Category: LTD

(These are the bones of the talk I gave at Dundee University in June 2009. Didn’t have time to write a full formal paper: I was extemporaneous on the day, moving in and out of these notes, so this isn’t everything I said. This was all written in pencil, in my hideous chickenscratch, in a notebook, a couple of hours before I took the lectern.)

Hello. Forgive me from working from notes. No time to write a full talk in the end. Because I’m a working writer in a deadline business. Which is why I’m here.

I think I’m supposed to be talking about my career in comics, providing some kind of summation to a conference about the relationship between comics and time. To which I’d first offer this, inscribed on a stone plaque embedded in the courtyard wall of the hotel across town I’m staying at:

“God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland.”

That stone was cut in 1870.

120 years later, I’m in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who’s just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his previous discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire eons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops… reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.

He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

That said, we can now thank Grant for solving the mandate of this conference while in the grip of profound psychotomimetic hubris, and move on.

What I do is the Paper Craft, and there are few better places to talk about it than here in Dundee, where ink has run in the town’s blood since even before 1870, but thick and dark since 1905, when DC Thomson was founded, Britain’s oldest continuous publisher of comics… making this place the storied city of Jam, Jute and Journalism.

I’ve been writing comics since the 1980s — grew up reading Alan Grant (who was in the audience) — and doing it full time for approaching twenty years. I do a lot of other things too — first novel a couple of years ago, journalism, animation, anything that looks like it’ll pay a bill. Because I’m a working writer. But comics were my first love, and I still spend most of my time writing them. I love visual narrative, and comics are the purest form of visual narrative.

I’ve worked in television, and there are a hundred people between you and the audience. I’ve worked in film, and there are a thousand people between you and the audience. In comics, there’s me and an artist, presenting our stories to you without filters or significant hurdles, in a cheap, simple, portable form. Comics are a mature technology. Their control of time — provided you’re not intent on reversing universes (or even if you are) — makes them the best educational tool in the world. Hell, intelligence agencies have used comics to teach people how to dissent and perform sabotage.

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure… Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media. They should just hand them out to being to stave off Alzheimer’s.

Although I think a headline of “Grant Morrison staves off dementia” might be a little premature.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”

And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there’s really no-one to stop you.

© Warren Ellis 2009

Speech given at The Science Gallery, Dublin, May 2015. Which I was reminded of today by the morning news.

Hello, Dublin.

I just got back from Berlin, where I was talking about the future, after having just got back from Manchester, where I was talking about the future.  Talking about the future is one of the things I do now.   The future and the past.   The folklore of tomorrow.  I come from a place on the Essex coast in England, that once was all forest and colonized by the Vikings.  The village I grew up in was a Viking settlement.  It’s called Thundersley, derived from an older name meaning Thor’s Clearing.  Which sounds pretty good, until you discover that Dublin, which was also a Viking colony, comes from an ancient term meaning Dark Pool.  That’s actually pretty nice.  I like that.

I can’t help but approach science and history from the standpoint of language.  Because I’m a writer, sure, but also because that’s where those things truly live.  Science can produce the greatest poetry of the age.  Even headline writing at otherwise sober institutions like phys.org take on mad poetry, just because that’s the way things are now.  Actual headline:  “Multifractals suggest the existence of an unknown physical mechanism on the Sun.”  An UNKNOWN PHYSICAL MECHANISM ON THE SUN.  Just let that sink in.  Because that bit alone is some demented Lovecraftian genius.  Which may only be topped by THIS actual headline about the NASA NuStar satellite: “NuStar captures possible ‘screams’ from zombie stars.”

This is the real music.  “Cosmology in ghost-free bigravity theory with twin matter fluids: The origin of “dark matter”.”  And, a personal favourite:  “Crystals May Be Possible In Time As Well As Space.”

