#For all my fellow creators who create such wonderful art that it makes our worst days easier to endure

[nyssasatelier]

Happy new years everybody🎉

I wish all of you an easy start into the new year!

I want to thank everyone in this community for turning around the last few months of what was possibly one of the hardest and most challenging years of my life till now. My father will never return home but following along to this story of a man who did with all of you has helped me pick my self up. I love you all!!!

[transgamerthoughts]

What I Found In The Leaves

Last August, as the lease to my apartment was about to end, the roof began to smolder until the place I lived was full of smoke. When all was settled and done, my apartment had no roof. My room was spared and most of my things were okay—this part of the story being set in late capitalism, I am required to assure you that the things I purchased were okay too—and I decided to leave New York City to return to New England with my family. One of the first things I did when I arrived was look at the sky and imagine I was up there. Falling or sailing or flying. It didn’t really matter. I wanted to touch a cloud, to feel the whipping wind.

I promise… this is leading to something. In the months since, in spite of comfort and proximity to my family… in spite of the arrival of my nephew into this world—a child I would climb a mountain and punch God for if I needed to—and in spite of a happy job… I have spiraled into depression. My solution was work and writing. To throw myself into my job and to, somewhat foolishly, take on the task of novelizing my favorite game: Skies of Arcadia. Because if you’ve read my work long enough, it always comes back to Arcadia. I am proud of that project but it sparked a yearning in me. To truly connect to the world I was writing. It lit a fire. Before we proceed, let me be clear that by depression I don’t mean the woes of pandemic living or some disaffection with the reality of entering my 30s. I mean a deep and painful darkness with all the implications therein. Regardless to say, my efforts to combat it drained me. To the point that I burnt myself out and with some prodding from my boss, took a vacation. Which I am currently on. This is not the first time this series of events has played out. I made a promise to myself when I started vacation: no writing. I am breaking it because I have found, yet again, a moment where I must desperately drain the wonder in my heart and attempt to explain to you that I think there are magical things in the world, and that I believe there is some type of magic in art—in that strange alchemic or shamanistic way—that transfers to us. This will be my second attempt to explain it, and to explain what it has to do with video games. (Forgive the indulgence of this introduction by the way; an editor would surely have cut it all but I need you to understand two things: I am in pain and there's a part of that pain which I think points to something important.) This is a story of ritual and tea. Of how my senses and imagination came together to send me on a journey around a fictional world, in search of heroes who both do and do not exist. As part of my love for Skies of Arcadia, I’ve become something of a paraphernalia collector. I bought an old light novel from ebay, I used my rudimentary Japanese skills to set up a warehouse dropbox so that two fan magazines could be sent there and then subsequently shipped to America, and I have drank tea based off the game. At the time, I wanted to collect the little tins the tea came in; they seemed excellent collector’s items. What I found with my first round of tea was art unto itself; balances of flavor and spice and blends that symbolized characters and connected me to them. These were crafted by a dedicated fan and fellow writer. I don’t have the time to sit and research all the ways in which tea is used in ritual. Because I am tired and older and depressed and writing a blog post that perhaps thirty people will read. Regardless, to my delight I found that the tea-maker had created blends based off the various moons that dot Arcadia’s skies. For those who do not know the game, which I assume is many of you: each nation of the world rests under a magical moon. There are six, with one—a Black Moon—theorized to have gone missing. Here was my opportunity for a journey.

I bought teas based on each moon, and one based on the world itself. I will post a separate collection of all my individual tastings and reviews later. The important thing is this: I had been given an amazing gift. With these teas, I had something of that digital world which was actual. When we play games, we hear them and see them. Perhaps with certain haptics we can feel them. But we do not smell them or taste them or literally consume them. Eight teas, eight chances to smell and taste that wonderful world. To touch the clouds. Quem quaeritis? This is a famous question asked by an angel to the three Marys visiting Christ's tomb: his mother the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, who is the sister of Lazarus—the man Christ brought back to life after his death. It means: “whom to do you seek?” I was journeying, one tea cup at a time, around Arcadia. From continent to continent, I tasted their spices and experienced hints of their values, their cultures as expressed through the tea. The question played in my mind: Quem quaeritis? Whom was I seeking? The answer is complicated. First, I was seeking something of myself. The part of me that understood magic and wonder. The part of me that believes in the soul and believes that art, in allowing the complex interaction of creators and characters with players, performs some type of soul-magic. It impresses upon us, real and actual changes. I was seeking that piece of me; that part of me that understood that each cup was a ritual that brought about a communion with a distant world. I was searching for the younger part of me that believed in wonderful things. 

I drank the teas in the order our heroes travel the world, and in doing so I was performing a sort of perseveration of their journey. I communed with some place distant and followed in their footsteps. Which answers another half of the question. Whom did I seek? I sought my heroes. I sought the adventurous Vyse and his dogged determinism, I sought the firecracker Aika and her swift rushes to action, and I sought Fina. The woman I wish I could be: feminine, slight, beautiful, kind, brave. Quem quaeritis? All of this sounds like nonsense and when I try to explain the nonsense, I feel a deep embarrassment. To care in the 21th century, particularly in America, is to be weak. To be publicly vulnerable is to make yourself a target. You must be hard and solid as a rock. You cannot believe in magic or else you are doomed. But here I was, chasing myself and my heroes one cup at a time. And I need you to know that it hurt to do that. 

I went to the corner store today to buy some energy drinks. When I got back home, my father asked: “did you find what you were looking for?” I told him “That’s a very complicated question.”

Let me explain. Let me do the thing that I feel I cannot do well anymore; let me do some game criticism. In the world of games, the entities we control exist as two things. They are actors; manipulatable bodies, guided by code and controller inputs, that we guide around as we see fit. In this way, players have extraordinary power. In some ways, it is a… fraught power. We can, as Soulja Boy did, leave Braid’s protagonist in a perpetual flux state: jumping and rewinding. Back and forth, forth and back. Eternal puppets for our amusement, avatars for our power fantasies. Sometimes, as in the case of a game like Skyrim, our controllable actors are little more than flesh suits But actors are, more than anything, just… avatars. Video game actors are also characters. Within their worlds, which are fictional, they have motivations and wants and desires and dreams. They want to live and grow and succeed. Cloud Strife wants to defeat Sephiroth and uncover the truth about himself, Joel wants to protect Ellie and survive in a cruel world. Arthur Morgan wants to find a calmer life and redemption for his sins. They are, as characters, people. But since they are also actors, we can deny them their hopes and dreams whenever we want. We can have Cloud while away his days gambling at the Gold Saucer and, if we want, we can force Arthur Morgan to murder to population of an entire town. The core truth of a player's relationship to the character is this: we decide if their dreams are fulfilled. I find that troubling and I will try to explain why. But first let’s be clear: I do not think the character in games are sentient entities. I outlined this relationship of players and characters in a GDC talk a few years ago, using highly rhetorical terms and my reward was the ridicule of countless gamers who questioned my sanity. Some made videos about my presentation. It was hell. To be a woman, perhaps especially a progressively minded trans-woman, in games is to know a very real hell. To this day, I cannot go a week without some type of horrid experience on the internet. Some judgment of my worth, some assumption about my competency, or in the worst cases some proclamation about my right to live. No doubt this is part of why I needed my vacation. But here is why I find the player/character/actor relationship troubling. It is not merely the abstract notion, the thought experiment that elicits fun but meaningless philosophical natter. The reason I find that relationship troubling or at least complicated is because for all of their fiction, the characters in games can give us real things. They can, through some type of power—a deep power found in the act of story-telling itself—impart aspects of themselves on us. For instance, they can teach us lessons which we then carry into the rest of our lives. My father, for reasons I can’t recall, once told me: “the meaning of life is to serve others.” Though he does not know it, that truism has been etched into my soul. It is a “thing” that my father has given me. But my father is not the only person who has etched something into my soul. Vyse, that dashing pirate, has etched many things into my soul. For instance: “impossible is just a word people use to make themselves feel better when they quit.” That is etched on my soul too. Just as much as anything my father has taught. So we come to the heart of it: what does it mean that Vyse can so alter my being and values, and that he can do it with the same strength and “realness” of my father? What does it mean for a character, who is also often an actor that I guide, to give me such a powerful gift? Because let us be clear: values are “real” things. When I tried to explain that I believe that certain things are actually true, for instance that looking at landscapes does mean that we are looking at something real…. I spent an afternoon with former Jeopardy! contestant Arthur Chu and a cohort of Twitteristas attacking my philosophical surety. So, again, fuck the internet… I digress.. Let’s explore: I believe in the realness of things because of the depth of the emotions those things make me feel, and I refuse to believe that life is just endorphins, hormones, and instinct. That music or games or anything else can make us weep for joy is proof-positive to me of the existence of a soul; of an ineffable thing that is “us.” Not necessarily all enduring but certainly extant. And if this thing exists, it can be acted upon. I know this because my father, with his truism, changed my soul. Changed the core of me. I know this because Vyse and the others did so as well.

I’ve written that games criticism is a kindness; that it seeks the good in art and attacks the banal explicitly because art is beautiful. I write today to suggest this: art is magical. It alters us, not metaphorically, but in the ways it can affect our souls. Which brings us back to character and actors. I control Vyse since he is an actor and I am a player; but he is a character with dreams and hopes and personality. And values. Wonderful values which he shared with me. So what does it mean now that I can send actors to their doom? What does it mean that I can control them utterly when I know for a fact that they can affect and change me? I do not have clean answers for this. Perhaps there are none. Perhaps all I have written is silliness, even as I beg you to please understand. Please. 

