what's new? If you got questions, suggestions, or simply want to say hi, my inbox is always open. Working on an RSS feed New blogs being added daily Categories (you can pick your own or I'll pick one for you!) Click on the "Random" button to visit a random site from the IndieWeb

open-source Open Source web-development Web Development
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pabloecortez 6 months ago

I made a public feed aggregator. Share your blog!

I'm excited to introduce powRSS to the Bear community. It's a small public RSS feed aggregator. A big appeal of Bear for me has always been its Discover page, and I decided to build something like it for the web. It's a public feed aggregator for all indie sites and blogs. powRSS updates daily. The feed is generated automatically by picking new sites each month, giving every site a fair chance to be featured. I'm inviting all of you to check out the feed and submit your own sites if you'd like to be discovered and read by a few more people! Grad school has made me dread e-mails, so to get over this I'm accepting website submissions via e-mail either at [email protected] or directly to me at [email protected] I can't wait to see your blogs over there too :-) I'm updating the post to say thank you for the number of submissions. I'm making my way through each of your blogs and replying one by one. You'll be notified as soon as your blog is included! Please send your site, we have a fantastic community going and we'd love for you to join us.

web-development Web Development
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

Leaving Instagram

Hi cybercitizens, I'm currently in the process of helping my father leave Facebook and Instagram in favor of the Indieweb. He loves sharing things online, from family photos to personal projects that he works on, such as illustrations and "blog posts" (which are really very long captions beneath Instagram posts). Today, he has over 1700 posts. We've talked about why it would be a good idea for him to have his own domain so he can own his content. At this point, I'm not sure what blogging platform would be best for him. For him, convenience is most important, but he has shown a lot of interest in having his own website. For an older and busier man, what would be a good blogging platform? His requirements are pretty simple: I am happy to help him through the entire process, but I also know he would like to feel independent and do it all on his own. He likes learning new stuff, but he's no web developer. What would you recommend? I'm looking forward to reading about any similar experiences you may have had yourself or with parents. To reply to this post, please feel free to email me at [email protected] Alternatively, if you'd like to reply publically so others may benefit in the future, I am happy to add a link to your reply here. Easy to upload photos Good mobile UI

web-development Web Development writing Writing
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

Is it worth it?

I keep seeing this question online, in various forms and communities, from internet forums to TikTok videos. A person will ask, "is it worth it to do X?" But what exactly are they asking, and how is anyone but themselves qualified to answer that? This question is usually raised when someone wants to know if the time spent on a given activity or project will produce what they consider a desirable outcome. Why would any stranger be able to answer that? I particularly dislike this question when it comes to learning something, because it's always about capital , whether it be social capital or financial gain. "Is it worth it to learn Ruby on Rails?" "Is it worth it to learn Spanish?" "Is it worth it to read Hemingway?" "Is it worth it to listen to The Beatles?" You don't need to ask permission! Knowledge is intrinsically valuable, learn things for their own sake! I'm aware that some people are asking these questions because it's comforting to ask others what their experience is regarding various activities. But why not ask instead about that? "What has been your experience using Ruby on Rails?" "How has learning Spanish changed your life?" "How did reading Hemingway make you feel?" "Why do you like The Beatles?"