Science is beautiful, and mysterious, and a source of constant wonder.  It is our new wilderness landscape, the new forest full of weird animals and spirits sliding in and out of view on the edge of the clearing and the pool.   Now we have, and here’s another headline: “NASA Funds Electricity-Harvesting Robotic Space Eel With Explosive Jet Thrusters and Electroluminescent Skin.”

I’m writing this in the evening, on a laptop resting on a work board my kid bought me for Xmas. The board is actually intended for tablets, and has a long slot so you can prop the tablet up, lay the board (with its beanbag-padded underside) on your belly and watch Netflix in bed until Netflix checks to see if you died. But it works fine for writing on a laptop on the sofa in the living room. I note all this because at this hour I would usually be writing in a notebook with a pen.

In 2020 I dropped pretty much all of my digital tools. Somewhere around here will be a photo of the notebooks I’ve filled in the last two years.

I almost exclusively think on paper these days. The first page of each notebook is used for a numbered index. When I’m jotting down something I know I’m going to want to refer to later, I assign it a number on the index page and write the same number on the top right hand corner of the piece I’m referencing. I write in it pretty much every day. It serves as work book, commonplace book, personal journal, anything I want to be. The numbering on the spines is done with a Pentel white-out pen. (UK) (US) (Pretty sure I picked up that trick from the Cool Tools newsletter.)

I like it. It’s calming. It allows my mind to wander more. I make different kinds of connections to the ones I used to. It’s more reflective. I do wish my handwriting was better, but I’ve wished that since I was ten, and it’s time to let that go. I use a Pilot Frixion erasable pen in Moleskines, and write in black block capitals that most of the time I can actually understand a day later. (Not always. Sometimes I’ve had to examine my writing under strong light to decipher exactly what the hell I was scrawling down.)

My phone has been made very still – limited notifications, fewer apps – and I’m not connected to the social internet at all, which takes away a number of attention-stealing cycles. I have newsletters, RSS feeds and bookmarks for news sources.

Craig Mod, recently:

“…so glad to be off Twitter, off the networks, off the slurping of the timelines. The mind really does expand, the shoulders relax when you disengage. That din of those places seeps into work. I felt that in reading this other, sloppy essay — oh, this sentence? This sentence is for the algorithm. For the likes. It was a bit sad, is all.”

There is, of course, a tendency to be a little… self-congratulatory about coming off the social internet? Not that I’m accusing Mr. Mod of that, at all. He’s making a good point, too. But I think there’s also some duty to not talk about it like one is newly sober. It’s not a fucking miracle to discover new focus from ceasing to use networked systems that are a dozen years old. Even when I wasn’t actively using Twitter as an engaged speaker, I was using it for news — but the thing about using Twitter for news is that you cannot completely filter out everything that’s not actual news of some kind, and you can’t filter out everything that’s not bullshit clickbait “headlines” and “quotes.”

Someone sent me this article the other day, and here’s the quote we both independently flagged from it:

But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions.

I’m not as up to date on some things as I used to be, but, framing it like that — what am I really missing? Value is not necessarily intrinsic to a digital service (or most other things). We choose to invest these things with value. And sometimes we’re too caught up in the stream to reframe these things and do a proper test on them. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate snapping out of long-term behavioral loops that one allowed to form in the first damn place. One just gets it done and then keeps getting it done until it’s better, I think.

There’s a tech industry term: dogfooding. It means using your own product or service. The inventor of Twitter fucks off to silent tech-free meditation retreats for weeks at a time. How was that not a red flag?

I read digitally on a Kindle for the most part, for reasons of There Is No More Space In This Little House For Books. When I finish reading a book, I download and print off my Kindle highlights, and paste them into a notebook.

I used to take a photo every day, and post it here and/or Instagram. I don’t take a photo a day any more, but, when I do photograph something I want to remember, I use a fun little device I bought in 2020 for this analogue purpose. It’s an Instax mini-printer (UK) (US), which churns out half-size Polaroids that I put into the notebook with sticky dots.