Understand the power of stories, understand it in the way that Tolkein did when he said: “Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else … may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.” Understand that I am telling you that the locked thing is your heart and soul, and that just as a lover or parent or mentor can open that thing… so can the people we meet in our fictional journeys. Vyse is not just the captain of a ship. He is my captain. That means something. Art is ritual and play is ritual. In creation, we place something of ourselves in another thing. In play, we allow ourselves to be transmuted and changed. This is magic, of a sort. I am left wanting however. I followed the path of my heroes in as literal a way as I could, pulling on new senses to understand the world they live in and touch their skies for a fleeting moment. But I cannot reach them; I am Tantalus in the mire. Ever reaching, ever chasing. For that moment I can be the person that my heroes trusted me to become. Note by musical note, word for written word, tea cup by tea cup, I am chasing my captain. When I went back to my apartment the day after the fire, I looked up at the spot where the roof used to be. All I could see was blue sky and I thought I might fall into it. Perhaps in superficial ways I have shared something with my heroes; I have tasted something they have, even though the tea is not actually from Arcadia. It was merely a conduit to my imagination, to the transformed parts of my souls. Yet, I did not find him and I could not find myself. Which is why it hurts, in spite of how wonderful it was. Quem quaeritis? He is not here. So I will keep sailing after him.

[monsterfucker-lisa-swallows]

Why Mika’s Death was Not Okay

It is a rule with fandom that the longer you stay with a series, the more it’ll disappoint you. A series will inevitably fail you, but the rule never will. Whether or not, as a viewer, we allow these sins committed by our favorite shows to turn us off til we turn it off for good is our own personal choice. Blind love can only carry us so far.

 It turns out that even though I feel the atrocities committed in the second episode of season 5 of Orphan Black are narratively unforgivable, I’m in too deep to turn off the tv now. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t see how the final trip ends when with only 8 episodes left. But I can’t forgive the writers for killing off Veera Suominen.

 Now I get it; I’m a writer, and I feel that while storytellers have a responsibility to care for our audience and to understand the broader impact of our art we also have a deeper responsibility to ourselves. Most storytellers would agree that their best stories were passion projects that felt as if they were just burning to get out of them. The finished product should always be something that, when looked at later, the author can look back on and be proud that they really put all of themselves into. Can Graeme Manson and John Fawcett honestly say that this is the best, most shining example of their work? Is the way they tossed aside such a valuable character really what they had in mind from the beginning?

 For the uninitiated, Veera Suominen (hereafter referred to by her preferred nicknames of M.K. or Mika) is one of the latest female clones to pop up on the scifi television show Orphan Black. She was a valuable new addition to the team last season, as she was a connection to a previously hinted at massacre of clones in Europe: the infamous Helsinki event where a group of clones became self aware and were killed to protect the interests of their creators. Mika was the only clone to escape alive, and was so traumatized by what had happened that she basically became a hermit. She was smart enough to know that it wasn’t safe to be seen out in the open, and she used her considerable skills as a hacker to keep an eye on what was going on in the world around her.

 I think what made Mika so appealing to me is my own history of psychological trauma, plus a history of medical problems that keep me pretty regularly sick. Without going into too much detail, I can safely say that maybe my thinking on the matter is entirely biased and clouded by emotion. M.K. was a person I could see myself in, and when it was first made clear that she was starting to get sick with the same autoimmune condition the other clones were experiencing my heart broke. I don’t know if I fully expected her to succumb to her illness when progress was being made towards a cure, but I expected pain and heartache at least. If she was to die, it would be a dignified death befitting someone who fought in her own way to stay alive and under the radar. She was living outside the control of the ones who created her, but was still living under psychological duress after what had happened to her. It was most definitely a relatable story, as it is one that I live every day (under less dire and conspiratorial circumstances). I wanted so much for her to get closure and freedom in her life.

 With all that being said, this death scene was not okay. That’s what I keep repeating to myself now. It’s the biggest impression I got from the episode. This show advertises as one that respects its characters, but respect is the farthest thing from what she got. There was no respect for Mika’s journey, and there was no dignity in this death. The writers took a Ferdinand, a sad, sexually dysfunctional little man who was responsible for the Helsinki event and had him kill Mika because he was angry with a different clone. It’s a death that strips her of her right as an individual (which is a major theme of the show) and has her die as a stand in for someone else. And she didn’t even struggle. She immediately gave herself up because she was tired of running, and didn’t even try to take him with her. This is such a far cry from the M.K. who almost killed Ferdinand last season, and really begs the question: What could Ferdinand possibly have to offer the show that M.K. couldn’t? Ferdinand didn’t have half of the useful skills that Mika had and any proficiency with murder or intimate knowledge of the conspiracy could be achieved by Helena or Rachel. But M.K. was useful as a hacker, and even beyond having a usefulness to the plot there are those of us with traumatic pasts who really could’ve stood to see her get resolution before her death.

 The funny part of all of this is that now we’re being told that the point of the death is to prove that “nobody is safe” at this point. But we kind of already knew that, didn’t we? This was pure shock value, and shock value has no place in a series that purportedly respects its characters. If writers want to go in the direction of shock value, write slasher films. I promise that a good slasher film requires just as much attention to detail and can be just as much fun. That way, you don’t have to invest any time in characters because we all know they’re not safe and we know the majority of them are going to die horribly - like little humanoid Happy Tree Friends. All I’m saying, really, is that, as Cosima would say, the writers need to admit what this is really about. This was never about proving that nobody is safe. This is because the writers were just...done with her. So they just killed her. In the least respectful manner possible. It tied up no loose ends, it served no real consequence to the plot. Her death wasn’t an immediate call to action nor did it seem to have any effect on the characters beyond proving Kira’s psychic ability (which we’ve all known was a thing) and pushing her towards DYAD for testing (which would have happened anyway). It was just...nothing.

 It could be argued that M.K. giving herself up in Sarah’s place was brave in itself, but it wasn’t brave in a manner that was conducive to her character arc. In fact, this entire episode was antithetical to her character arc. Like I’ve already mentioned, clone disease is treatable. We’ve spent all this time seeing the sisters struggle with it, but there was no time dedicated to Mika’s personal struggle. Even Jennifer had more time post mortem to show us her coming to terms with her mortality. This just felt like one more thing to do to make her suffer, because what other way could they make Mika into a martyr for the cause than to make her too weak to fight? Which, in case you’re wondering, is what she should have done. Accepting her death immediately, before it even came to blows...lifting not a finger or a word in her own defense...It was deeply upsetting. Narratively, extremely sloppy, but personally very unsatisfying. It seemed like something I would do on my worst days. I went through a horrible trauma as a child and also suffer from an immune disorder that frequently makes me very sick. Being mentally and physically sick all the time is exhausting and I could understand why she would end it that way. But I turn to fiction a great deal of the time to see people who are in similar situations do things better than I would have, so that on the days when I want to give up I can point to them and say, ‘Well they didn’t, so I won’t either.’ She should have at least taken him with her. Then Helsinki would have at least been finished, and in death we could have wrapped this up quite neatly. Killing a major player in the event that created her mental trauma would have been a fantastic resolution to her character arc.

 I’m not saying, exactly, that death of a main character isn’t permissible in character-driven stories. When a series handles death well, it can be fantastic. True, in real life death doesn’t always have some kind of grand purpose and is always meaningless. But this is a story, and stories are supposed to have a grander purpose. I understand that we needed to raise the stakes, since this show has almost as many main character resurrections as Buffy (I exaggerate, but you get my point that this is the show where our characters never die). But it could’ve been handled with more respect to the character involved. I also think it was weird timing to kill off a Leda girl this early in the season. Big character deaths normally should be reserved, if not for the finale itself, than for the episodes directly leading up to it. That kind of death puts a show on a more clear narrative trajectory. One of the greatest character deaths in recent history happened on the CW show Nikita when Ryan Fletcher was killed off before the finale. Not only was that a death fitting of his character, but we know things just got real and there is a definite tipping point from which there is no return. I don’t have the same feeling after Mika’s death. I feel like she’s just gone and there’s no real reason for it. But I could be being unfair since there are still 8 episodes to go until the conclusion.

 I’m going to keep watching this show til the end, even after all this. Tatiana Maslany’s performance continues to be that which I aspire to as an actor, and I still feel a deep connection to the characters and an insatiable need to know where it all goes. But this was deeply upsetting, and cannot be forgiven. Please, just, fellow writers, I beg you...Retire the shock value deaths. Put actual thought into your characters and don’t just throw them away like this. Rest in peace, Veera Suominen (AKA M.K., AKA Mika). You didn’t deserve to be reduced to a stand-in for Ferdinand’s frustration with Rachel. You didn’t deserve to die as a representation of someone else. You deserved so much better.

[piarou-neelix]

Surviving VidCon Europe 2017

So, I am slowly getting back to being alive again. So far since crawling out of my bed (for the second time today) at one pm, I have only tripped twice, bumped my head thrice, and spilled/dropped stuff (drink/bread/butter/washing-powder) four times. So yay! :D Now to try and put these past days into words. In only one word is easy: AMAZING. But there is so much more to say than just that it was probably the best weekend I have had in years. So many feelings to describe, so many emotions to be conveyed. And so many people to thank.

