Category: Craft (Page 13 of 18)

The Quote-Unquote Golden Age

February 25, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I follow a marketing newsletter which last year alerted me to this gem of an article from Ad Age, “There Was No Golden Age of Advertising, So Quit Pining for It, If You Haven't Seen Any Good Work Lately, Then You Don't Know What It Looks Like”

Wow punks! The title says it all. Do we even need to read an piece after this? Well, okay….it has good stuff, too. And remember, this all applies to the state of poetry, too.

Ken Wheaton says,

“Remember back in the day when everything was better? The air was clean and a golden light shone on everything, including advertising. Especially advertising. Every once in a while, we'll get a letter at Ad Age or, more likely, a web comment on one of our stories, bemoaning the passage of the golden age of advertising, when Creative Giants roamed the offices, brilliant ad copy trailing in their wakes. Their worst ideas were better than anything these young punks are putting out today, what with their bits and bytes and snap-tweets and Huluzons and what have you. Why don't you all just get off my lawn?!? Wait. I got carried away. The fact is, there was no golden age. It didn't happen in learning, religion, world peace or advertising…. So instead of hunting for a past golden age, do your best to make future generations think this was their golden age."

Here's another quote for thought:

"Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present." – Bil Keane

Ah, the golden years.

How to Become Well-Rounded Poet

February 25, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Here's an idea: the way to becoming a well-rounded poet is similar to the way to becoming a well-rounded person. And spring is the perfect season to broaden your horizons.

In the movie about the collaboration between W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, Topsy Turvey, Gilbert is accused of being in a rut, writing the same ole story over and over and his composer Sullivan just doesn’t want to do it anymore. Meanwhile, Gilbert's wife goads him into attending the local Japanese Expo where he witnesses a new culture for the first time. One of the great, great scenes in the movie is a closeup of Gilbert as this new cultural information translates into a novel idea for him. Literally, Gilbert enacts the moment when a new thought appears like a sparkle in his eye. Jim Broadbent plays Gilbert and gives an amazing performance of this experience. Their musical The Mikado is the result of this inspiration.

Spring is the time for new input opportunities for your eyes, ears and smells!

Go to see new art exhibits at local museums and galleries.
Rent art documentaries from your local library.
Take an online class on a composer or find music documentaries from your local library.
Find out when your nearest city is having their Restaurant Week and price fix on fine dining for a fraction of the cost. Search Google for "Restaurant Week" and your city name.
Go see the Oscar Shorts at your local theater or online. Oscar shorts are the short films nominated for Oscars in the categories of live action, animation and documentary. They tend to be very poem like in their constraints of length and storytelling.

Often art-changing inspiration can be found by taking a chance on something completely new.

New Year, New Poetry Magazines

February 10, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

So for the last two or three years I’ve been trying out poetry journals, newsletters and organizations. Really learned a lot but I’ve made some changes this year. In review:

The Scottish Poetry Library newsletter was great, friendly and full of awesome community outreach programs and activities but was pretty pricey if you live stateside. I had to give it up for a while.

The Poetry Society of America provided not much return for your membership (except a membership card) unless you live in New York City and can take advantage of their programs and outreach. For instance, when I lived there in the 1990s I enjoyed their poems on posters in the subways.

The Academy of American Poets, who publishes the 2x–a-year American Poets magazine which has really good brief essays and a nice variety of poems and enticing, yet brief reviews. But that only comes out a few times a year. And the price is high considering. But you also get copies of their award-winning books, depending on your membership level. Of all the books I’ve received over the last few years, I only liked one of them. The majority were experimental, language-y books, which I don't dislike but not as a majority of what I read. I will probably go back to them at some point. You also get their National Poetry Month poster with your membership but you can get that separately from their website.

Poetry magazine. I feel torn about this one. Sometimes I loved it. But usually I didn’t. I tended to enjoy more their themed issues. The essays were hit and miss, sometimes affectedly esoteric. The visual content was always good. The key for me was when the thing arrived in the mail. Did I feel burdened about its arrival or excited? The truth was I never felt excited. Does this mean I’m not a sophisticated poetry reader? The Costa Rican poet Luis Chavez from the October 2015 issue, however, proves to me why Poetry is an indispensable journal. He felt like a miracle to find and he’s available nowhere else in translation yet.

American Poetry Review. Now this magazine I was always excited to receive, mostly for its essays which hit just the right tone and variety. However, after two years or so years reading it I’m still seeing the same authors over and over again. This, too, I will probably return for at some later time but if exploring is my goal and money is limited, I have to quit some of these journals for a time.

