More Stories, Less Data

MikeachimThe Everyday8 Comments

 The stars we are given. The constellations we make.

– Rebecca Solnit

I worry about data.

As everything gets faster and more hectic online, as friends and companies and apps and professional deadlines push for quicker updates & ever-more-frantic feedback, we’re pressured to publish not stories, but raw data.

Stories are things made from raw data – crafted, hammered into shape, hacked out, honed, smoothed, sharpened, and then, if we’re really smart and brave, thrown away and remade all over again. Crafting; drafting; refining. Until something precious results. Something that endures and anchors itself to the world.

It worries me that we’re under a lot of pressure to either shortcut that process or forget it altogether. We stop making stories because we don’t have time, and because we’ve got out the habit of giving ourselves time. Instead, we publish data. As soon as it’s collected, it’s published. If we’re lucky, we might put a spin on it as it flies past – but that’s about it.

Why is this bad? Because we might lose the art of stringing things together. Joining the dots to make things that fit the way human beings interpret their world. Making shapes from chaos. Interpreting.

When I worked in archaeology, I was initially baffled why we were asked to take photographs of sections and plans and draw them. What’s with that? Surely a photograph is more accurate than any drawing? In fact, an archaeological photo is (depending on the skill of the photographer) mainly data – and a drawing is a story created from data that accentuates, exaggerates or downright misleads, all to create an argument based on what someone thinks they are looking at. People are biased and fallible, hence the photos – but data is shapeless, hence the drawings.

The constellations in the night sky are stories invented by ancient Greeks. They looked up, they saw points of light, and they joined them together in the most wonderfully human ways that still mean something to us. Who hasn’t stood on a hillside as a kid and delighted as a cluster of random stars turned into a shape that their mind tried to fit into a picture – “look, there’s Orion’s belt – and there’s his sword. Do you see it?”.

I worry about our ability to stand there patiently, in the dark, until we see it.

Image: ComputerHotline

Storytelling: Free eBook – “How To Make People Care About Anything”

MikeachimWriting25 Comments

Update: go here for my more recent 10-part series on storytelling for beginners.

Storytelling. It’s not just for fun. It underpins everything. And I have a lot to say on this topic.

So I put it all into an ebook.

Click here to download “Storytelling or How To Make People Care About Anything“ 

(PDF, 6.5mb)

Problems opening when saved to desktop? Click here for the less pretty but smaller & more offline-friendly version

In an ideal world, you’d look like this as you read it.

If that doesn’t happen, at least you’ve not lost any money – because this book is 100% free.

You can do pretty much anything you like with it – share it, host it, discuss it, comprehensively rubbish it Oatmeal-style in a public place – it’s your choice.

It’s designed to get people thinking (which is why I’d much appreciate you passing it around). Thinking about what? About storytelling not just as something that naturally arises from “good writing”, and definitely not as a fun but unnecessary luxury for any creative and/or business endeavour – but as the bedrock of everything we do. Our brains are made of stories, and we’re completely helpless in the face of a good one…

I love this field of study, and I hope that if you read this booklet, you’ll start to feel the same way.

Thanks for your time.

– Mike

Further reading

Images: Boulder’s Natural Animal + Hospital; lrargerich.

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Kathleen Jamie’s “Findings”: Don’t Fear The Dark

MikeachimOrkney2 Comments

For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality. We were at the mercy of merciless death, which is darkness. When we died, they sent a beam of midwinter light in among our bones. What a tender, potent gesture. In the Christian era, we were laid in our graves to face the rising sun. We’re still mortal, still don’t want to die, don’t want our loved ones to die. That’s why the surveyors waved so heartily – if I’d spent ten days working in the house of the dead, dammit, I’d come out waving, too. We have not banished death, but we have banished the dark. We have light, we have oil-fields and electricity and lasers. And by the light we have made, we can see that there are, metaphorically speaking, cracks. We are doing damage. The surveyors poring over the tomb are working in an anxious age. We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it’s all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us.

Kathleen Jamie, Findings – as excerpted by the Guardian here.