Let's start this tale at last Thursday, April 6th, 2017. Under an indecisive sky I waited for Johanna, the fellow Vidcon-volunteer, whom I had only talked to through Skype for an awkward half hour before that day, that was going to stay at my place for the coming nights. With a delay of five hours her bus from Vienna finally arrived at Sloterdijk, and I got to meet her at last in real life. And what luck I had in having her for a guest. Johanna is a young woman with a base state of happiness that is so heart-warming and mind-soothing to undergo and be around, it is almost unreal. That being coupled with a sharp mind and a smart wit made her one of my favorite people I know through the power of the internet almost immediately. The lively and intriguing conversation we had during our short walk through the woods in Castricum after dropping off her bags at my place was a confirmation of my first instincts. After the walk we cooked together, ate our prize, and then played two rounds of Kahuna before going to bed early-ish. Friday we got up at what felt early for me then, but was to become a blessed long sleep compared to the days after. ;) Following a typical Dutch breakfast with bread with 'hagelslag' we took the train to Amsterdam. We started the day with a tour of the more typical touristy locations so Johanna could check them off of her list, after which we went to the Vondelpark where an International Nerdfighter Meeting was organized by good soul Richard. It was the first time in years that I was at a Nerdfighter meeting where I knew less than seventy-five percent of the people. The sun was a bit unsure about it all (though managed to burn me nonetheless), but I think all had a great time. There was songs being sung, games being played, and friends being gained. Johanna, me, and several others had to leave the gathering for a while, because there was a volunteer-training scheduled at the RAI. Other than finally meeting Nick who was our coordinator, I didn't learn much there and then. But I did get to meet more of my fellow volunteers, which was cool. A whole bunch of them joined us at the pizza-place that evening, which made us a group of over 60 for a reservation of 20, but after splitting in two we still had food for all, spread out over two restaurants. All in all, a good day, filled with loads of nice people. Okay, I felt a bit tired from the somewhat too much walking I had done, and my forehead almost gave light from the sunburn, but I figured I would manage. Then again, Vidcon hadn't even started for real yet, for me. :D That happened on Saturday. And oh wow, did it start. So many people eager for an event they had been waiting for for months, if not years. Lines of fans waiting for a chance to meet, touch and take pictures with their heroes, whom they had so far only seen in digital form. And that sea of enthusiasm was compressed to a stream of roiling emotions in the meet-and-greet-wristband-distribution-line. My original shift was a bit over-staffed compared to the understaffed situation at this bottleneck of the first morning, so I was transferred to help out there. And thus I got a first glimpse of what this weekend would entail for me. Hard work, and loads of smiling faces filled with anticipation and joy. In an attempt to entertain the masses while they waited, and to keep myself awake as well, I did some frolicking and goofing around, doing impromptu little dances and pirouettes whenever I had the chance. But as time moved on, it became clear that the lines were filling way faster than we were clearing them, so an extra line was created, and the time for whimsical folly was over. I know for a fact that I was by far the worst wristband-attacher of all times, but looking down and me are not the best of friends. ;) As my shift ended, my neck and eyes were hurting, as well as my fingers. But still, I was filled with an overflowing sense of warmth and happiness just because I was helping people get the best days of their lives. After a short break, and catching the first half of The Vlogbrothers' Q&A, I started what eventually became my favorite shift of the weekend: The Vidcon Booth. Seriously, I was born to stamp passports-of-joy. Enticing people to just go that one more step to get not five, but ten stamps was such fun. Coming up with creative reasons why/how people earned the stamp for “Awesomeness” was the most energy-giving thing I have done in ages. Being on various selfies I had 'forced' people to take for yet another stamp, or just seeing the weird/cute/tender/beautiful selfies being taken right in front of me to earn that precious red blob of ink. Encouraging people to write or draw something on the wall, and then later realizing they had made a little piece of art. All that and more made it the best few hours of 'work' I have ever had. I went across the street for a quick Dirk-van-den-Broek sandwhich for dinner, and then it was time for the Saturday-evening featured-creator-show. Being blown away by the facial expressions and amazing voice of Carrie Hope Fletcher and the wonderful poetry of Savannah Brown made up for the somewhat cringe-worthy Max and Harvey performance. Matthew Patrick closed the night with words of power and honesty that made me want to hug him to make him feel better, and thank him for making so many others feel better. And then it was time for the trip home. The NS had decided to work on the tunnel between Amsterdam and home, so we (Johanna and I) were fearing a replacement bus-service was to be our lot, but luckily the whole weekend we managed to time our travels thus perfect that we could catch the rerouted intercity home. Five hours of sleep is a lot more than four-and-a-half, so we were quite happy with that, indeed. :D My Sunday shifts were a lot less exciting to me. I was room-monitor in the morning, and auditorium monitor in the afternoon. But to be fair, I don't know if I could have handled much else after I started the Vidcon-day with a tumble on the concrete floor. Both my knee and my shoulder were scuffed, and turned stiff quite rapidly. But hey, the show must go on, so I kept doing my utmost best to make everyone around me have the bestest of times at this first ever Vidcon Europe. The morning-shift I decided to be the outside-monitor, as that ensured me to have a quiet start of the day, and meant less walking around with the microphone. But the auditorium was too big to be handled by one mic-walker. And at that point my energy had been adequately replenished by the many awesome fellow volunteers. So I happily went were the panels wanted me to go. The two panels during which I had my shift were very interesting and I will certainly take some of their words with me. In between all of this, there were of course the meet&Greets I myself had the opportunity to have. On Saturday I got to hug Emma Blackery, and give her a bag of fizzy peaches, proving that not all forty year old followers of her are creepy af. Sunday in the afternoon I hugged Hank Green (@edwardspoonhands.tumblr.com this is what I meant when I said I still blame you: http://piarou-neelix.tumblr.com/post/153356577720/i-blame-you), and between my last shift and the volunteer-thank-you-party, I met Hannah Witton, whom I had already met almost exactly two years earlier in Amsterdam. After hugging her, it was straight to the Nedfighter-special event, but that was a bit too noisy for me, so I retreated to the volunteers' little safe-haven of calm and quiet next to registration, where I doled out my ever-present new addiction, Verkade Bites (seriously, don't eat them, or don't blame me). Then it was time for the aforementioned volunteer-thank-you-party, where I managed to grab a bite of food as well. I was amazed to realize I hadn't even met all volunteers yet that were in the room. And all were amazing, seriously. So much friendliness and warmth in one room was invigorating to the soul, and strengthened my already high trust and belief in humanity. A (not completely) surprise-visit by Hank Green, where we caught him in a circle of high-fives, and some completely unexpected gifts were nice unneeded bonuses to an already awesome event. It all ended with the logical end, the Sunday-evening featured-creator-show. We had missed the beginning due to our 'private' party, but saw most of it anyways. Dodie and Jon Cozart were, in my humble opinion, the stars of the evening, and Kwebbelkop surprised me with the way he filled his time on stage in a positive way, but all on stage were amazing this evening. Except maybe for the herring. ;) But as with all things, even the best of the best events have to end some time, and so it went here as well. After hugs and farewells Johanna and I took our leave of the Rai to once again travel to Castricum, and our much needed beds...

...for four hours of sleep. :( Johanna, adventurer as she is, had to go to her next big memory-in-the-making, and had to be at Schiphol at six in the morning. So after a short night, and a very weirdly quiet train-ride, it was time for me to say goodbye to my new friend (for now). She took the one train, that being her first step on the road to India and a new adventure, and I took the other back to Castricum again, and to another couple of hours of sleep. And then, it was all really over. But in my mind, the event will never end. My heart, head, and soul has been changed by all the wonderful people I have met during these past four days, the new friends I made, and the words I heard. Especially the awesome group of volunteers I will not soon forget. Once again I have seen the proof that the world of the interwebs is a powerful world indeed, and that it can do the most beautiful things, and knit the most awesome communities out of yarn from many different types of stories.

[weblistposting-blog]

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The five most traumatic Android capabilities

I’ve been an iPhone consumer for the reason that 2011. Back then, it becomes by no means simply a query whether I’d pick out iOS or Android as a phone platform. My pals had iPhones, my coworkers had iPhones—every person who become everyone, absolutely, had an iPhone.

Android Capabilities

However, that was extra than 1/2 a decade in the past. Nowadays, Android is certainly on an identical footing with iOS (and in reality, the 2 borrow, thieve, and proportion “new” features so frequently you’d think they had been teenage sisters sharing the equal wardrobe). And after such a lot of years on iOS, I felt the time became proper to provide Android an attempt full time. As a device creator and reviewer, I’ve sampled dozens of iOS, Android, and Windows Telephone devices over the years, However, I’d by no means really given a non-iOS tool a long-term trial. Till now.

for the reason that December, I’ve been using a Huawei Nexus 6P walking Android 7.1.2 (Nougat) as my important device. There’s a lot to love about it, However having been an iPhone devotee for goodbye, there are a handful of factors that power me loopy.

The five worst Android functions 1) Mysterious notifications

Perhaps I clearly want to clean out old notifications in a more timely style, However, I have one steady trouble with my Android Cellphone: I am getting mysterious vibration notifications, and I’m able to decide what they’re from. My Cellphone will vibrate, I’ll select it up, test the notifications onscreen, and… they’re precisely the same notifications I noticed the remaining time I checked my Cellphone. I’ll take a look at my texts, Google Hangouts, and email, and if there’s not anything new there, I simply come to be shrugging my shoulders and sitting my Phone backpedal. Anything notification I were given absolutely wasn’t essential sufficient to garner further motion than that.