ruby Ruby career Career
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

A blog about cyberspace

I'm currently working on developing a blog about cyberspace. Adhering to the indie web principles , I have been programming the site from scratch. Handwritten HTML and CSS, no JavaScript, no trackers, no analytics, building only what I need as I need it. Since the site is not ready for publication yet, I share here one of the first entries, where I talk about what it means to be a cybercitizen. ——— In the information age, we have been steadily working towards an inhospitable future for a purely offline existence. Points of entry to cyberspace have made themselves readily accessible in our smartphones, our computers, our televisions, and in the internet of things. We have collectively contributed to this vast digital network of human expression with data —ours and the data of those around us. The digital component of life today is a permanent aspect of human interactions, and this in turn creates the need for analyzing the way we live this hybrid existence. Broadly speaking, people have taken to the internet for obligations, for leisure, for socialization, for expression, and for politics. Cyberspace is a complimentary component of the human experience, as some things are better done online while others should probably stay within the bounds of the physical world. One thing is certain: The current separation between digital and physical spaces will continue to evolve, and we ought to prepare for these changes. Consider the times that your digital life plays an important role in your daily routine. Job applications, apartment hunting, loan payments, entertainment, work, education, mortgages, even meeting people for the first time can be done through cyberspace. It’s not likely that this will change anytime soon. Whether this impossibility for offline existence is a good or bad thing is a topic for another entry. Here, I want to address our obligation to reflect and think about what cyberconstituency entails. What does it mean to be a cybercitizen? Can I opt out of existing digitally? How can I be a good cybercitizen? Why should I want to be a good cybercitizen anyway? I use the terms “cyberspace” and “cybercitizen” following the definitions in philosopher Pierre Lévy’s 1997 book Cyberculture. There, Lévy defines cyberspace as “the medium of communications that arose through the global interconnection of computers”. A cybercitizen is a participant of this communication medium. Because there is a distinction between the terms Internet, World Wide Web, Gopher, Gemini, and any future communication protocols that may exist, the term cyberspace allows for a technology-agnostic discussion on information exchange facilitated by computer communication protocols. For example, if the metaverse becomes the de facto communication protocol in a few decades, the ideas discussed in this entry will remain applicable. A person becomes a cybercitizen when there is an exchange of personal data for usage of some digital service. Regardless of the frequency of this transaction, once it has been carried out at least once, the cybercitizen may not readily renounce their place in cyberspace. More concretely, once the discrete exchange of personally identifying information such as phone number, home address, or credit card has been given up in exchange for access to a service, a person becomes one more node in the vast repository of information travelling through the digital space. Because I assume my reader will find themselves in this category, in the following sections I offer some thoughts on cyberconstituency, or the relationship that a person has to cyberspace. The Structure of Cyberspace Some burning questions include: what is the structure of cyberspace? Who runs it? What role do individuals play in it? The answer to the first question is that the structure is fluid at best. The cyberspace of the 2020s is drastically different from what it used to be in the 1990s, partly because the main communication protocol used today, what we know as the World Wide Web, has matured and adapted to the ways its users access it. In its infancy, it would have been hard to imagine that doorbells, refrigerators, microwaves, voice-operated digital assistants, and other household appliances would be as data-oriented as they are today. All these kinds of devices serve as interfaces for access to the internet, and every point of access offers different services. They all have one thing in common: feeding data from their users to the corporation that manufactures them. The development of the infrastructure that powers our modern model of cyberspace is directly informed by the way in which its developers can profit from its usage. Today, this model heavily relies on advertising, particularly personalized advertisements for every cybercitizen. Through the collection of personal data, corporations can create marketing profiles for each user, and we are shown advertisements that target and adapt to our preferences and demographics. This type of business model where users’ personal data is the currency traded between businesses, governments, and individuals is explored in detail in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The largest downsides to such a model are the perpetual violations of privacy that are needed to make it happen, thus participation in cyberspace at large is necessarily one where privacy must be given up in some way. ——— Why should we care about being a good cybercitizen? Who benefits from being one and what does it all even mean? A good cybercitizen is someone who understands their relationship to the single largest repository of human expression in its digital form. Knowing what personal data we share with the use of digital services, the structure of the space where we spend so much time, and knowing the influence that those who control cyberspace can have on real-world events all are necessary components of being a good cybercitizen. Being a good cybercitizen is about having knowledge about being one and using that knowledge to shape cyberspace in a positive way for its current and future users. This is desirable because cyberspace exerts a considerable influence on social development, so the permissible behaviors, information, and the moral values that we share and support in the digital space will in turn shape the local and physical communities in which we live.

