Update and Writing Advice

Long ago I read the writing advice that every sentence should do at least three things at once, and aspire to more. If all you do is say what happens next, the sentence isn't worthwhile. If at the same time it also evokes the mood of the setting, implies new information about a character, and is a pleasure to read because it is funny, clever, deep, or beautiful, now you're talking.

What I mean to say is that my script writing process reflects no special talents, I'm just stubborn and meticulous and have the luxury of being able to take the time to edit until all my sentences do multiple things.

For Metachirality part 2, last week I was struggling with how (or what) to include all the prerequisite information. I want to quickly review what is chirality, what are the common transformations and symmetries, what "meta" as a prefix means, etc. A first draft might contain just simply defining those thing, but merely defining things often loses the folks who already know them and is a chore for those who don't.

You might notice that almost every time I need to define or review a concept in a video I have multiple things going on at once. I'm not just defining, I'm making it part of a story or thought process, it is written in a way that shows personality, and it also often involves making a joke or observation about the thing at the same time. Then it is voice acted in character, and of course there's the visuals too!

To get more specific, I often use the narrative device of saying "you know such and such, and so get to thinking about how so and so connects to yadda." That's a story about a character who thinks that way and makes those connections. It works if you already know the things, and it works if you don't. 

The better I'm doing my job, the more you feel the motivation why the character knows what they know, and why they're thinking along the path they're thinking. "Doodling in Math Class" is a device that allows me to establish a character, mood, setting, voice, motivation, and art style, all within two seconds. I can do so many things at once! No wonder I've reused it so much!

The longer I work on a video the more depth I can give the writing and visuals so that different people can hop on to whatever wavelength they're feeling at the moment. Some folks are experts in the topic who follow all the math references, know what they imply, and enjoy taking the opportunity to think through to deeper connections. Some folks are struggling to understand something new for the first time. Some folks want to connect with the feeling of thinking something through, enjoying the overarching idea without sweating the details. Some folks just like the metaphorical connections and existential implications, or just like the jokes and references. Some folks enjoy zoning out and letting the cadence of my voice wash over them. Some folks want to watch pretty visuals and mute the narration. 

All those possible experiences work to the extent that I take the time to make them work.

I like to think that making videos takes me ten times longer than other people because each video I make is ten videos at once.

Anyway, all I wanted to do in this quick update was a few things at once: give a little insight into my work process, which I hope might also be useful writing advice, plus give context to a progress update, and of course excuse the slowness of my work to you who fund it, while really mostly soothing my own anxiety that no one ever thinks I do enough.

But this afternoon I'm feeling pretty good! We've got a bunch of new folks since last week who I assume saw the call for patrons at the end of the last video (hello good humans!) and I'm optimistic that when the final figures for the month come in we'll see a bit of growth for the first time this year. I'll feel much better once we're trending in the right direction!

Oh, right, the point of the long writing-advice-style intro was that today I've finally got a draft of Metachirality Part 2 that I'm happy with. It felt like a super long time even though it's only been a week since Metachirality 1 came out, but these videos are supposed to be a little simpler and more didactic than what I mostly go for these days. Only 5 things at once instead of 10. So I wanted to believe it might be super fast!

But it'll still be pretty fast. Last week I was really struggling with how to reintroduce the concepts that needed to be reintroduced in a way that simultaneously grew the story, character, humor, etc. Then I got a little distracted by the Zuckerberg hearings (which I watched in their entirety and with complete focus and full of thoughts and worries and have I mentioned I spend a lot of time thinking about social media systems and democracy?***) But today I worked  out the big problems in the script and have a good draft. Still needs editing but should be straight forward from here on out, done by the end of the week.

Ok! In Lens news, it's still buggy and I had a lot of cascading upload failure this weekend. Currently reinstalling Patreon for the second time today.

And finally, M and I are attempting our first livestream tomorrow (Tues April 17) at 5pm pacific. For now it's limited to $9.99+ patrons (on either of our channels) partly to limit the damage if we fail entirely, and put less pressure on the learning process. My ideal would be if we have a limited livestream and then put an edited version out to a larger audience (that is family friendly, for example, whereas our live version may not be). Not sure how realistic that is though. 

Ok! That's enough updates for today, thanks for being here and hope to share a video with you soon :D

Vi

*I had to struggle to edit out terrible jokes about the facebook hearing from the metachirality script... I mean, you're familiar with the "meta" prefix from words like "metadata", and Zuckerburg never metadata he didn't like, while congress apparently never metadata at all....

**Uh and if you missed my writing on social media systems and democracy, here's from 2015: http://vihart.com/social-media-systems-and-democracy/ but seriously even in 2012 I would loudly complain to anyone who'd listen that targeted advertising algorithms were contributing to the downfall of society (well, mostly in response to folks telling me I was crazy not to run ads on my channel. WHO'S CRAZY NOW, EH?).