2) The app drawer

Reputedly, the app drawer is something most Android Telephone owners love, However, I simply can’t seem to get used to it. antique behavior dies tough, I suppose. I’d rather have my most-used apps on my major domestic screen, and my next preferred apps a swipe away to the right. Tapping the six-dot app drawer icon at the bottom center of the screen, then scrolling and searching to locate the app I’m seeking out simply doesn’t experience efficiently.

3) The hardware digicam shortcut

For a while, I used to be perplexed as to why on occasion I’d pull my Cellphone out of my pocket and the camera would be open. (and actually, stated digital camera had snapped a handful of dark photographs from inner my pocket.) Turns out, with most recent Android phones, you can fast get admission to the digital camera, even in case your Cellphone is locked, by way of double tapping the electricity button. It’s a beneficial shortcut, for positive, until you will be predisposed to accidentally press the electricity button as you’re pulling your Telephone out—as I appear to do.

Luckily, through heading into the Settings menu there’s a way to exchange this shortcut off. That turned into without a doubt the right pass for me: by accident switching at the digital camera was truly the perpetrator of a number of those phantom vibrations I’d been so confused approximately.

4) Adaptive Brightness

To be truthful, this option drove me crazy on iOS too: Auto brightness. On Android, it’s known as Adaptive Brightness, However, it’s far seriously out of control. My dad, looking at a photograph on my Smartphone, requested, “Why is it doing this?” because the screen shifted darker, then brighter again. Sitting on a recent aircraft flight analyzing an ebook on my Phone, the brightness distractingly and constantly shifted up and down. Possibly the moderate turbulence turned into changing the angle of my Cellphone and what sort of mild its sensor detected? Regardless, it was demanding. whether in shiny light, dim mild, or any mild scenario sincerely, with adaptive brightness enabled, the display screen’s brightness degree sporadically shifts for no obvious motive. I headed to Settings, Display, and that I switched Adaptive brightness off. I’ll just manually regulate the Phone’s brightness to my for my part liking as wanted.

5) Incompatibilities with iOS text messaging

I’m often Ok with the truth that I recognize that I’m an inexperienced bubble now. (That is, once I textual content with iPhone proprietors, my messages display up as green text bubbles, in place of the blue ones of fellow iOS customers.) But, I wasn’t prepared for some different inter-operating system incompatibilities.

Android features on the HTC Choice S

Across smartphones from numerous Telephone producers, there may be one handset that has jump began the Android platform into stardom. That is HTC’s Preference. This Smartphone opened our eyes to what Google’s cellphone OS can do. This paved the manner for the smartphone-optimized running device to now dominate international OS market shares. However, seeing that this cellular Telephone has been in the marketplace because of March of 2010, it wants of a modern refresh. That is precisely what you will get with the HTC Desire S.

On the subject of Android features, you’re certain to enjoy best the maximum up to date features the OS has to provide. It’ll actually feed your mind. seeing that modern mobile phones provide you with immediately get entry to the internet, you’re sure to stumble upon something you are curious approximately or truly know nothing about. If this happens, all you need to do is tap and keep. This could give you facts on any phrase or word found in Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary, and even YouTube. This definitely approaches that you get some of the options to get the statistics you could need.

on the HTC Choice S, each form of communications revolves around human beings. When you choose a contact out of your touch listing, you do no longer just get the choice to ship a textual content message or make a call. You furthermore may get to see beyond SMS and missed calls. Aside from these ordinary capabilities, you’ll additionally get to ship emails and look at Facebook updates. With this Phone refresh, you’ll get a communications hub no longer found in other handsets.

The predecessor of this mobile Phone sports activities a 5 MP digital camera. today’s version sports activities the same megapixel matter. However, it gives to do greater. The HTC Choice S’ digital camera comes with the same old functions together with autofocus, LED flash, contact attention, and picture stabilization. But, it does include a few skills that were now not present mind the preceding model. It comes with an immediate capture camera. in the past, the time it took for customers to press the capture button and for the Telephone to truly capture the photograph took too much time. This turned into enough to allow the moment bypass you by. With immediate capture, the picture is captured as soon as you press the button. Moreover, it is able to now record videos in HD.

The smartphone now gives a clean reading and net surfing. To save you squinting, you can zoom in on textual content for better reading. For the reason that Cellphone is pre-cooked up with Android’s Gingerbread OS, you will revel in Adobe Flash Player aid. This can permit you to get right of entry to infinite websites found Throughout the web.

The Samsung Galaxy S – A smartphone Packed with Android features

Whilst Android smartphones are worried, there were a number of handsets which are synonymous with this style of cell phone. these handsets are the HTC Desire, the Google Nexus S, and the LG Optimus One. Samsung has also created a cellphone That is jam filled with contemporary features. This is the Samsung Galaxy S.

This handset comes with considered one of the earlier Android running systems the two.1 OS Éclair. maximum of the brand new handsets is pre-installed with an extra up to date version the two.2 OS Froyo. You do not need to worry about this. you could effortlessly update the OS of this handset to the state-of-the-art 2.2 model. This will assist you to enjoy quicker internet browsing, higher web constancy, and smoother multi-tasking. This could make the S model even better.

In case you love installing apps to your Smartphone, this smartphone is for you. It’ll give you quick get right of entry to the Android marketplace. Here, you may select from an expansion of apps. There are literally heaps to pick from. you can select to download cellular tools. you can install apps which are all about amusement. you may download eBooks. you can get widgets that personalize the Samsung Galaxy S even more. Of direction, you could download a collection of games. there may be so many things you could do with those apps.

With all of the energy this phone’s software program has to provide, you may be wondering that its battery will now not last up to you anticipate. If That is what you think, assume again. no longer handiest does its OS allow smoother multi-tasking and faster net surfing, it is also fairly energy green. This without a doubting manner that you’ll enjoy its functions for hours upon hours.

Of direction, an Android handset will never be complete without getting admission to an assortment of Google tools. This is exactly what the Phone has to offer. It’ll give you briefly get entry to Google Search, Gmail, Maps, Calendar, YouTube, and GTalk. you will never wait till you get your computer or computer to enjoy these capabilities. With the Samsung Galaxy S, you get a telephone Filled with Android capabilities.

[hypertagmaster]

7 Real-World Ways to Think Like an Artist for Better Content Marketing

Earlier this year, I wrote that I believe art plays a critical role in content marketing.

But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, what does that word “art” really mean?

“I’ll know it when I see it.” – Random critic

For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll define art as an expression that can’t be made by an algorithm. It’s the creative spark, the unusual choice, the flare of personality, the moment of real human empathy and connection.

I believe it’s a serious mistake to think that marketing and art are somehow separate.

As Brian Clark has said for years:

“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.

People who think art is irrelevant and marketing is about tricking people into buying shit they don’t need tend to be terrible marketers and worse human beings.” – Brian Clark, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the Art of Phony Marketing

While I’m defining art, let me go ahead and define marketing: It’s what we communicate that allows us to work with others. Advertising, social strategy, SEO, funnels, automation — they all need to serve that function.

Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that marketing was another word for lies. Don’t buy it.

Smart marketers don’t accept the excuse of “It’s just marketing” to hide the truth or produce crummy work that benefits no one.

Wise marketers embrace art as integral to what they do, as much as strategy and execution are.

Here are some observations I’ve made over the years about how artists work and how anyone can adopt a more artistic mindset.

1. Artists geek out over craft

“Creativity occurs in action: It is not a trait; it is something you do.” – Bert Dodson

Get a group of writers together and you’ll hear a whole lot of geeky talk about structure, language, word choice, metaphor, and the serial comma.

Art is about your unique and personal expression of the world you see around you. But you can’t express what you see and feel until you master your chosen craft.

As a content marketer, you make a living with words. Dive into the disciplines that will teach you how to stitch words together in ways you haven’t tried before.

Study poetry. Study screenwriting. Study short stories. If you’re a podcaster, take an acting class or voice lessons.

The reason an artist’s life is so interesting and rewarding is that you never stop learning. When you master your craft at one level, new levels reveal themselves. The game gets ever more complex and interesting.

Any study of creative writing will benefit you as a content marketer. You’ll learn how to show, not tell. You’ll think more carefully about word choice. And you’ll learn the nuances that make for superb storytelling.

A writing workshop can be a great start, but there are also lots of wonderful books on writing well. Here are just a couple of suggestions — this is far from a complete list.

Resources:

Stephen King’s On Writing

Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

2. Artists protect their productive time

If you pick up a book about the work habits of creative people (I’m a bit obsessed with this topic), you’ll notice something striking.

Nearly all great writers, musicians, painters, and other artists tend to work in well-defined work cycles.

They nearly always have specific times of day set aside for creative work. They protect this time with a ferocity that can border on cruelty.

Often, this time is strictly reserved for what writers call “draft” — the messy, sometimes ugly part of the creative process where we take new ideas and work through them with as much craft as we can manage.

You need to be a bit brutal about protecting this time. That’s more important than it ever was, thanks to the seductive call of so many distractions.

Because, to be honest, a lot of days, this isn’t the fun part. This is the moment when all of those lovely dreams and ideas get turned into unsatisfying reality — on the page, the canvas, or the screen.

It’s where you face the dreaded, “The words on the screen don’t sound like they did in my head.”

