It’s 12 noon on tuesday the 7th of April 2020. It’s been about 3 months since my last word vomit. I’ve been spending most of my productive time and creative energy working on my ebook FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD and making videos for my youtube channel. I’m quite proud of how much I’ve done on those fronts, and how well. But of course this project (@1000wordvomits) is always on the back of my mind.
What is its purpose right now? Because its purpose has changed over the years. Initially it was all about becoming a better writer. I think I’ve crossed several thresholds on that front. I feel comfortable and confident enough as a writer that I’ve written, published and sold an ebook to hundreds of people. That feels really good. So what’s next? I still want to finish this project. That means 219 more reps of 1000 words each. What do I want to do with these reps? What would be ideal for me?
I think I’m now starting to think of my body of work as a sort of sprawling junkyard that I can pull from, in order to craft more polished material. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of this on Twitter. And I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it on YouTube, too. YouTube is currently more interesting to me, being the more recent pursuit.
I quite like how I’m approaching my YouTube process. Every youtube video has a thumbnail and a title. I start my ad-libs by thinking of a word or phrase that I want to put in the thumbnail, and then I try to make the title something that riffs around that word. Phrases I’ve used so far are “friends”, “project management”, “masculinity”, “motivation”, “ambition”, “thinking”, “depression”, “optimism”, “nerd”, “storytelling”, “navigating culture”, “boredom”, “recreating myself”, “isolation”, “crisis”, “prolific”, “rerouting”. Many of these one-or-two-word prompts build out into videos that are 30-50 minutes long, and I’m not sure if I’d have been able to do them if not for having written so many word vomits and tweets.
So what now? For the foreseeable future, I want to keep doing these ad-lib youtube videos. I’ve done 34 videos so far, I want to do at least 66 more this year. So I’ll have to keep thinking of words that mean something to me, words that I can use as generative seeds. The seed leads to the content, and the content can then be condensed back into the seed. I personally find it to be a remarkable information architecture challenge, at least for me.
What’s the difference between videos and text? There are lots of differences, many of which are probably not even obvious to me, the guy doing all the writing and video-making. There are pros and cons to both approaches. The big benefit of video is that you get to use gestures, facial expressions, body language and vocal tone to convey your points. The written word doesn’t quite have that luxury, that sort of bandwidth. The written word, on the other hand, can be read at the reader’s own pace. Yes, it’s true that you can rewind and replay videos – but you can’t quite jump around the text as easily. You can’t watch all of the video at once, backwards and forwards. There’s just something fundamentally different about how written text and video are supposed to be parsed, allow themselves to be parsed. You can try to be “textual” with a video in a sort of creative way, and you can try to be “video-esque” in your writing (“stream of consciousness” is the usual description), and both of those approaches can have interesting outcomes – but there is a difference still, and a skilled communicator will learn to appreciate that difference.
It might seem like “transcribed videos” are the best of both worlds, since you can watch the video AND read the transcript. In practice, though, I find that the raw transcript of an ad-libbed video tends to be more challenging to read. It comes across as incoherent and rambly. (Which can also be a problem with written text, I know.) So you’ll then have to make some editorial decisions as a transcriber – maybe you’ll choose to leave out bits of clunky repetition, ums and ahs. That makes for a cleaner reading experience. But there is information encoded in every clunky repetition, every um and ah. The editor has to make some executive decisions re: how much of that information is actually relevant to the reader. Some of it just gets lost in translation.
Finally, it’s tempting to think that the holy grail of all of this is the well-prepared, well-scripted video that’s well-rehearsed and well-executed, so that both the video and the transcript of it flow smoothly and artfully. There are trade-offs here, too. First of all, making such polished content is something that takes a lot of time and effort. You might spend days worth of effort to make a polished little gem of content. And you may subsequently discover that all that polish and editing somehow choked the life out of the work. I find that to be a very demoralizing experience – and so I have largely chosen to instead produce large volumes of content, both in text and video, so that I get better at freestyling in all mediums. I know that this can be frustrating to witness, especially if you’re used to seeing high levels of polish in the content you consume. But as Lord Farquaad said, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. 😂
We’re approaching the end of this word vomit, and it’s time for me to think about what the seed phrase should be. “Multimedia” is the first word that comes to mind. It feels like it’s been a cliched word for a long time, so much so that nobody really even thinks about what it means. It’s a sort of vague, handwave-y word that’s supposed to mean “Well, all the things. All the media, the multiple types of media, pictures and sound and text and all that”. It feels like we’re all casually multimedia-literate now. Everybody is watching videos and taking photos all the time now, thanks to the ubiquity of our devices. And yet, it feels to me like there’s still room for some bold, daring moves to be made across domains.
Maybe I shouldn’t be too clever about the title. Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do is to simply call it as it is. “The difference between video and text” is better than 95% of titles I could come up with. Though I have to admit that final 5% is an exciting challenge. What would be a better title? Something evocative, something inspiring, something about crossing domains. “The Multimedia Speaker” is kind of clever but also bland. Can I tie it to something pop cultural? A person who speaks multiple languages is called a “polyglot”. How about “in search of polymedia literacy”? Feels a bit pretentious. And it’s not just literacy I’m seeking, but true proficiency. Which is also a diluted word at this point. I think I’ll just phone in the default option, and move on to my next rep.