Somewhere around here will be a Weathershot Pro photo. The Instax photos are too small to allow the data chyron to be visible. I like the data on Weathershot photos. I miss having that. Note the portrait size. I no longer need to frame photos for social media, so I can use whatever size I like.

I still use Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a store with very basic “social” functions that can be cut off – it doesn’t distract or engage, nobody can reach you, it just plays and sells you music. Most of the music I buy there is physical, but sometimes it’s digital, and my wishlist is digital. Just writing down URLs in a notebook seems fairly pointless.

I have not yet built the habit of writing about the books I read in the notebook. I just paste in the record of sentences and paragraphs I want to remember. I seem to have this deep-seated muscle-memory-like thing, that writing about books is a thing that happens on a keyboard, and is put out into the public space in case it helps anyone else curate their reading.

All of which is to say, I’m happier in an analogue life, but there are things that only really work for me on a digital level. I liked taking a photo a day, and we tend to forget that digital photography means we no longer burn through expensive physical film and processing to get that photo a day. And also we get as many tries as we want to get a photo we like enough to represent that day. Especially when one is, like me, a terrible photographer who just farts around with a camera because we like it.

So I’ve decided to reactivate LTD, in a limited way. I’m conceiving of it, at this time, as the digital tool that fills in the few gaps I have remaining in a life of knowledge work and personal record. Here’s where I am today and here’s what I think it looks like. These are the things I can see and hear. These are the books I want to remember because culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten. Also photos of chickens.

And now I’m closing the laptop and picking up my notebook, and lighting a fire so that my fingers warm up enough to hold a damn pen properly.

Commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of Essex at Southend

On the occasion of having been made an honorary Doctor of the University

Delivered 31 October 2017

Cliffs Pavilion, Southend-on-Sea

I’m going to keep this short, because I just got back from Amsterdam, and I’m sure some of you know how that goes.

(This actually got a big laugh, which led me to make a comment along the lines of “Oh, I see what kind of crowd we have here.”)

I’ve been asked to say something inspirational and uplifting to you on the happy occasion of your graduation.  Which, given that you’ve worked very hard for your qualification and I just wandered in here and got one for free, seems faintly obscene.  So I could lead out with a cautionary tale about how life is fundamentally unfair and old white guys steal everything.  But, you know, I left education at 18, and by the time I was your age I was living in a six foot by six foot rented room that used to be a dark room and would sometimes go out at night to punch pay-phones to get them to spit out loose coins that I could use for food money.  And here I am.  Life is unpredictable. 

Sometimes you start out at the bottom.  Sometimes you’ll trip and fall down. Sometimes you stay there for a good long time.  Sometimes all the lousy luck in the world only ever seems to wash up at your door.  I’m telling you from experience that sometimes you’re going to feel like giving up on your chosen path.  Maybe you’re even worried that you don’t actually have a chosen path yet.  There’s going to be a day when you say to yourself, the hell with it, I’m going to leave a note blaming my teachers for everything and I’m going to go and sell all my organs to medical science while I’m still alive.

Don’t.

I’d been working as a professional writer for seven years or so when I went on my first American tour. On the first stop, at the signing table, this big guy comes up to me, with wet eyes, and told me about the story I’d written that saved his life one night when he’d been down so long that he didn’t see a better day ahead.  Whatever was in that story, it gave him something to think about, a goal to stay alive for.  I don’t tell you this story to explain what a wonderful person I am, though of course that’s true and now I have a doctorate to prove it, which I’m going to use to drive my family absolutely insane for the rest of my life.  I tell it because life is unpredictable and you never know what’s going to happen to let in the light.  And I say that as someone who used to literally live in a dark room.

The focus and dedication and determination that got you into this room is what’s going to keep you going.  You know how to aim at a goal and reach it.  You know what you want.  Keep it in sight.  Hold on tight.  Maybe you don’t know what the specific goal is yet.  That’s fine.  You’ve got time.  Even if you don’t know the shape and name of it, you know in your gut where you want to be.  Aim for what makes you happy.  For what feels valuable to you.  Put yourself where it’s going to count.