web-development Web Development html HTML css CSS javascript JavaScript
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

How to be a reliable narrator

The narrative-driven method makes me write by responding to why . But how will I know if my answers are correct? If I were to start narrating a story, you’d believe every word I wrote only if I believed them myself, if I successfully convinced myself with a plausible narrative told reliably. Note: Make sure you’ve read part 1 and part 2 of this collection. I can comfortably imagine a story where a man is sitting at the computer. I also believe he received an email from a woman named Grace, someone he began corresponding with almost daily after that first message. They developed a friendship in the following days, writing daily, often multiple times a day, asking each other if they’d read a given book or visited a city where some story had taken place. These progressively got more ridiculous. At first Adam asked if she’d been to Salamanca, maybe even visited the Tormes. Grace followed up by asking if he’d been to New York, where many of her favorite characters had lived. It didn’t take them long to inquire about Liliput, Wonderland and Joyce’s Dublin. It took them even less to start wondering what it’d be like to visit these places together. I can imagine a plausible narrative where those circumstances unfold. And if I believe it, telling it becomes easier, I’ll know what happened next because it will remain believable to me, I will have convinced myself of its truth, however fictional it may be. And then I keep asking why. Why would these two be in this situation? What’s going on in their lives? Once again, the possibilities are endless, but the moments where I’m forced to ask why are the points of inflection, the points where I’m called to imagine possibilities. This is how I’ve learned to extract threads of fictional truth from a starting statement such as

writing Writing
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

Narrative-driven writing

In direct contrast to the data-driven approach to writing, there is a narrative-driven method , which requires me to ask why . The starting statement is: A man sitting at the computer. Why? He could be waiting for an important email. He’s expecting to hear from a job application. Or he could be an investment banker awaiting a report from a coworker. Better still, perhaps the man is writing an email to someone he’s never met in person but with whom he’s established a sort of friendship, a punctual digital correspondence that brings him to the computer daily. Yeah, that sounds good to me. More why questions: why is it only a sort of friendship? Does he think virtual friendships are illusory? That’d be an interesting theme to explore. But I’m getting ahead of myself, maybe the man isn’t close to this person yet, the relationship could be just starting. I can imagine a first email: Yeah, that’s interesting. The email itself doesn’t have to be part of the story, but now I’ve got something to work with. Now I know why the man is sitting at the computer. He’s writing an email to Grace, a woman who bought a book from him weeks ago. They’ve never met in person. But something has brought them together, otherwise they wouldn’t be friends. At this point the tree of possibilities begins to branch out. By asking why , I force myself to come up with explanations, and if those make sense to me, I can reliably share them with the reader in the form of a story. In other words, I'd be a reliable narrator .

writing Writing
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pabloecortez 1 years ago

Data-driven writing is boring

This writing advice is for myself, for the future, for when I inevitably forget how to tell a story. I always fall for the same trap. I sit at my desk, open my text editor, and before typing a word I want to have an outline. I want to know who my characters are, what they do, I want to start listing traits. I have a tendency to favor a data-driven writing process . But that’s never how a story develops. Instead, it goes like this: I imagine a scene, there’s got to be tension or an unknown and a question I need to answer: why? This can be in reference to anything, which is what makes writing both liberating and daunting— I’m responsible for creating a reliable narrative of plausible circumstances. And there’s an infinite number of ways to do it. Let’s take the following prompt and develop it into a story: A man sitting at the computer. Here’s what a data-driven approach would look like: A man sits at the computer in a dimly lit room while cigarette smoke hangs around a boxy monitor. Dark shadows hang from his tired eyes, his fingers languidly gracing the surface of his keyboard. That’s boring. It sounds like the writing of someone exclusively familiar with visual storytelling, likely movies or TV shows, hence the list of clichés, someone whose memory of the story is a list of facts, an entire story diluted to atomic units of object description that abuse visuals and produce no forward movement. I prefer narrative-driven writing .

writing Writing
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