The only holdover is Poets & Writers which feels indispensable and community-connecting. I’m also keeping One Story. I enjoyed every issue from last year, its inexpensive and a subscription I'm sharing with friends.

My new journals this year are Rattle, Lapham’s Quarterly and The New Yorker, which I haven’t ever enjoyed previously but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

New Year’s Resolutions, Laurie Anderson, the Brand of You, eBook Sales

January 11, 2016 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Happy New Year! This very blog and all my sites were just given responsive re-vampings over the holiday break so they should be more accessible on mobile devices. This makes it a good time to revisit what this blog’s mission really is. I’ve been looking at it lately like a poetry toolbox, lots of little ideas being fashioned as tools poets can take forward into poetry projects.

Self-publishing and eBooks

I read quite a few stories toward the end of 2015 about how eBook sales have stabilized and experts surmise that they may have found their permanent sweet spot. It’s too early to tell as techno-babies continue being born. It also contradicts other reports, such as this one about “slightly fewer Americans are reading print books, new survey finds.” Smashwords also did its annual survey of the previous year's eBook sales.

And here’s a smattering of other content I came across before the end of 2015:

A short treatise on commas from the Grammar Diva
Why Author Open Mic Night Doesn’t Have to Suck (tips on how to perform at an author reading)

Laurie Anderson

Monsieur Big Bang and I went to see Life of a Dog in December. This is the new movie by Laurie Anderson, a beautiful visual poem reflecting on the nature of life and death, a project that had been inspired by the recent deaths of her husband, Lou Reed, her dog and her mother. I was so enraptured by the movie I immediately went online afterwards to get "the book" on Laurie Anderson, the coffee table book, the biography, anything! But there was none to be found. Five or six books exist on Lou Reed however. WTF?

Anyway, all I managed to find was an article here from The New York Times on her projects during the 1980s! I also found another good piece on Laurie Anderson that’s more current from NPR. It had some great life advice:

"One of the things that I had to do when I inducted Lou into – or gave a speech when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few months ago was first of all, that's a very boring ceremony. It's – just goes on for, like, so many hours. And I was trying to shorten the speech because it was getting so dull. So I tried to shorten it, shorten it. And then I thought I'm just going to mention these three rules that Lou and I had. We made them up, and they had to do with how to live with your life 'cause, you know, life goes by so fast. It's really – and a lot of times things happen so fast you don't know – how should I react? What should I do? I'm in a panic, you know. So we came up with these, and they're time-tested rules. And I'll tell you what they are. So the first one is don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you're not afraid of anyone. Two, get a really good BS detector and learn how to use it. Who's faking it and who is not? Three, be really tender. And with those three, you're set."

At the end of the movie Life of a Dog Anderson invokes the old Huck Finn quote about "lighting out for the territories." I thought about that for a long time. The new year is, after all, a time to begin anew. It’s something we say when we’re in need of a life change, light out for the territories. We’ve been in that mindset now for over 100 years. But where does one go anymore? Where can you go to start over? California is pricing out even its natives. Portland is the new “it” but is it crowding up, too? Are cities the right answer anymore? Do we start to question ownership now? Should we just start going inside? Where are the territories? Does starting a garden count? It’s also true that all of humanity didn’t, in fact, all light out. This was an idea sold to us as hip and adventurous, which is was. But is it still?

Writer Brands

There’s an old marketing adage that you can“frame or be framed” meaning if you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you and you might be framed in a negative sense or literally framed for the crime.

My friend and fellow poet Christopher and I have been having good conversation about the trend of writers trying to develop their brands. He sent me an article about Diana Vreeland's heirs who have branded perfumes (and other things) under her name. With the new documentary about her (Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has to Travel) it felt the family was attempting to turn her life story into a brand.

Christopher commented that branding humans feels, well, very inhuman: "I don't think I have sufficient words to express how much I detest the prevalence of all these people fretting over their brands. It's such an un-repentantly cynical approach to furthering one's reach in the world, a mission largely predicated on realizing greater profits, whether it be of the individual or corporate variety. Indeed, that is what is so troubling to me about it; people have become so inured to the heartless devices and practices of the corporate hegemony, they are now gladly adopting the same in order to best capitalize their own sense of self-importance, or more bluntly put, their product. Self as Product. Yes, we try to "sell" ourselves everyday–to prospective employers, to colleges to which we're seeking admission, to potential mates…the list goes on and on–but this concept of purposely disembodying/distilling oneself into an aspirational brand for others to follow, covet or purchase–it smacks of such inflated self-regard."

