Recently in Conversations about Creativity Category

In which Tobin talks about mechanical art and what makes for a great toy, and shares ruminations from a Muppet colloquium.

Welcome to the second part of this interview with toy inventor/Director of Exhibit Development Adam Tobin. If you haven't already, be sure to also check out Part One.

On the Web: The Exploratorium; Wordle preview

Cecil Vortex: I read that you also create mechanical art. What's that work like?

Adam Tobin: After I sold the first toy company, I had a few larger-scale projects I'd always wanted to pursue. The first thing I wanted to make was a clock that told time with rolling marbles. I'd wanted to make it since I was a kid. And I started making it and ended up making a few other contraption-type pieces. It was just such a joy for me, after years of designing things to be mass produced to say, "I'm just going to make one, and I'm not as concerned about how you can make 10,000 of these." In essence, they were very large one-of-a-kind toys.

CV: Do you still work on those projects?

In which Tobin talks about growing up as a child-inventor, the Exploratorium workflow, and the challenges of summoning an "ah-ha!" moment on a deadline.

Bio: Adam Tobin is the Director of Exhibit Development at San Francisco’s famed Exploratorium. Before that he was an entrepreneur and an award-winning toy inventor whose creations included Frigits, Getups, Tub Tunes Water Flutes and Drums, and SuperFort. His creations are sold around the world and have been featured in New York Magazine, Discover Magazine, CBS Morning News, Fox News, CNN, Regis and Kelly Ripa, and the New York Times.

This is the first half of a two-part interview. Jump here for the second half.

On the Web: The Exploratorium; Wordle preview

Cecil Vortex: Do you remember your first invention?

Adam Tobin: I started as an electronics tinkerer. I made a burglar alarm to keep my sister out of my room. I took an old car radio that had been abandoned from one of the old family cars and got inside it and wired up quadraphonic sound in my bedroom. I began making wooden toys when I was young as well, like whirligig and rolling marble toys.

CV: Were you raised in a family of inventors, or was it something you got into on your own?

AT: I don't know where it came from. My father can't pick up a hammer.... For some reason, with me, I was just a tinkerer from the get-go.

CV: How did your parents respond?

Photo credit: Chelsea Hadley.

In which Reinhardt talks about why she rarely uses her notebook, how her first book may have been the easiest to write, and getting a sixteen-year-old to translate into IM.

Dana Reinhardt is the author of three novels for young adults. Her most recent book, How to Build a House (Random/Lamb, 2008), tells the story of a resilient teen who leaves her split family and life on the coast for a summer in Tennessee. Reinhardt's pre-novel-writing experience includes working in the foster care system, fact-checking for a movie magazine, working for PBS' Frontline, and time spent as a reader for a young adult line at a mass-market paperback house.

We chatted by phone eons ago (she's very patient). I read through the conversation last month while simultaneously attempting to tackle a novel during NaNoWriMo, and her words rang so true -- there's great advice here for artists of all stripes, and especially for writers.

Dana Reinhardt on the web: danareinhardt.net

Cecil Vortex: Do you have a writing routine you hold to?

Dana Reinhardt: I do. I try my best to stick to writing every workday. It's a bonus if I do any writing on a weekend. I try to write Monday through Friday as if I had a real job. My goal for each day can change but in general, my rule is that my workday's not done until I have three pages, which is roughly 1,000 words, maybe a little less. So it's somewhere in there. I generally don't let myself off the hook until I've done that. And sometimes I can do that in 40 minutes, and sometimes it takes me ten hours. But I try to have that done every single day.

CV: Is there an outline you work off?

DR: I don't work with outlines. I know a lot of people do, but I don't. I mean, I know where I'm headed, usually. Before each book so far that I've written, I know generally the arc of the story and how I want it to end. And sometimes I'll have certain things I have an idea that I want to have happen halfway through. But in general, for me, the fun about writing is finding out what happens between the beginning and the end of the story.

CV: Do you try to get a first draft out and then go back and revise? Or do you tend to polish as you go?