The only way most of us ever manage to get anything done is simply to be rather robotic about getting to work. Uninterrupted creative time needs to get blocked into your calendar. You need to defend it — against your own resistance as much as anything else.

Resources:

There are lots of excellent apps that help you defend your productive time. I like the Freedom app to protect me from my own worst habits.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a fascinating look at how different artists have used their time.

3. Artists embrace bad art

If we’re spending time every day creating something that doesn’t match our creative vision, how do we push ourselves to keep showing up?

Artists know that the way to create good art — maybe some day even great art — is to make a whole lot of bad art.

We’re looking for what painters call “brush mileage.” You’ll never be able to paint well until you pull a paintbrush through a certain amount of paint and onto a certain volume of canvas or paper.

We make good sentences by starting with awful sentences.

Writers, in my opinion, have it lucky. We can keep working on a piece until it doesn’t suck. Try that with a watercolor; you won’t be happy.

If we keep working on material that’s appropriately challenging, we’ll keep getting better. At first, your pieces may need a lot of editing time. As you mature creatively, your rewrites might get faster, but you’ll still find that genuinely good work needs the discipline of multiple rewrites.

Resources:

In my experience, there’s no substitute for a thoughtful critique of your writing. Critique groups can be helpful, if (big if) the right people are in them. A well-qualified writing teacher or freelance editor is probably the gold standard.

If that’s not in the budget for now, find a friend or fellow content creator whose writing you admire and barter in-depth critiques for a task you’re terrific at.

4. Artists seek flow

Most of us have heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, even if we need to refer to Google any time we have to spell his name.

It’s all about that “creative state” — the mental point where time stops and we feel pure creative focus.

For us to find flow, whether it’s in rock climbing, flower arranging, or writing, we have to keep ourselves balanced on the edge between “too hard” and “too easy.”

When it’s too hard, we’re frustrated all the time and our thoughts get cramped. It’s hard to create anything new when you’re just angry with yourself.

When it’s too easy, we either become hacks, cranking out the same tired crap, or we get bored and start to become self-destructive.

The life of an artist is about constantly looking for that edge, and climbing back onto it again and again.

Resource:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(By the way, my best sources for how to pronounce his name say “Me-high Cheek-SENT-me-high.”)

5. Artists ask a lot of questions

Craft is about how skillfully you can express an idea. Art adds interesting questions to that expression.

Craft makes the work pretty. Art makes it meaningful.

Is that the best way? Are there other options we could explore?

It truly doesn’t matter what your topic is. If you ask questions — lots of them — you’ll start to come up with interesting answers.

Questions lead us to new places. They build cathedrals and pyramids and space stations.

Resources:

Some of the most powerful questions you’ll ever answer will come from your audience. You’ll never outgrow the need to listen closely to your audience’s questions.

But in addition to those, consider these:

Why does the world look the way it does today?

What haven’t we thought of yet?

What’s standing so fully in our way that we can’t even see it?

6. Artists value pragmatism

“Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.” – Bert Dodson

In my experience, the stereotype of the “flaky artist” who’s out of touch with reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

If your vacuum cleaner breaks? Don’t throw it into the landfill; call your artist friend. She’ll know how to rewire it, she can resolder the piece that broke off, and she’ll tweak the switch so it’s easier to use.

Of course, she may also paint it deep red with a filigree pattern of pale yellow and silver polka dots, and add a sound system.

Art presents endless opportunities for recycling, rethinking, and pragmatic problem solving.

Lots of us quit the formal practice of problem solving when we stopped doing word problems in math class. Artists solve new problems every time they sit down to work.

Artists understand that it’s not enough to have some grand idea. We have to figure out how to translate that into something other people can see or hear or touch.

Resources:

Our monthly content challenges are designed to give you pragmatic exercises to improve your craft and your creative output. You still have time to complete our creative challenge for January here:

January’s Content Excellence Challenge Prompts

And look for February’s challenges on the blog next week.

7. Artists actively seek an audience

Art begins in self-expression. But at a certain point, we have a deep desire to find an audience for our creative work.

There’s nothing wrong with making art to please yourself. It’s a satisfying way to spend your time.

But when we “go pro” — when we seek an audience — we begin to walk the tightrope between what we intend and what we actually communicate. Between our expression and how the audience sees that expression.

It’s a bit of a zen paradox.

Art is not about you. Also, art is about you.

Some art works well for a small number of people. Some art works well for millions. It’s your job as a creative professional to find the ones who get your message, then find some more people like that.

That’s why it doesn’t make you a “hack” to want to build the audience for your work. When you tell great stories, your stories become your audience’s stories. If a story is powerful enough, it picks up and walks on without you.

Resources:

Helping you find a bigger audience is one of the reasons we’re here. You can snag a juicy library of free content marketing training here, including lots of resources to help you grow your audience and community:

The Copyblogger free content marketing library

And for the rest of this month, we’ll be talking a lot about how art (and craft) will serve your work. February will be a rich month of tutorials, techniques, and inspiration to elevate your content. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in the coming weeks!

The post 7 Real-World Ways to Think Like an Artist for Better Content Marketing appeared first on Copyblogger.

via marketing http://ift.tt/2jvVITu

[marie85marketing]

7 Real-World Ways to Think Like an Artist for Better Content Marketing

Earlier this year, I wrote that I believe art plays a critical role in content marketing.

But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, what does that word “art” really mean?

“I’ll know it when I see it.” – Random critic

For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll define art as an expression that can’t be made by an algorithm. It’s the creative spark, the unusual choice, the flare of personality, the moment of real human empathy and connection.

I believe it’s a serious mistake to think that marketing and art are somehow separate.

As Brian Clark has said for years:

“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.

People who think art is irrelevant and marketing is about tricking people into buying shit they don’t need tend to be terrible marketers and worse human beings.” – Brian Clark, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the Art of Phony Marketing

While I’m defining art, let me go ahead and define marketing: It’s what we communicate that allows us to work with others. Advertising, social strategy, SEO, funnels, automation — they all need to serve that function.

Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that marketing was another word for lies. Don’t buy it.

Smart marketers don’t accept the excuse of “It’s just marketing” to hide the truth or produce crummy work that benefits no one.

Wise marketers embrace art as integral to what they do, as much as strategy and execution are.

Here are some observations I’ve made over the years about how artists work and how anyone can adopt a more artistic mindset.

1. Artists geek out over craft

“Creativity occurs in action: It is not a trait; it is something you do.” – Bert Dodson

Get a group of writers together and you’ll hear a whole lot of geeky talk about structure, language, word choice, metaphor, and the serial comma.

Art is about your unique and personal expression of the world you see around you. But you can’t express what you see and feel until you master your chosen craft.

As a content marketer, you make a living with words. Dive into the disciplines that will teach you how to stitch words together in ways you haven’t tried before.

Study poetry. Study screenwriting. Study short stories. If you’re a podcaster, take an acting class or voice lessons.

The reason an artist’s life is so interesting and rewarding is that you never stop learning. When you master your craft at one level, new levels reveal themselves. The game gets ever more complex and interesting.

Any study of creative writing will benefit you as a content marketer. You’ll learn how to show, not tell. You’ll think more carefully about word choice. And you’ll learn the nuances that make for superb storytelling.

A writing workshop can be a great start, but there are also lots of wonderful books on writing well. Here are just a couple of suggestions — this is far from a complete list.

Resources:

Stephen King’s On Writing

Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

2. Artists protect their productive time

If you pick up a book about the work habits of creative people (I’m a bit obsessed with this topic), you’ll notice something striking.

Nearly all great writers, musicians, painters, and other artists tend to work in well-defined work cycles.

They nearly always have specific times of day set aside for creative work. They protect this time with a ferocity that can border on cruelty.

Often, this time is strictly reserved for what writers call “draft” — the messy, sometimes ugly part of the creative process where we take new ideas and work through them with as much craft as we can manage.

You need to be a bit brutal about protecting this time. That’s more important than it ever was, thanks to the seductive call of so many distractions.

Because, to be honest, a lot of days, this isn’t the fun part. This is the moment when all of those lovely dreams and ideas get turned into unsatisfying reality — on the page, the canvas, or the screen.

It’s where you face the dreaded, “The words on the screen don’t sound like they did in my head.”

The only way most of us ever manage to get anything done is simply to be rather robotic about getting to work. Uninterrupted creative time needs to get blocked into your calendar. You need to defend it — against your own resistance as much as anything else.

Resources:

There are lots of excellent apps that help you defend your productive time. I like the Freedom app to protect me from my own worst habits.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a fascinating look at how different artists have used their time.

3. Artists embrace bad art

If we’re spending time every day creating something that doesn’t match our creative vision, how do we push ourselves to keep showing up?

Artists know that the way to create good art — maybe some day even great art — is to make a whole lot of bad art.

We’re looking for what painters call “brush mileage.” You’ll never be able to paint well until you pull a paintbrush through a certain amount of paint and onto a certain volume of canvas or paper.

We make good sentences by starting with awful sentences.

Writers, in my opinion, have it lucky. We can keep working on a piece until it doesn’t suck. Try that with a watercolor; you won’t be happy.

If we keep working on material that’s appropriately challenging, we’ll keep getting better. At first, your pieces may need a lot of editing time. As you mature creatively, your rewrites might get faster, but you’ll still find that genuinely good work needs the discipline of multiple rewrites.

Resources:

In my experience, there’s no substitute for a thoughtful critique of your writing. Critique groups can be helpful, if (big if) the right people are in them. A well-qualified writing teacher or freelance editor is probably the gold standard.