I submitted to him that writer brands are all the rage these days on book marketing sites. The rumor out there is you can't get a non-fiction publishing deal unless "you already have a viable brand." I did a short search today and came up with these sites about the need to develop your writer brand:

What bothers me about it is how commodified we have let our art become. Instead of art being a moment making a connection between people over a painting or a book, it's full-blown capitalism from intellectuals who profess to know better and want better. You really get a sense of their attitude toward you: you're just an email address, a body to market to. I think this is partly a reflection of how cut-throat authorship is out there and, yes, part narcissistic self-regard. But it's what the "experts" are pushing in order to solve the problem of low demand and a plethora of product.

Full disclosure: I’ve been dutifully working on my brand but, to be honest, it feels ridiculous. But then is that now part my brand?

Food for Writerly Thoughts 2015

December 9, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

For the past few months for work I’ve been reading the Bo Sacks newsletters on marketing and publishing issues. Here’s a sample of one of Bo Sack's pieces.

He posts a plethora of good quotes that apply to writers and thinking. Here are my many favorites so far:

Living a Life

"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger." Aldous Huxley

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Isaac Asimov

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." Lord Salisbury

Thinking Better

"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions." Claude Levi-Strauss

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Henry David Thoreau

"Anyone can negatively criticize – it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires." Chuck Jones

"The golden age is before us, not behind us." William Shakespeare

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." John Locke

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions." Leonardo da Vinci

An interviewer once asked Ursula K. Le Guin advice for writers, and she replied: "I am going to be rather hard-nosed and say that if you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work."

The final one is a quote from James Taylor on a recent Oprah’s Master Class episode: “Those days the amount of time to consider, experiment without distraction was a lot longer. It’s very easy today to be distracted. You actually have to really defend your time in order to have a long thought.”

Reach

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." Stephen King

"A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson." John Henrik Clarke

"If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there." Old West Proverb

Bearing the Business

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." Rene Descartes
("The reading of all good books on any substrate is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries." BoSacks Corollary)

"A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success." Bo Bennett

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." Leonardo da Vinci

"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else." Albert Einstein

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." Isaac Asimov

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." Winston Churchill

"The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck." Channing Pollock

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith." Steve Jobs

"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." Leonardo da Vinci

What Language Poems Used to Be About: Piet Hein

December 9, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

In the last few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of encountering poetry in unlikely places. I was visiting my Aunt Nancy in Socorro, New Mexico, while she was selling her photographs at a craft fair coinciding with The Festival of the Cranes.

My aunt takes amazing bird photography around the Bosque del Apache area. One of the local gallery owners came up to her for the sole purpose of reading some poetry to her. He was excited about a new find. He saw us and hesitated. I told the main I was also excited about poetry and he introduced us all to the work of Danish poet, scientist, mathematician, inventor Piet Hein and Hein's own form of poetry called “grooks.”

Here is the poem read to us in the middle of the craft show floor:

Timing Toast

There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
twenty seconds less.

Here are some other samples I found online:

Those Who Know

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

A Moment's Thought

As eternity
is reckoned
there's a lifetime
in a second.

Ars Brevis

There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.

The Road to Wisdom
The road to wisdom?
— Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Hein’s Wikipedia page had this to say about the more serious layer of his poetry:

“The Danes, however, understood its importance and soon it was found as graffiti all around the country. The deeper meaning of the grook was that even if you lose your freedom ("losing one glove"), do not lose your patriotism and self-respect by collaborating with the Nazis ("throwing away the other"), because that sense of having betrayed your country will be more painful when freedom has been found again someday.”

Consolation Grook

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

On our way into work, Monsieur Big Bang and I were listening to a class on the history of the English language in a Great Course class called "The Secret Life of Words" by Anne Curzan. Curzan was introducing a section on wacky English spelling and she alerted us to this poem by an unknown author called “English is Tough Stuff.” The spelling anomalies in the poem really challenge your ability to read it.

A sample:

   Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
   Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
   Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
   Exiles, similes, and reviles;
   Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
   Solar, mica, war and far;
   One, anemone, Balmoral,
   Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
   Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
   Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

A Book About Paradox, Surprise and Uncertainty in Poetry Craft

November 19, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Just like the book Nine Gates (which I reviewed in 2014), I loved this book of Hirshfield essays although they were difficult. Did the book live up to its subtitle? Probably not but maybe it's a miracle the book had a subtitle at all considering the nebulous, ethereal subjects they explore. This book is not really for beginners; it’s strategy is so particular and pensive and one which requires good amounts of concentration.