I posted an interview this evening over on the O'Reilly digital media site with Jesse Thorn, the host of "The Sound of Young America" (an excellent radio show that's distributed by Public Radio International.)

Thorn's launching an intimate convention/vacation/education/entertainment extravaganza this summer called MaxFunCon. Most of the conversation was about that event -- where the idea came from, what the focus is, why it won't feature half-naked pictures of Dane Cook.

At the end, he shared a bit about how he gets stuff done that I thought would make a nice addition to the About Creativity interviews on this site:

MaxFunCon bills itself as, among other things, "a convocation of awesome people who seek to become more awesome." In your own life, is there anything you've found that helps you achieve more awesomeness?

Jesse Thorn: When I was just out of college, I couldn't get a job. I was really depressed about it, and I had been trying to get a radio job. But I couldn't even get any job. It was really horrible. I was applying for retail jobs and not getting them.

I was really down, and I was thinking, "Why am I driving back and forth to Santa Cruz, an hour-and-a-half from San Francisco?" At the time, I didn't have a car, so I was driving back and forth in my mom's car. I thought to myself, "I should just quit doing this. There's no reason I'm doing this."

And I talked to my now wife/then girlfriend, Theresa. And she said, "Well, you don't do anything else," and I thought, "Yeah, that's true, I don't do anything else. Maybe I should keep doing this." [laughter] And it has been the regular demands of making sure that I'm doing something that has backed me into a corner in order to be creative and think of new things. The fact that I have to make a radio show every week. For many years I did it when I had a real, regular day-to-day job, and now it is my job. The fact that I have to think of new stuff to connect me with people. It's sort of boring, but it's that backed-into-a-wall state where I'm able to be creative.

I'm a very harshly self-critical person. To be honest, I'm a very harshly critical person in general. [laughter] Which I think is one of the reasons why I find improv so beneficial. I'm only able to really create when I have to. So I've set up my life so that I do have to.

And the things that I have to do are things that I love to do, so it works out.

So-called Bill and I have recently started posting about digital creativity over at digitalmedia under The Creative Beat. This subsite is an extension (an outgrowth? a spur?) of the interviews you've found over over here, with a little more focus on things-tech.

Last week, SCB had a fun post on Eno's Oblique Strategies and where they can be found online. And mere moments ago, I added a chat with Craig Schwartz the co-founder of toonlet.com, a neat site that makes it easy peasy for folks to make cartoons. Drop by when ya get a chance....
-Cecil

I've recently started blogging about things-creativity-and-tech at work. Using my own name even. My other own name.

Before too long, there should be an actual brand-new creativity subsite I can link to, but for now, it's more like a post here and there. Today's entry: Dr. Horrible and the Future of Entertainment, which reveals why Doogie Howser is the man of tomorrow.

Welcome to the second part of this interview with Blizzard VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen. If you haven't already read the first part of this interview, be sure to check it out to hear about the power of spinning ideas, and how Metzen got his big break on a bar napkin.

Chris Metzen on the Web: Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, Sons of the Storm

Cecil Vortex: What do you think are the ingredients of good storytelling in computer games?

Chris Metzen: You definitely want "show -- don't tell." And it's difficult in interactive spaces because "showing" usually means it's very keyed into specific art resources or the way your game engine works. Also, more often than not, you don't want to stick the player with minutes worth of exposition. Ultimately, it's a video game and people are conditioned to want push buttons or click their mouse. Whether they're playing Pac-Man or Half Life 2 or World of Warcraft, they want to feel like they're in the driver's seat -- that's the difference between the interactive medium and film, for instance. In film you're pretty much a captive audience. You're going to sit there for two hours and experience what the writer and the director and the actors want you to experience. You have very little say in the matter other than how you process it after the fact, right?…. [So] even if we take control away from you for a couple of minutes to show a pre-rendered cinematic, or a cinematic sequence that shows the next story note unfolding, we want to get people back into the action as soon as possible. And that determines the way your story unfolds. You have to tell it in bite-sized chunks because you know that control must resume for the player pretty soon.

CV: How do you typically kick ideas off?