If that’s not in the budget for now, find a friend or fellow content creator whose writing you admire and barter in-depth critiques for a task you’re terrific at.

4. Artists seek flow

Most of us have heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, even if we need to refer to Google any time we have to spell his name.

It’s all about that “creative state” — the mental point where time stops and we feel pure creative focus.

For us to find flow, whether it’s in rock climbing, flower arranging, or writing, we have to keep ourselves balanced on the edge between “too hard” and “too easy.”

When it’s too hard, we’re frustrated all the time and our thoughts get cramped. It’s hard to create anything new when you’re just angry with yourself.

When it’s too easy, we either become hacks, cranking out the same tired crap, or we get bored and start to become self-destructive.

The life of an artist is about constantly looking for that edge, and climbing back onto it again and again.

Resource:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(By the way, my best sources for how to pronounce his name say “Me-high Cheek-SENT-me-high.”)

5. Artists ask a lot of questions

Craft is about how skillfully you can express an idea. Art adds interesting questions to that expression.

Craft makes the work pretty. Art makes it meaningful.

Is that the best way? Are there other options we could explore?

It truly doesn’t matter what your topic is. If you ask questions — lots of them — you’ll start to come up with interesting answers.

Questions lead us to new places. They build cathedrals and pyramids and space stations.

Resources:

Some of the most powerful questions you’ll ever answer will come from your audience. You’ll never outgrow the need to listen closely to your audience’s questions.

But in addition to those, consider these:

Why does the world look the way it does today?

What haven’t we thought of yet?

What’s standing so fully in our way that we can’t even see it?

6. Artists value pragmatism

“Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.” – Bert Dodson

In my experience, the stereotype of the “flaky artist” who’s out of touch with reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

If your vacuum cleaner breaks? Don’t throw it into the landfill; call your artist friend. She’ll know how to rewire it, she can resolder the piece that broke off, and she’ll tweak the switch so it’s easier to use.

Of course, she may also paint it deep red with a filigree pattern of pale yellow and silver polka dots, and add a sound system.

Art presents endless opportunities for recycling, rethinking, and pragmatic problem solving.

Lots of us quit the formal practice of problem solving when we stopped doing word problems in math class. Artists solve new problems every time they sit down to work.

Artists understand that it’s not enough to have some grand idea. We have to figure out how to translate that into something other people can see or hear or touch.

Resources:

Our monthly content challenges are designed to give you pragmatic exercises to improve your craft and your creative output. You still have time to complete our creative challenge for January here:

January’s Content Excellence Challenge Prompts

And look for February’s challenges on the blog next week.

7. Artists actively seek an audience

Art begins in self-expression. But at a certain point, we have a deep desire to find an audience for our creative work.

There’s nothing wrong with making art to please yourself. It’s a satisfying way to spend your time.

But when we “go pro” — when we seek an audience — we begin to walk the tightrope between what we intend and what we actually communicate. Between our expression and how the audience sees that expression.

It’s a bit of a zen paradox.

Art is not about you. Also, art is about you.

Some art works well for a small number of people. Some art works well for millions. It’s your job as a creative professional to find the ones who get your message, then find some more people like that.

That’s why it doesn’t make you a “hack” to want to build the audience for your work. When you tell great stories, your stories become your audience’s stories. If a story is powerful enough, it picks up and walks on without you.

Resources:

Helping you find a bigger audience is one of the reasons we’re here. You can snag a juicy library of free content marketing training here, including lots of resources to help you grow your audience and community:

The Copyblogger free content marketing library

And for the rest of this month, we’ll be talking a lot about how art (and craft) will serve your work. February will be a rich month of tutorials, techniques, and inspiration to elevate your content. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in the coming weeks!

The post 7 Real-World Ways to Think Like an Artist for Better Content Marketing appeared first on Copyblogger.

[nathandgibsca]

7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist

Earlier this year, I wrote that I believe art plays a critical role in content marketing.

But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, what does that word “art” really mean?

“I’ll know it when I see it.” – Random critic

For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll define art as an expression that can’t be made by an algorithm. It’s the creative spark, the unusual choice, the flare of personality, the moment of real human empathy and connection.

I believe it’s a serious mistake to think that marketing and art are somehow separate.

As Brian Clark has said for years:

“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.

People who think art is irrelevant and marketing is about tricking people into buying shit they don’t need tend to be terrible marketers and worse human beings.” – Brian Clark, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the Art of Phony Marketing

While I’m defining art, let me go ahead and define marketing: It’s what we communicate that allows us to work with others. Advertising, social strategy, SEO, funnels, automation — they all need to serve that function.

Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that marketing was another word for lies. Don’t buy it.

Smart marketers don’t accept the excuse of “It’s just marketing” to hide the truth or produce crummy work that benefits no one.

Wise marketers embrace art as integral to what they do, as much as strategy and execution are.

Here are some observations I’ve made over the years about how artists work and how anyone can adopt a more artistic mindset.

1. Artists geek out over craft

“Creativity occurs in action: It is not a trait; it is something you do.” – Bert Dodson

Get a group of writers together and you’ll hear a whole lot of geeky talk about structure, language, word choice, metaphor, and the serial comma.

Art is about your unique and personal expression of the world you see around you. But you can’t express what you see and feel until you master your chosen craft.

As a content marketer, you make a living with words. Dive into the disciplines that will teach you how to stitch words together in ways you haven’t tried before.

Study poetry. Study screenwriting. Study short stories. If you’re a podcaster, take an acting class or voice lessons.

The reason an artist’s life is so interesting and rewarding is that you never stop learning. When you master your craft at one level, new levels reveal themselves. The game gets ever more complex and interesting.

Any study of creative writing will benefit you as a content marketer. You’ll learn how to show, not tell. You’ll think more carefully about word choice. And you’ll learn the nuances that make for superb storytelling.

A writing workshop can be a great start, but there are also lots of wonderful books on writing well. Here are just a couple of suggestions — this is far from a complete list.

Resources:

Stephen King’s On Writing

Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

2. Artists protect their productive time

If you pick up a book about the work habits of creative people (I’m a bit obsessed with this topic), you’ll notice something striking.

Nearly all great writers, musicians, painters, and other artists tend to work in well-defined work cycles.

They nearly always have specific times of day set aside for creative work. They protect this time with a ferocity that can border on cruelty.

Often, this time is strictly reserved for what writers call “draft” — the messy, sometimes ugly part of the creative process where we take new ideas and work through them with as much craft as we can manage.

You need to be a bit brutal about protecting this time. That’s more important than it ever was, thanks to the seductive call of so many distractions.

Because, to be honest, a lot of days, this isn’t the fun part. This is the moment when all of those lovely dreams and ideas get turned into unsatisfying reality — on the page, the canvas, or the screen.

It’s where you face the dreaded, “The words on the screen don’t sound like they did in my head.”

The only way most of us ever manage to get anything done is simply to be rather robotic about getting to work. Uninterrupted creative time needs to get blocked into your calendar. You need to defend it — against your own resistance as much as anything else.

Resources:

There are lots of excellent apps that help you defend your productive time. I like the Freedom app to protect me from my own worst habits.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a fascinating look at how different artists have used their time.

3. Artists embrace bad art

If we’re spending time every day creating something that doesn’t match our creative vision, how do we push ourselves to keep showing up?

Artists know that the way to create good art — maybe some day even great art — is to make a whole lot of bad art.

We’re looking for what painters call “brush mileage.” You’ll never be able to paint well until you pull a paintbrush through a certain amount of paint and onto a certain volume of canvas or paper.

We make good sentences by starting with awful sentences.

Writers, in my opinion, have it lucky. We can keep working on a piece until it doesn’t suck. Try that with a watercolor; you won’t be happy.

If we keep working on material that’s appropriately challenging, we’ll keep getting better. At first, your pieces may need a lot of editing time. As you mature creatively, your rewrites might get faster, but you’ll still find that genuinely good work needs the discipline of multiple rewrites.

Resources:

In my experience, there’s no substitute for a thoughtful critique of your writing. Critique groups can be helpful, if (big if) the right people are in them. A well-qualified writing teacher or freelance editor is probably the gold standard.

If that’s not in the budget for now, find a friend or fellow content creator whose writing you admire and barter in-depth critiques for a task you’re terrific at.

4. Artists seek flow

Most of us have heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, even if we need to refer to Google any time we have to spell his name.

It’s all about that “creative state” — the mental point where time stops and we feel pure creative focus.

For us to find flow, whether it’s in rock climbing, flower arranging, or writing, we have to keep ourselves balanced on the edge between “too hard” and “too easy.”

When it’s too hard, we’re frustrated all the time and our thoughts get cramped. It’s hard to create anything new when you’re just angry with yourself.

When it’s too easy, we either become hacks, cranking out the same tired crap, or we get bored and start to become self-destructive.

The life of an artist is about constantly looking for that edge, and climbing back onto it again and again.

Resource:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(By the way, my best sources for how to pronounce his name say “Me-high Cheek-SENT-me-high.”)

5. Artists ask a lot of questions

Craft is about how skillfully you can express an idea. Art adds interesting questions to that expression.

Craft makes the work pretty. Art makes it meaningful.

Is that the best way? Are there other options we could explore?

It truly doesn’t matter what your topic is. If you ask questions — lots of them — you’ll start to come up with interesting answers.