Here is my take on what the essays cover and a quote from each section, although I don’t think cover is really the right word, more like "make exploratory expeditions into."

1. How a poem “sees”

“Poetry’s generative power, then, lies not in its ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ nor in any simple recording of something external to its own essence. It resides within the palace of its own world-embedded, intertwining existence.”

2. Poetic statement

“…the narrow alleyways of rhetoric, the differing fatigues of failure and success. There is no way of telling in advance what part of our knowledge will be needed at any given moment.”

3. An introduction to Basho

“Basho’s haiku describe and feel, think and debate. They test ideas against the realities of observation; they renovate, expand and intensify both experience and the range of language.”

4. The idea of the hidden in poetry

“The union, like all metaphor, brings revelation and addition, while it also covers, complicates, veils.”

5. Poetry and uncertainty

“For those willing to let themselves feel it, any story leaves behind an uneasiness, sometimes at the center, other times at the edge of perception, and like the remainder left over in a problem in long division, it must be carried. Literature’s work, and particularly poetry’s, is in part to take up that residue and remnant, to find a way to live amid and alongside the uncertain.”

6. Windows in poems

“…a window can coincide with the poem’s emotional center of gravity and pivot.”

7. Poetry and surprise

“Cognitive and creative discoveries are made in the same way as much of biological life is: by acts of generative recombination. Disparate elements are brought together to see if they might make a viable new whole.”

8. What is American in Modern American Poetry

“…there is the migrant traveler’s perennial hunger and search for what can be made known, made home, that leads American poets, more often than not, toward the respite and sustenance of the local and radiant detail.”

9. Words’ transformative power

“Beauty unbuckles pain’s armoring. Unexpected startlement unfastens the psyche’s fortifications.”

10. Poetry and Paradox

“Art makes open cases, not closed ones.”

Intent and Abstraction in Racial Protest

November 4, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Earlier this year I did a piece on Vanessa Place's political twitter project, talking about the pitfalls of confronting racism in America with art pieces.

Since then, I've come across more stories about art pieces dealing with racism that have bombed miserably:

– Kenneth Goldsmith attempting to read the autopsy of Michael Brown, one of the past year's victims of police violence.

– The Vanessa Place Gone with the Wind tweet project.

– And the San Francisco Bay Area collective's Berkely effigies

It was the effigy story that changed my mind about the issue. In that article you will see elaboration on why these art pieces have continually been read as offensive and not thought-provoking. In the effigy case, the collective artists were black. They describe themselves as "queer black and PoC" (people of color).

So, even when the artists were black, the same results are happening. The article on the effigy was educational: it seems when there is no clear meaning of intent, offense always trumps the message (for lack of a clear message). Intent, when obscured, is highly disrupted:

"the effigies' powerful message was muted, if not canceled out, by the unclear intent. 'The relief does not negate the initial trauma,' said the Rev. Michael Bride."

…"What would have happened, he asked, "if swastikas started popping up everywhere and were intended to be a teachable tool to remind people about the Holocaust but no one was there to associate them with the lesson?"

Before, I've tended to sympathize with the misunderstood protesters. You have to engage with art before you condemn it. If you're not going to read the piece fully, you surrender the strength of your own position.

But when you are dealing abstract artists who deal in statements, by definition, that are without context, the pieces cannot be read fully. And this is why they appear racist.

Similarly, this was one of the recent complaints about pink-ifying everything for breast cancer. In this recent story about the pink balloons flying in downtown New York City, the objects are meant to symbolize exercise and diet in fighting breast cancer but there is no signage connecting the symbol to the idea.

"Outside the New York Sports Club on West 41st Street in Manhattan, pink and white crepe paper wraps the poles propping up a scaffold to protect pedestrians from construction debris. Tied to the poles are pink and white balloons and pink crepe paper flowers. Although there is no sign saying so, the decorations are to make women aware that exercise and diet can reduce their risk for breast cancer, said Lisa Hufcut, public relations director for Town Sports International, the parent company. And to make them aware of the importance of mammograms, she added."

Talk about a message getting lost in the design. This is the, unfortunately, one of the problems abstract art gestures (and pieces signifying informational disconnect) have left us with.

10 Productive Poetry Workshop Practices

October 8, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Imagine all these fellows in a poetry workshop? What drama would ensue?

