Brad isn't clever. 30 minutes. Unfiltered. Every day. Rinse. Repeat.

Tonight, I pick the torch back up. Rather than the usual Explosions in the Sky soundtrack, I’ve opted for one of the more instrumental Broken Social Scene albums. We’ll see if there is a noticeable difference. I’m a bit more inclined to pay attention to some of the awesome songs I like. For instance, I forgot how magical the intro to “KC Accidental” sounds live. I’ve seen Broken Social Scene thrice, and they always put on a good show. I heard they kicked some major ass at the Arts & Crafts showcase during SXSW this year.

I found my time at SXSW Interactive/Film, and thus time off from work and these daily writing exercises, to be quite inspiring. I tried to attend Interactive panels that I found both intriguing and non insanely technical. I managed to sit in on one very technical panel (HTML 5 Video) and I was lost for part of it. I found panels on design to be highly entertaining, surprisingly. I guess the concepts just translate well to anything. While there are specifics that apply to large web-based platforms, those core concepts can be extracted and interpreted through various lenses. I found a Film panel on Title Design in movies and that was also FANTASTIC.

I’ve always appreciated film title sequences, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an opportunity to sit down and learn about them. It was great to see two experts in the craft share their insights and inspirations. I was able to appreciate the sequences with greater depth and view them critically. The next time you see a romantic comedy or an action sequence, watch the title sequence and think to yourself, “What kind of movie does this title sequence seem to portray?” It’s easy to see with something like Mission: Impossible or the Bond films, in my opinion. The Pixar films always have amazing and imaginative title sequences, but it’s hard to classify their films beyond animated adventures.

I also saw several films I enjoyed and caught up on a bit of extracurricular reading. I’m only 60% or so through “REWORK” by the founders of 37 Signals, but I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s a lovely collection of short essays and illustrations. In true 37 Signals style, they gathered up a great amount of useful material, boiled it down to its core concepts and presented it in a simple yet elegant format. The essays are very compelling.

To paraphrase one of these essays, the authors encourage readers to act like curators in a museum. Museums typically have giant stockpiles and warehouses filled with art to display, but they don’t display it all. Most of it is kept out of sight. Curators make important decisions to show only a fraction of the content. What’s shown is just as important as what isn’t shown.

I love that concept. If you write a 700 page book and throw in every idea you’ve ever had, it’s going to suck. It’s going to be overwhelming and hard to appreciate each individual element. Rather than drown in the sea, cut it down. If you’re a comedy writer, you can’t shoehorn 7000 jokes into a set. You’ve got to pick and choose. Content generation is one talent, but content selection is just as important these days.

I like to think of these writing samples as filling my warehouse. I’m not trying to curate things yet. A year from now, I imagine I won’t like everything I’ve written here. Undoubtedly, I’ll be able to select any entry at random and edit it down to a more presentable format. Beyond that, I’ll probably find only a handful of my entries worthy of editing and presenting in another format.

This goes along with what I’ve written before and what I’ve heard people like Hurwitz say over and over again: before you can offer people your best work, you have to create a lot of crap. Hurwitz hated his first few spec scripts. He probably didn’t like many after that. But I know I’d feel better submitting a teleplay to the film festival I’ve selected if I had several to choose from. The only real way to prove mastery of a field is to do it yourself again and again. Each time, you learn. You can take those skills and apply them to future works or retroactively edit previous works.

It’s just a matter of pushing out products. You can tidy them up and edit them down later. In order to get there, you have to create something to work with. This is where I suffer as a perfectionist. I’d rather not write three crummy teleplays. I’m sure anyone would prefer to just write one great one if they had to choose. But life doesn’t work that way. You have to get in there and get your hands dirty… often.

I saw a documentary called SATURDAY NIGHT during SXSW and it reminded me a lot of this idea. The film followed the cast of Saturday Night Live around for a week and displayed how a show is created from relative scratch each week. The core effort appears to happen on Monday, when all the writers try to crank out as many sketches as humanly possible overnight. By the deadline next morning, around 50 sketches will exist. 50! 50! I’m going to wager that, even with a crack staff of seasoned comedians and writers, most of those sketches aren’t great.

The staff reads through each sketch and consults with the host to select something like ten sketches worth pursuing. For the massive all-nighter these staff members pull each week, 80% of their work goes to waste. It’s good. That means the rest represents the best 20% available. The senior staff writers can then pass over each of the finalists and tweak them.

I find an SNL episode successful when half of the sketches evoke big laughs from me. It’s a bit intimidating to realize that’s merely 10% of the proposed material for that evening. That’s the power of curation.