Questions lead us to new places. They build cathedrals and pyramids and space stations.

Resources:

Some of the most powerful questions you’ll ever answer will come from your audience. You’ll never outgrow the need to listen closely to your audience’s questions.

But in addition to those, consider these:

Why does the world look the way it does today?

What haven’t we thought of yet?

What’s standing so fully in our way that we can’t even see it?

6. Artists value pragmatism

“Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.” – Bert Dodson

In my experience, the stereotype of the “flaky artist” who’s out of touch with reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

If your vacuum cleaner breaks? Don’t throw it into the landfill; call your artist friend. She’ll know how to rewire it, she can resolder the piece that broke off, and she’ll tweak the switch so it’s easier to use.

Of course, she may also paint it deep red with a filigree pattern of pale yellow and silver polka dots, and add a sound system.

Art presents endless opportunities for recycling, rethinking, and pragmatic problem solving.

Lots of us quit the formal practice of problem solving when we stopped doing word problems in math class. Artists solve new problems every time they sit down to work.

Artists understand that it’s not enough to have some grand idea. We have to figure out how to translate that into something other people can see or hear or touch.

Resources:

Our monthly content challenges are designed to give you pragmatic exercises to improve your craft and your creative output. You still have time to complete our creative challenge for January here:

January’s Content Excellence Challenge Prompts

And look for February’s challenges on the blog next week.

7. Artists actively seek an audience

Art begins in self-expression. But at a certain point, we have a deep desire to find an audience for our creative work.

There’s nothing wrong with making art to please yourself. It’s a satisfying way to spend your time.

But when we “go pro” — when we seek an audience — we begin to walk the tightrope between what we intend and what we actually communicate. Between our expression and how the audience sees that expression.

It’s a bit of a zen paradox.

Art is not about you. Also, art is about you.

Some art works well for a small number of people. Some art works well for millions. It’s your job as a creative professional to find the ones who get your message, then find some more people like that.

That’s why it doesn’t make you a “hack” to want to build the audience for your work. When you tell great stories, your stories become your audience’s stories. If a story is powerful enough, it picks up and walks on without you.

Resources:

Helping you find a bigger audience is one of the reasons we’re here. You can snag a juicy library of free content marketing training here, including lots of resources to help you grow your audience and community:

The Copyblogger free content marketing library

And for the rest of this month, we’ll be talking a lot about how art (and craft) will serve your work. February will be a rich month of tutorials, techniques, and inspiration to elevate your content. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in the coming weeks!

The post 7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist appeared first on Copyblogger.

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[soph28collins]

7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist

Earlier this year, I wrote that I believe art plays a critical role in content marketing.

But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, what does that word “art” really mean?

“I’ll know it when I see it.” – Random critic

For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll define art as an expression that can’t be made by an algorithm. It’s the creative spark, the unusual choice, the flare of personality, the moment of real human empathy and connection.

I believe it’s a serious mistake to think that marketing and art are somehow separate.

As Brian Clark has said for years:

“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.

People who think art is irrelevant and marketing is about tricking people into buying shit they don’t need tend to be terrible marketers and worse human beings.” – Brian Clark, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the Art of Phony Marketing

While I’m defining art, let me go ahead and define marketing: It’s what we communicate that allows us to work with others. Advertising, social strategy, SEO, funnels, automation — they all need to serve that function.

Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that marketing was another word for lies. Don’t buy it.

Smart marketers don’t accept the excuse of “It’s just marketing” to hide the truth or produce crummy work that benefits no one.

Wise marketers embrace art as integral to what they do, as much as strategy and execution are.

Here are some observations I’ve made over the years about how artists work and how anyone can adopt a more artistic mindset.

1. Artists geek out over craft

“Creativity occurs in action: It is not a trait; it is something you do.” – Bert Dodson

Get a group of writers together and you’ll hear a whole lot of geeky talk about structure, language, word choice, metaphor, and the serial comma.

Art is about your unique and personal expression of the world you see around you. But you can’t express what you see and feel until you master your chosen craft.

As a content marketer, you make a living with words. Dive into the disciplines that will teach you how to stitch words together in ways you haven’t tried before.

Study poetry. Study screenwriting. Study short stories. If you’re a podcaster, take an acting class or voice lessons.

The reason an artist’s life is so interesting and rewarding is that you never stop learning. When you master your craft at one level, new levels reveal themselves. The game gets ever more complex and interesting.

Any study of creative writing will benefit you as a content marketer. You’ll learn how to show, not tell. You’ll think more carefully about word choice. And you’ll learn the nuances that make for superb storytelling.

A writing workshop can be a great start, but there are also lots of wonderful books on writing well. Here are just a couple of suggestions — this is far from a complete list.

Resources:

Stephen King’s On Writing

Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

2. Artists protect their productive time

If you pick up a book about the work habits of creative people (I’m a bit obsessed with this topic), you’ll notice something striking.

Nearly all great writers, musicians, painters, and other artists tend to work in well-defined work cycles.

They nearly always have specific times of day set aside for creative work. They protect this time with a ferocity that can border on cruelty.

Often, this time is strictly reserved for what writers call “draft” — the messy, sometimes ugly part of the creative process where we take new ideas and work through them with as much craft as we can manage.

You need to be a bit brutal about protecting this time. That’s more important than it ever was, thanks to the seductive call of so many distractions.

Because, to be honest, a lot of days, this isn’t the fun part. This is the moment when all of those lovely dreams and ideas get turned into unsatisfying reality — on the page, the canvas, or the screen.

It’s where you face the dreaded, “The words on the screen don’t sound like they did in my head.”

The only way most of us ever manage to get anything done is simply to be rather robotic about getting to work. Uninterrupted creative time needs to get blocked into your calendar. You need to defend it — against your own resistance as much as anything else.

Resources:

There are lots of excellent apps that help you defend your productive time. I like the Freedom app to protect me from my own worst habits.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a fascinating look at how different artists have used their time.

3. Artists embrace bad art

If we’re spending time every day creating something that doesn’t match our creative vision, how do we push ourselves to keep showing up?

Artists know that the way to create good art — maybe some day even great art — is to make a whole lot of bad art.

We’re looking for what painters call “brush mileage.” You’ll never be able to paint well until you pull a paintbrush through a certain amount of paint and onto a certain volume of canvas or paper.

We make good sentences by starting with awful sentences.

Writers, in my opinion, have it lucky. We can keep working on a piece until it doesn’t suck. Try that with a watercolor; you won’t be happy.

If we keep working on material that’s appropriately challenging, we’ll keep getting better. At first, your pieces may need a lot of editing time. As you mature creatively, your rewrites might get faster, but you’ll still find that genuinely good work needs the discipline of multiple rewrites.

Resources:

In my experience, there’s no substitute for a thoughtful critique of your writing. Critique groups can be helpful, if (big if) the right people are in them. A well-qualified writing teacher or freelance editor is probably the gold standard.

If that’s not in the budget for now, find a friend or fellow content creator whose writing you admire and barter in-depth critiques for a task you’re terrific at.

4. Artists seek flow

Most of us have heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, even if we need to refer to Google any time we have to spell his name.

It’s all about that “creative state” — the mental point where time stops and we feel pure creative focus.

For us to find flow, whether it’s in rock climbing, flower arranging, or writing, we have to keep ourselves balanced on the edge between “too hard” and “too easy.”

When it’s too hard, we’re frustrated all the time and our thoughts get cramped. It’s hard to create anything new when you’re just angry with yourself.

When it’s too easy, we either become hacks, cranking out the same tired crap, or we get bored and start to become self-destructive.

The life of an artist is about constantly looking for that edge, and climbing back onto it again and again.

Resource:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(By the way, my best sources for how to pronounce his name say “Me-high Cheek-SENT-me-high.”)

5. Artists ask a lot of questions

Craft is about how skillfully you can express an idea. Art adds interesting questions to that expression.

Craft makes the work pretty. Art makes it meaningful.

Is that the best way? Are there other options we could explore?

It truly doesn’t matter what your topic is. If you ask questions — lots of them — you’ll start to come up with interesting answers.

Questions lead us to new places. They build cathedrals and pyramids and space stations.

Resources:

Some of the most powerful questions you’ll ever answer will come from your audience. You’ll never outgrow the need to listen closely to your audience’s questions.

But in addition to those, consider these:

Why does the world look the way it does today?

What haven’t we thought of yet?

What’s standing so fully in our way that we can’t even see it?

6. Artists value pragmatism

“Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.” – Bert Dodson

In my experience, the stereotype of the “flaky artist” who’s out of touch with reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

If your vacuum cleaner breaks? Don’t throw it into the landfill; call your artist friend. She’ll know how to rewire it, she can resolder the piece that broke off, and she’ll tweak the switch so it’s easier to use.

Of course, she may also paint it deep red with a filigree pattern of pale yellow and silver polka dots, and add a sound system.

Art presents endless opportunities for recycling, rethinking, and pragmatic problem solving.

Lots of us quit the formal practice of problem solving when we stopped doing word problems in math class. Artists solve new problems every time they sit down to work.

Artists understand that it’s not enough to have some grand idea. We have to figure out how to translate that into something other people can see or hear or touch.

Resources:

Our monthly content challenges are designed to give you pragmatic exercises to improve your craft and your creative output. You still have time to complete our creative challenge for January here:

January’s Content Excellence Challenge Prompts

And look for February’s challenges on the blog next week.