One thing lacking in most writing workshops is a few minutes taken at the beginning to discuss workshop etiquette and basic expectations. A few months ago, I polled my fellow Sarah Lawrence MFA workshop compatriots, (Ann, Murph and Joann), and my cousin Gretchen, a writing teacher in Alaska, for their advice on writing workshopping.

More recently, Jane Friedman posted an interesting piece on the four dangers of writing groups. And although we did not discuss bad craft habits gained from and critiquing ineptitude found in writing workshops, we did talk a lot about basic etiquette:

Come prepared. Read everyone's poems beforehand. It’s impolite and self-absorbed to coast through other people’s work.
Be fully present. Speak up but share the floor. There’s an art to knowing how often to participate. Practice it. Take a few deep breaths before each workshop. You're not only learning the art of writing, you're learning the art of conversation.
Joann said to listen bravely to suggestions without interrupting to defend your choices. Come to the table with a thick skin or at least some skin. Critiquing implies your poem is imperfect to begin with. Let it go. No suggestions are cut in stone.
Don’t rewrite it! Be mindful of the project you are not doing. Be open to genres you don’t love, read or are unfamiliar with. Don’t insist the work conform to what you would like it to be. Murph put it well, “Try to discern what the writer is going for. Say what you think succeeds in the attempt. Then, if you see a specific approach or tactic that might help the writer achieve her goal, define it and suggest it as an additional approach to try.”
All the same rules you learned in Kindergarten still apply. Be nice to others. Share. Take turns. Don’t have temper tantrums. Follow the group rules. Being a ground-breaking artist doesn’t mean you should attempt to be a rule-breaking participant in a writing workshop. Groups require cooperation. Solo work does not.
Focus on the writing. Don't get derailed by the issues presented within the writing or personal issues outside of the writing. Respect everyone’s time and intention attending a writing group.
Feel free to ask that specific issues or questions be addressed, anything you know for sure you need help with or feedback on.
Spend time with architecture. Murph suggested creating outlines or arcs that can help define what is fuzzy or where something is missing.
Listen to yourself. Murph says don’t ask questions that are criticisms in disguise.
Don’t get addicted to writing workshops.

Ann sent along this Buzzfeed satire of Jane Austen receiving feedback in an MFA program.

What Poets Can Learn From Marketers & Their Attitudes About Empathy

September 2, 2015 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

We’ve been talking about how mindfulness and meditation affects the physical makeup of your brain’s gray matter and how ability to empathize is affected.

Poets may not consciously realize how empathy is working or not working when they write poems but even a decision to be emphatic or the ability to do it will affect the content and the tone of the poems you write and how you critique every other poem you encounter, the content of that poem and your attitude toward the poet who wrote it.

So at a foundational level, empathy will affect what you write and how you read because it fundamentally affects how you conceptualize the world.

From a brazenly marketability viewpoint, empathy is one of the big buzzwords these days. Similar to writing a poem, your ability to empathize affects the very foundation of any product you design. Without customer empathy, you can’t understand customer needs. Marketing guru Seth Godin defines what empathy is in this blog post:

Empathy doesn't involve feeling sorry for someone. It is our honest answer to the question, "why did they do what they did?"

The useful answer is rarely, "because they're stupid." Or even, "because they're evil." In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from.

Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

He also talks about flipping the rules here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/08/the-permanent-rules.html

In this PDF on Design Thinking:

Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them….WHY empathize? As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.

Honestly, most of us have fallen somewhat short of empathy as critics. We’re too self-focused. But as a customer we usually get it immediately. We think, “You better understand me or I won’t buy your device, soap or service.”

But what about books and poems? Why is it taboo to have empathy for a customer as a reader? This is not to say you should write poems like a marketer would, although you’re free to try that. (Big secret: marketers have yet to understand how to do this themselves.) But it's the practice of human empathy that is the issue here.

Because marketers are under such pressure to sell, (and because they can be psychologically ruthless about it), marketers and product designers are usually ahead of the rest of us on understanding human experience. It behooves us all to listen to what they are saying. Don’t be that guy who misses the message for the messenger.

The PDF above also shows how workshopping is similar to product testing:

How to test: show don’t tell. Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or your user within an experience. And don’t explain everything (yet). Let your tester interpret the prototype. Watch how they use (and misuse!) what you have given them, and how they handle and interact with it; then listen to what they say about it, and the questions they have.

I also follow Marketoonist. He has a good toon from 2013 on idea generation and submission issues for cartoonists. His commentary works as tips for writers as well: https://marketoonist.com/2013/01/brainstorming-ideas.html