Welcome! This interview is part of an ongoing series of chats with artists about their creative process. You can find the full set of interviews, including musicians Adrian Belew and Jonathan Coulton, writer Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), cartoonist Dan Piraro, and comic book creator Matt Wagner all at about-creativity.com. You can also subscribe to future interviews here. Thanks a lot for dropping by, -Cecil

Chris Metzen is the Vice President of Creative Development at Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the beloved Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo series of PC games. These are the blockbusters of the PC gaming world, famous for their rich worlds, near flawless gameplay, and graphics and audio that pull the player in and don't let go. World of Warcraft, the company's popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), and its expansion packs, have been the best-selling PC games for 2005, 2006, and 2007. WoW currently has 10 million subscribers worldwide.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. Be sure to also check out Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft: Of Blood and Honor, Sons of the Storm

Cecil Vortex: How do you explain to nongamers what you do for a living?

Chris Metzen: My core responsibility is coming up with the worlds our games take place in. And over time, the worlds are becoming the game, strangely enough.

When I started out in this racket about fourteen years ago, we were making war games. Essentially, you're playing through a sequence of maps with this virtual army you build over time. It was my job not only to create the single-player component of the game -- the storyline that you ultimately track through in these ongoing wars -- but also to just kind of create the universe behind the game so that when you weren't actually playing, you might still be chewing on these concepts or characters or places that you'd experienced.

CV: What were some of your big influences growing up?

CM: Well, figure that everyone in the industry just loved Star Wars. Star Wars created a monster. But I think what shaped the monster [for me] ultimately was a mix between Dungeons & Dragons and comic books. Those were my absolute loves, as most geeks around here will probably repeat. I'm more a comic geek than anything else, honestly. I still have about a thirty-dollar habit per week. It's gotten bad; I need a twelve-step program. I even still buy Marvel. So I just grew up with serial storytelling. Every week you could go to the store and see somebody's latest adventure. That template -- the way comics unfold over time -- had a really big impact on me.

I loved D&D -- I loved the big worlds, the big spanning themes, the big epic quests, the unfolding settings with ancient civilizations and ancient secrets coming back to haunt the present. I loved all that. I love mythology. And somehow, as a little kid, comics was the conveyance system -- the media that really captured my imagination…. There was continuity, high drama, threads from beyond space and time. There were threads from the past. There were gods walking the earth. Everything I wanted to have my head in was right there.

CV: Did you create your own comics?

Photo credit: Nancy Bellen.

Ianthe Brautigan was born in San Francisco at the tail-end of the Beat Era. Her book You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir (St. Martin's Press, 2000), recently optioned for a movie, chronicles her life growing up as the daughter of poet and novelist Richard Brautigan and grappling with his suicide in 1984. Her work has appeared in Cartwheels on The Faultline, The Poet’s Eye: A Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Antioch Review, and will appear in Confrontations. She's taught at Sonoma State University and lives in Northern California, where she's currently working on a novel.

Ianthe Brautigan on the Web: Red Room, You Can't Catch Death

Cecil Vortex: What sort of writing had you done before you started working on your memoir?

Ianthe Brautigan: I was actually a Theater Arts major, and I was going to the Junior College, and I fell in love with my English 1A class and ended up writing nonfiction essays. At that point I realized that I was going to be torn between the two worlds, and I decided to choose writing. I still went to New York and worked for Roundabout Theatre and was in the theater world and toyed with that for a little while. And then I came back to Sonoma County and really started writing in earnest and did all the things that writers do -- I took creative writing courses and did workshops and worked with Robin Beeman, who's in the county and is absolutely phenomenal. I got my undergrad in English Literature at Sonoma State, which was the best thing I could have ever done…. You need to read a lot of stuff and get an idea of what's going on. Then I got my MFA at San Francisco State University, and I don't recommend that for everybody.

Going back to my memoir, God, I had started that in the form of poetry right after my dad died. And I'm a terrible poet. But I wrote a prose poem and Don Emblen read it and he said, "You're onto it -- this is what you should be doing; stay away from that poetry stuff." [laughter] And I began writing about my dad. And as you might imagine, it took a long time.