7. Artists actively seek an audience

Art begins in self-expression. But at a certain point, we have a deep desire to find an audience for our creative work.

There’s nothing wrong with making art to please yourself. It’s a satisfying way to spend your time.

But when we “go pro” — when we seek an audience — we begin to walk the tightrope between what we intend and what we actually communicate. Between our expression and how the audience sees that expression.

It’s a bit of a zen paradox.

Art is not about you. Also, art is about you.

Some art works well for a small number of people. Some art works well for millions. It’s your job as a creative professional to find the ones who get your message, then find some more people like that.

That’s why it doesn’t make you a “hack” to want to build the audience for your work. When you tell great stories, your stories become your audience’s stories. If a story is powerful enough, it picks up and walks on without you.

Resources:

Helping you find a bigger audience is one of the reasons we’re here. You can snag a juicy library of free content marketing training here, including lots of resources to help you grow your audience and community:

The Copyblogger free content marketing library

And for the rest of this month, we’ll be talking a lot about how art (and craft) will serve your work. February will be a rich month of tutorials, techniques, and inspiration to elevate your content. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in the coming weeks!

The post 7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist appeared first on Copyblogger.

from Copyblogger http://www.copyblogger.com/artist-mindset/

[annegalliher]

7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist

Earlier this year, I wrote that I believe art plays a critical role in content marketing.

But what does that actually mean? When you think about it, what does that word “art” really mean?

“I’ll know it when I see it.” – Random critic

For the purposes of this conversation, I’ll define art as an expression that can’t be made by an algorithm. It’s the creative spark, the unusual choice, the flare of personality, the moment of real human empathy and connection.

I believe it’s a serious mistake to think that marketing and art are somehow separate.

As Brian Clark has said for years:

“People who think art is sacred and marketing is dirty tend to be terrible marketers and marginal artists.

People who think art is irrelevant and marketing is about tricking people into buying shit they don’t need tend to be terrible marketers and worse human beings.” – Brian Clark, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and the Art of Phony Marketing

While I’m defining art, let me go ahead and define marketing: It’s what we communicate that allows us to work with others. Advertising, social strategy, SEO, funnels, automation — they all need to serve that function.

Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that marketing was another word for lies. Don’t buy it.

Smart marketers don’t accept the excuse of “It’s just marketing” to hide the truth or produce crummy work that benefits no one.

Wise marketers embrace art as integral to what they do, as much as strategy and execution are.

Here are some observations I’ve made over the years about how artists work and how anyone can adopt a more artistic mindset.

1. Artists geek out over craft

“Creativity occurs in action: It is not a trait; it is something you do.” – Bert Dodson

Get a group of writers together and you’ll hear a whole lot of geeky talk about structure, language, word choice, metaphor, and the serial comma.

Art is about your unique and personal expression of the world you see around you. But you can’t express what you see and feel until you master your chosen craft.

As a content marketer, you make a living with words. Dive into the disciplines that will teach you how to stitch words together in ways you haven’t tried before.

Study poetry. Study screenwriting. Study short stories. If you’re a podcaster, take an acting class or voice lessons.

The reason an artist’s life is so interesting and rewarding is that you never stop learning. When you master your craft at one level, new levels reveal themselves. The game gets ever more complex and interesting.

Any study of creative writing will benefit you as a content marketer. You’ll learn how to show, not tell. You’ll think more carefully about word choice. And you’ll learn the nuances that make for superb storytelling.

A writing workshop can be a great start, but there are also lots of wonderful books on writing well. Here are just a couple of suggestions — this is far from a complete list.

Resources:

Stephen King’s On Writing

Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones

2. Artists protect their productive time

If you pick up a book about the work habits of creative people (I’m a bit obsessed with this topic), you’ll notice something striking.

Nearly all great writers, musicians, painters, and other artists tend to work in well-defined work cycles.

They nearly always have specific times of day set aside for creative work. They protect this time with a ferocity that can border on cruelty.

Often, this time is strictly reserved for what writers call “draft” — the messy, sometimes ugly part of the creative process where we take new ideas and work through them with as much craft as we can manage.

You need to be a bit brutal about protecting this time. That’s more important than it ever was, thanks to the seductive call of so many distractions.

Because, to be honest, a lot of days, this isn’t the fun part. This is the moment when all of those lovely dreams and ideas get turned into unsatisfying reality — on the page, the canvas, or the screen.

It’s where you face the dreaded, “The words on the screen don’t sound like they did in my head.”

The only way most of us ever manage to get anything done is simply to be rather robotic about getting to work. Uninterrupted creative time needs to get blocked into your calendar. You need to defend it — against your own resistance as much as anything else.

Resources:

There are lots of excellent apps that help you defend your productive time. I like the Freedom app to protect me from my own worst habits.

Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a fascinating look at how different artists have used their time.

3. Artists embrace bad art

If we’re spending time every day creating something that doesn’t match our creative vision, how do we push ourselves to keep showing up?

Artists know that the way to create good art — maybe some day even great art — is to make a whole lot of bad art.

We’re looking for what painters call “brush mileage.” You’ll never be able to paint well until you pull a paintbrush through a certain amount of paint and onto a certain volume of canvas or paper.

We make good sentences by starting with awful sentences.

Writers, in my opinion, have it lucky. We can keep working on a piece until it doesn’t suck. Try that with a watercolor; you won’t be happy.

If we keep working on material that’s appropriately challenging, we’ll keep getting better. At first, your pieces may need a lot of editing time. As you mature creatively, your rewrites might get faster, but you’ll still find that genuinely good work needs the discipline of multiple rewrites.

Resources:

In my experience, there’s no substitute for a thoughtful critique of your writing. Critique groups can be helpful, if (big if) the right people are in them. A well-qualified writing teacher or freelance editor is probably the gold standard.

If that’s not in the budget for now, find a friend or fellow content creator whose writing you admire and barter in-depth critiques for a task you’re terrific at.

4. Artists seek flow

Most of us have heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow, even if we need to refer to Google any time we have to spell his name.

It’s all about that “creative state” — the mental point where time stops and we feel pure creative focus.

For us to find flow, whether it’s in rock climbing, flower arranging, or writing, we have to keep ourselves balanced on the edge between “too hard” and “too easy.”

When it’s too hard, we’re frustrated all the time and our thoughts get cramped. It’s hard to create anything new when you’re just angry with yourself.

When it’s too easy, we either become hacks, cranking out the same tired crap, or we get bored and start to become self-destructive.

The life of an artist is about constantly looking for that edge, and climbing back onto it again and again.

Resource:

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(By the way, my best sources for how to pronounce his name say “Me-high Cheek-SENT-me-high.”)

5. Artists ask a lot of questions

Craft is about how skillfully you can express an idea. Art adds interesting questions to that expression.

Craft makes the work pretty. Art makes it meaningful.

Is that the best way? Are there other options we could explore?

It truly doesn’t matter what your topic is. If you ask questions — lots of them — you’ll start to come up with interesting answers.

Questions lead us to new places. They build cathedrals and pyramids and space stations.

Resources:

Some of the most powerful questions you’ll ever answer will come from your audience. You’ll never outgrow the need to listen closely to your audience’s questions.

But in addition to those, consider these:

Why does the world look the way it does today?

What haven’t we thought of yet?

What’s standing so fully in our way that we can’t even see it?

6. Artists value pragmatism

“Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.” – Bert Dodson

In my experience, the stereotype of the “flaky artist” who’s out of touch with reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

If your vacuum cleaner breaks? Don’t throw it into the landfill; call your artist friend. She’ll know how to rewire it, she can resolder the piece that broke off, and she’ll tweak the switch so it’s easier to use.

Of course, she may also paint it deep red with a filigree pattern of pale yellow and silver polka dots, and add a sound system.

Art presents endless opportunities for recycling, rethinking, and pragmatic problem solving.

Lots of us quit the formal practice of problem solving when we stopped doing word problems in math class. Artists solve new problems every time they sit down to work.

Artists understand that it’s not enough to have some grand idea. We have to figure out how to translate that into something other people can see or hear or touch.

Resources:

Our monthly content challenges are designed to give you pragmatic exercises to improve your craft and your creative output. You still have time to complete our creative challenge for January here:

January’s Content Excellence Challenge Prompts

And look for February’s challenges on the blog next week.

7. Artists actively seek an audience

Art begins in self-expression. But at a certain point, we have a deep desire to find an audience for our creative work.

There’s nothing wrong with making art to please yourself. It’s a satisfying way to spend your time.

But when we “go pro” — when we seek an audience — we begin to walk the tightrope between what we intend and what we actually communicate. Between our expression and how the audience sees that expression.

It’s a bit of a zen paradox.

Art is not about you. Also, art is about you.

Some art works well for a small number of people. Some art works well for millions. It’s your job as a creative professional to find the ones who get your message, then find some more people like that.

That’s why it doesn’t make you a “hack” to want to build the audience for your work. When you tell great stories, your stories become your audience’s stories. If a story is powerful enough, it picks up and walks on without you.

Resources:

Helping you find a bigger audience is one of the reasons we’re here. You can snag a juicy library of free content marketing training here, including lots of resources to help you grow your audience and community:

The Copyblogger free content marketing library

And for the rest of this month, we’ll be talking a lot about how art (and craft) will serve your work. February will be a rich month of tutorials, techniques, and inspiration to elevate your content. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in the coming weeks!

The post 7 Real-World Ways to Think and Work Like an Artist appeared first on Copyblogger.