That’s where I need you to be.  You’ve lead lives that had structure and clearly defined ends, and now you’re entering a world where people watch Jeremy Kyle on purpose. Nobody predicted how weird it’s gotten out here. And I’m a science fiction writer telling you that.  And the other science fiction writers feel the same.  I know some people who specialized in near-future science fiction who’ve just thrown their hands up and gone off to write stories about dragons because nobody can keep up with how quickly everything’s going insane.  It’s always going to feel like being thrown in the deep end, but it’s not always this deep, and I’m sorry for that.  But we need you to be out here with us now.

I hope you have the fire in you that my generation had at your age, that most generations have at your age – the fire to fix things, and the fire to make new things, fly new ideas, create the new sound that nobody heard before.  You’ll notice that my generation didn’t fix everything, and also released Piers Morgan on the world.  We’re sorry for that, too.  We made mistakes.  You’ll make mistakes too.  Don’t be afraid of that.  Making mistakes happens when you’re trying something new. It’s how you know you’re bending the envelope.  Making mistakes is how you learn, and sometimes a mistake gives you something valuable.  Brian Eno made a set of cards with weird notes on them that he used when he was working with David Bowie, among others, and one of the cards reads, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”  You’ll find that’s a lot more useful than Keep Calm And Carry On.

Don’t worry about making mistakes.  You’ll learn something, and that will be added to the commonwealth of our knowledge, and we all take one step forward.

Today isn’t the end of anything, really.  It’s the beginning.  You’re just getting started.  You’re going to do great things.  You’re going to surprise yourself with what you’re capable of and what you achieve.  I’ve seen it happen, over and over again.  All you have to do is not quit.  Take a day off, but don’t quit.  Keep fighting, keep thinking, keep making, keep trying something new.  Hold on tight to what matters to you, stand up for what’s right, and keep your eyes on the horizon.  It all starts today.  It all starts with one step forward.

Congratulations to you all on your achievement.  It’s time to begin the bigger and more exciting and more important part of your life.  The part where you make a difference.  I look forward to seeing you all again, in the future that you help create. Time to get started.

LTD 002

I am half a century old, and for more than twenty years of that run, I’ve had a public-facing presence on the internet of some kind. Most recently, I had a morning journal imaginatively titled morning.computer. But time, and working methods, and schedules, and life all act upon practices and plans. Writing in the mornings was a great leveller four or five years ago when I was travelling near-constantly. Today, I spend the first hour or two of my day staring blankly at the sky over coffee with soothing ambient music being poured into my ear canals in an attempt to stop my brain from flipping open the top of my skull and abandoning ship.

And yet. I find myself continuing to want a public-facing place on the net. I always say that I need to get ideas out in front of me so that I can see them properly, and writing not-fully-baked notions on a website is often the best way for me to do that.

Social media does not “get” not-fully-baked. Social media is useless for thinking out loud and exploring notions. Social media — bizarrely, given its nature — does not do context.

I start a new notebook every year. Notebooks have internal context. Notebooks exist only to think about things, remember things and preserve things for later consideration. This is a notebook.

Also, let’s face it, it’s a blog. Not fully elderblog, as it’s a fresh notebook. But it’s a blog, which is a niche activity. Not fully baked is a coinage of Simon Reynolds, from the days when we were all publishing and all reading each other. Now, we’re the Isles of Blogging, a scattered archipelago of desert islands and sea forts who throw messages in bottles towards the mainland. And signal to each other with mirrors.

I am half a century old and nowhere near the cutting edge of anything. I am fine with this.

A legible presence on the web is also important to me. Because I’m a working writer, involved in many things with long gestation periods, and disappearing entirely from human notice is not always the best thing for a career. Put bluntly, I need to be able to signal that I’m still alive.

I’ve been testing out various publishing systems and formats for the last few months, to settle on what I want to do and how I want to act for, say, the next three to five years. I think this is it. So I’m signing and dating the first page of the notebook.

LTD 001