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I was zooming around the Internet the other day and I stumbled across a site called Change This. It’s another creation from marketing expert Seth Godin.
This site, which he launched with Amit Gupta — the wunderkind behind The Daily Jolt — is an attempt to leverage the power of Web 2.0 … maybe not so much to be a vehicle for social change as much as a powerful method of spreading ideas. Not unknown territory for Godin.
So what does this have to do with writing or reading?
Besides that the site is chock full of written stuff ripe for the reading, I found one of the pieces there, called The Simplicity Cycle, to be a stunning read. In a nutshell, the author, Dan Ward, says that reaching “goodness,” as he calls it, is the result of first adding complexity to a process or system or product … but only to a point.
If you look at an X-Y axis, with Complexity falling along the Y-axis and Goodness along the X-axis, Simplicity appears where the two points intersect at zero. Goodness — which increases as you move horizontally along the X-axis, can only be reached by adding complexity.
However, there comes a point where too much complexity forces the process into a state of complicatedness, for lack of a better word. Not only that, but the usual corrective response is to continue to add more complexity.
Ward says the only way to achieve optimum — if not maximum — goodness is to deliberately strip out complexity. In other words, you gotta simplify once the complexity reaches critical mass. If you don’t you’re hosed.
So, again, what does this have to do with reading or writing? As for the reading part, not much. But the writing part, to me, is obvious. Often, struggling or new writers spend too much time planning and plotting and making things more complicated than they need to be.
In essence, they’ve reached complixity critical mass and the process of writing or the story itself gets forced into the complicatedness zone. Once that happens, according to Ward, innovation — what we writers call creativity — gets stymied. The secret is to strip the complexity away.
How many writing books about how to break writer’s block tell us to “just write through it”? Exactly. That act in itself is a form of simplifying. It’s just writing for the sake of writing.
So what if none of what pours out is usable? Even though some of that output will be usable, the point is to break from the forced complicatedness.
Right now I’m at a spot in a short story I’m working on where I can’t bring stuff together. Yes … it’s too complicated. It’s also in need of some dramatic conflict and a better definition of the protagonist’s big desire, but that’s another post.
Reading Ward’s manifesto — as Change This calls their articles — reinforces to me what I’ve known all along.
Tags: books, goodness, reading, writer
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks so much for the kind words about my Simplicity Cycle! I’m glad to hear it resonated!
I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, and am always happy to see it being discussed & applied in new and interesting ways.
Cool association! It’s funny, as a colleague of Dan, I’ve been encouraged to write more myself. And this is exactly what he tells me when I can’t think of stuff to write. What’s more is that he fancies himself a writr too, even though that’s not his “real” profession. But in the course of writing and mentoring me, he has exposed me to all kinds of ideas such as the concept of Apophenia-the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data (the late Col John Boyd was a master). So I’ve been trying to write about this; about relating seamingly unrelatable ideas becasue I think it the essence of creativity. And low and behold, you do that very thing by linking writing with his manifesto. Isn’t it crazy how so many things intersect.
-Gabe