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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      I've run a 1-person small business for nearly a decade now, but I don't think I could do a tech startup. I lack both the ambition and risk appetite, and sufficiently big ideas to base a business on. With fiction I have the reverse problem.

      2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      I have a bunch of sci-fi ideas in draft stage, but am very impatient about learning and practicing the basic storytelling skills 🤬 I have zero interest in telling ordinary non-sci-fi stories 🤣

      6 replies 0 retweets 25 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      Most useful sources for fiction so far: - Impro by Johnstone - The MICE model in Orson Scott Card book - Save the Cat (color by numbers Campbell) - Reading like a writer by Francine Prose - Archetypes for Writers by Jenifer van Bergen Damon Knight: creating short fiction

      5 replies 2 retweets 43 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      In a way, the switch from non-fiction to fiction feels hard in the same way switching from procedural to OO and more structured paradigms felt hard. I never successfully learned OO or declarative styles besides bits and pieces, and never even tried functional.

      3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      This could also be why I found Impro to be the most directly useful in fiction writing attempts. It's a sort of kayfabe non-fiction simulation in your head that you then "report" as fiction. Anything more structured sorta kneecaps me. I'm 10x more pantser than plotter.

      3 replies 0 retweets 14 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      A more practical problem is that fiction basically takes 10x more time per word than non-fiction of comparable quality (and poetry takes 100x more time per word). So I just don't have the time to produce the volume I need to tell the stories I have drafted :D

      4 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      A general heuristic for any kind of writing is that it's like weight training. Your highest volume output (like say your newsletter or blog) is generally at about 70% your one-rep max quality. Which means you have to overtrain your target zone.

      1 reply 3 retweets 26 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      If you want to write blog quality nonfiction, train on journal level writing for ORM. If you want to write genre fiction, train on literary fiction for ORM. If you want to write literary fiction, train on poetry for ORM. If you want to write poetry, get an undemanding real job.

      2 replies 0 retweets 28 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      This fits the business vs. tech startup analogy. A regular, non-innovation small business like a coffee shop or restaurant takes MORE raw hard work to run profitably because you lack innovation leverage. But it trains you.

      2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      I have a couple of decent stories on ribbonfarm, but the easiest fiction I've written is actually a flow-hack... on @artofgig where half the issues are kinda silly didactic fiction around an absurdist consultant world. It's mediocre quality, but the thing is it flowed out easily.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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      I probably have about a novella worth of words there, like 20k. I have the final chapter to write, after which a winter project is editing the whole thing into an ebook, which will be my first kinda-fiction book. We'll see how it goes.

      1:22 PM - 23 Nov 2020
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      • Lorah Rahul Ramchandani Albert Based Prophet of the Lethe River Nick Parker ᚛ᚄᚔ ᚓᚌᚐᚅ᚜
      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          The frontispiece of Reality Hunger by David Shields quotes the best line on fiction I've ever read: "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one." I don't care about "great" but I find that genre-creative-destruction is where words flow easiest for me.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          My art of gig yakverse fiction may not be great, but it does dissolve/invent a genre -- absurdist consultant fiction with elements of sci-fi and fantasy but base content being basic airport-business-book style business ideas. It's the only one of it's kind I know of.

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          Also bits of murder mystery. There's such a thing as consultant fiction but afaik I'm the only one who's gone down this particular genre-bending bunnytrail.

          3 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          One of my suspicions is that for my more ambitious drafts that I want to put more work into, the unblocking move will be finding the genre-busting tweak. Right now, the drafts are pretty much pure-paradigm sci-fi plots.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          In my first flirtation with fiction ~20y ago (which I've since deleted from online), the flow-inducing mashup was first-person regular fiction + cookbooks + lyric books. I had segments with literal recipes and song fragments in them. Again not great, but it flowed.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          Dunno about the rest of you, but for me flow is key. If the words don't flow at near the physical limit of typing speed and physical endurance, it's not working for me. Until I can unlock that flow rate, the writing lacks both quantity and quality of words. Minimum viable flow.

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Nov 23
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          Ground-truthing this thread... I've written probably a couple of million words of non-fiction, and maybe 50k words of fiction in my life (publicly published that is). I've never directly made money off fiction though. Art of gig doesn't count since it is a nonfiction trojan horse

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        9. End of conversation

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