🤷 Inneresting #140 - Make good choices!

Every story, every page, every word requires decisions.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill

– Rush, “Freewill”

Writing means making choices. As we covered in this week’s rebroadcast, decision fatigue is real. So what are some ways for writers to grapple with the pressure to keep making good choices?

Julie Duffy suggests remembering that writing is non-destructive and iterative. If you make a decision you don’t like, you can go back and fix it later! What if you’re stuck choosing which idea to pursue? Leigh Anne Jasheway checks in with other writers for strategies on finding a clear winner in a list of potential projects.

Writers work with the anticipation that people will read their words—that doesn’t mean you have to give those imagined readers and their approval power over your decisions. Oliver Burkeman wants you to take back the power in your decision making process.

What about editing? NaNoWriMo’s Grant Faulkner offers some tips on how to hunker down and make decisions about what to do with your next draft. David Moldawer prefers a punch list—planning out your potential edits before you start making changes so you can see the big picture.

Even if you’ve figured out what you’re writing, there’s still the questions of when to do it and how to stay on task. Patrick Rhone argues that locking in when to do things is as important as deciding what you’re doing. Matt Might takes a deep dive into why avoiding temptations (like distraction) isn’t a single act of willpower, but a process of effectively separating yourself from less desirable actions.

Lex Friedman makes a case that there’s no perfect system, and sometimes you just need to pick one thing and start.

Let’s end on a musical note: Mister Rogers sings a song about the importance of choosing to do something instead of just thinking about it, and a reminder that sometimes we need to accept that failure is part of growth. It’s an anti-perfectionism bop.

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It doesn’t need to be perfect

Be like Fred Rogers and start getting those ideas out of your head and onto the page.

Join us in our weekly Write Sprint thread to meet your Substack neighbors and encourage each other to keep going!

What’s a Write Sprint?

John wrote up an explanation, but here’s the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.

Shout out to recent Sprinters Skaana, Brian Matusz, Marc-o-vision Studios, John Harvey, Callum Saunders, Aimee Link, and Sampelior.

Click here to join in!

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For Your Consideration: Weekend Read 2 Beta

The original Weekend Read made it easier to read screenplays on an iPhone. Now we’re preparing to launch a sequel!

Anyone with an iOS or iPadOS device can use TestFlight to download a copy of this app in progress. Your feedback helps speed up the process of getting the best version of this app to the App Store.

And you can test it out using a library of For Your Consideration scripts from this year’s Academy Awards nominees! You’ll find a library of these scripts under the Discover tab in the app.

Download the beta through TestFlight and let us know what you think!

We’re continuing to refine the new features, and your feedback is a huge help!

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Previously on Inneresting…

In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link the Writer Emergency Pack site offers 7 tips for crafting unforgettable villains.

Other Inneresting Things…

• Lane Brown has some words about the poor performance of movie theater projection.

“If a movie theater can’t perform its most basic function and deliver a sharp, well-lit image with the right colors and contrast, then we might as well knock it down and put up a bank.”

• Facundo Iglesia and Lucía Cholakian Herrera investigate the connection between social media influencers and an increase in pregnant Russians immigrating to Argentina since the start of the war in Ukraine.

• Maria Popova takes a closer look at Hannah Arendt’s writing about Saint Augustine’s ideas about love and loss. How love is something that takes place in the present, and how the desire for love becomes the fear of losing it if one focuses on trying to hold on.

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Reading the room

NOAH EVSLIN @nevslin

Brief 🧵 on finding a rep. There used to be a time where just having one or two great samples would get you repped. Now it’s so competitive that you need to have what a call “a +1”. (As always, there are exceptions and ymmv.) /1

@deweyteevee#nickelodeon #allthat #universalstudios #orlando #themeparks #tourguide #gak #slime #the90s #oldtelevision

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And that’s what’s inneresting this week!

Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.

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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Twitter @ccsont, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art