CV: Was the transition from short stories to poetry to memoir writing difficult, or did you feel like you were finding your natural genre?

IB: I think it's important to try all sorts of stuff. I love writing short stories. I've written a novella. I think that in memoir and nonfiction writing, you're using the craft of fiction writing. In fact, a lot of what makes, I think, a good memoir is that it has a lot of fictive elements, except it's based on truth.

CV: Can you elaborate on that -- how fiction-writing techniques can play a role in memoir writing?

Photo credit: Jefferson Pitcher.

Keri Smith is an author/illustrator turned guerilla artist. She is the author and illustrator of several activity books aimed at jump-starting creativity, including Wreck This Journal (2007, Penguin Books), The Guerilla Art Kit (2007, Princeton Architectural Press), Living Out Loud (2003, Chronicle Books), and Tear Up This Book!: The Sticker, Stencil, Stationery, Games, Crafts, Doodle, And Journal Book For Girls! (2005, American Girl).

As a freelance illustrator she's worked for a variety of clients, including Random House, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Ford Motor Co., the Boston Globe, and Hallmark. In the last few years she's lectured and run workshops on the topic of living creatively for the HOW Design Conference, U.C. Davis, and schools across North America.

Keri Smith on the Web: Keri Smith.com, The Wish Jar

Cecil Vortex: What got you started making creativity books?

Keri Smith: I've been trying to figure this out for myself. For some reason I cannot stop making activity books based on the subject of creativity. I seem to be obsessed with it, even though I will admit that I get tired of talking about it directly and would rather just have people do something (as opposed to talking about doing something) -- a conundrum for an author, yes?

I can tell you a few things that I know about it in list form (just because I like lists):

1. My medium is most definitely books. I have been obsessed with books my whole life and worked in bookstores for years. As a child I had a favorite activity book (called Good Times) that I think had a lot to do with forming my creative brain.
2. I love the idea of creating books that give people more of a direct experience with life instead of walking through it passively. Get up out of your chair and take a look at things around you for crying out loud! Turn off the TV and use your brain cells before they deteriorate completely! There is no time to waste. Aren't we all just aching for a bit of adventure? It's all there in various forms. It's just about a conscious decision to "tune in." My books are just a little reminder of why and how to do this (for myself too).
3. I am drawn to experimenting (in various forms). My favorite artists and authors are often those who are "playing," trying things, not necessarily succeeding at them, but seeing where an idea takes you. This concept of play comes up constantly for me and is in large part the foundation for all of my work. To truly conduct an experiment, you must not know where you are headed. It can be scary at times, but that fear is what excites me about it. What happens when I try "this"? A direct confrontation with the UNKNOWN. It is such a great metaphor for life because none of us truly know where we are headed. We can try to control it but at a deep level we aren't ever really in control.
4. My family life growing up was not about taking risks (make sure you have all your bases covered, don't attempt things unless you know what the outcome will be, take the safe route). I think in part my life/creative work is a form of rebellion against this and about choosing to do the opposite in a given situation to see what happens. I had to learn to trust in my ability to deal with whatever comes up in the moment. And guess what? You really can deal with "whatever comes up." You are much stronger and more creative than you think. But you have to jump off a cliff all the time to figure that out. Every time I do, I learn how amazing a feeling it is. There is nothing that can hurt you in this. Fear of taking risks is a fear of living.
5. For a while now I have enjoyed working with the concepts of imperfection and impermanence (the Japanese refer to it as wabi-sabi). I think this concept is quite rare in Western culture, which seems obsessed with making things as perfect as possible -- technology, bodies (plastic surgery), mechanization of life, etc.

So I see the books as another way to present the idea of embracing imperfections and actually incorporating them into your process (Wreck This Journal is a good example of this). I guess what I am saying here is that books are a way to share my philosophies and get some different ideas out into the culture at large. At some level I enjoy the thought of taking ideas from some slightly edgier artists and thinkers and incorporating them into my work so that a new audience can experience them.

CV: Can you talk a little bit more about play and how that shows up in your creative process?