Findings isn’t one of my favourite collections of travel writing essays just because it opens with Orkney, although I’m far from immune to the charm of that. It’s not because it challenges our modern prejudice against the dark – the very thing we spend the first 9 months of our lives in, comfortable and safe, until everything turns to noisy, terrifying light. It’s not just because it’s gorgeously written, or because Jamie has the same gift as Alain de Botton for interrogating the “simple”, “obvious” things everyone looks past.

It’s this: she wanders. She goes for walks, throws her eyes and ears and mind wide open, and collects as much as she can. There’s no clear itinerary or agenda. She just observes and thinks and writes. Good travel writing happens when you pay attention to what the world is telling you and when you allow it to surprise you and change you. This book is a beautiful example of the power of that approach.

I’m saying all this right now because this gorgeous book is an absurd £0.99 on Kindle today. Less than a pound. Go get!

Further reading: “Kathleen Jamie: A Life In Writing” – Sarah Crown, Guardian.

As usual, you can presume all links to Amazon are affiliate links. Know that I will take any money I earn and use it for the betterment of mankind, via snacks. (It’s a very tortuously abstracted “via”, but it’s there, trust me).

Hope In The Time Of Tranquility

MikeachimThe Everyday8 Comments

In February 1908, Amalgamated Press of London started printing an extraordinary series of books. Released in fortnightly parts, the Children’s Encyclopedia aimed not to cross-reference but to teach. Its 760+ articles aimed to give its pre-school readers a thorough grounding in those subjects its authors considered to be the building-blocks of middle-class culture, including history, the natural sciences, industry, mathematics, French and a tour of the peoples of the world (from a then-politically-correct perspective of the white man as the pinnacle of civilization, but with a benevolent generosity of spirit that robbed this gentle racism of its sting).

Its editor was journalist Arthur Mee, an extraordinarily prolific writer who averaged a million words a year for fifty years, and who believed above all in the power of the human race to overcome its shortcomings and ‘do the right thing’.

It taught how to make a fiddle from a cigar-box, it showed the inside of a British pottery, it told the stories of Botticelli and Louis Pasteur, of Beethoven and electricity, and above all it talked of God, without putting religion in the way of any branch of human learning. It was intelligent, simplifying but never dumbing down, and it tackled many difficult questions with a cheerful optimism. It was a remarkable, hopeful achievement, and I hope it reached a lot of people.

I grew up with these books. They’re still here, in my parental home, and in the time I have before I jet off to speak at TBU Porto, I’m reading through as many as I can. (You can do the same with volume 1: it’s online here). And I haven’t yet reached the section about the Moon that concludes something like this:

Perhaps one day someone will set foot on that distant neighbour of ours so far away in the sky. And what a day that will be.

I wasn’t even born when that most remarkable day came to pass – and the man who took that first step has just died at the age of 82, even as millions of us peer through a robot camera lens onto the surface of Mars.

It’s easy to decry the excesses of the modern world – but it’s equally easy to forget how far we’ve come in so short a time, through so much that could have gone so dreadfully differently. Some people say they’d like to be born in some other historical age, out of love of that time or of disillusionment with the current era. Well, not me. I feel incredibly lucky. If I’d been reading the Children’s Encyclopedia when it was first released, I might have missed the beginning of one of the most exciting stories in human history.

And I’m just fine right here, thanks.

Image: NASA Goddard Photo & Video

How To Get A UK Emergency Passport: An Utter Idiot’s Guide

MikeachimTravel13 Comments

(Reading tip: if you’ve seen Fox’s 24, it might help to imagine that counting-down sound).

T Minus 05:35:00

I’m in a Starbucks in Düsseldorf, and my wallet is gone – and with it, my credit cards, my plane tickets and my passport. There’s a simple explanation to all of this, and I make sure I don’t think about it while I rummage through my bag in a panic, just in case the wallet has disobeyed the laws of physics and ended up somewhere impossible. A couple of minutes of this behaviour is just enough to prevent the top of my head from exploding, but does nothing for the weak, sick feeling of dread originating somewhere near my knees.

Okay, I tell myself, let’s use the right words here: I’ve been robbed.Read More