Riffception: A Riff on Riffs
When I was in college I formed a hip-hop group together with my friend Nate. At some point into writing the origins of our first album, feeling creatively stuck, one of us (I don’t recall which) proposed to timebox the creation of our next track: I would compose an instrumental in 30 minutes, and then he would take 30 minutes to write lyrics, after which we would record the track as quickly as possible. Et voilà: sonic (fool’s) gold. I frequently found that when composing music my brain would seem to get stuck in a certain rut, looping endlessly over the same melody or idea like a needle at the end of the record. These “30 minute challenges” therefore quickly became a favorite exercise of mine to break out of these mental blocks and creative ruts, as I found that the time pressure enforced clarifying simplicity and rapid ideation (“I only have 2 minutes left and I still need to add the drums!”).
Later, at Amazon, I experienced doc culture à un degré extraordinaire. This topic has been written about extensively by people far more influential than myself, so I will spare the reader my rehashing. However, there is one subtle and I think often overlooked aspect of Amazon’s doc culture that bears specific mention here: that the naming and framing of a document significantly influenced how it was received and evaluated. Because the 1-pager and 6-pager documents had significantly different lengths, expected content, and levels of detail, it is a fairly obvious statement that a 1-pager would evaluate very poorly as a 6-pager, and vice versa. Perhaps more subtly, an initial draft of a 1-pager would also be reviewed and evaluated significantly differently than a third draft or a final version. The earlier and rougher the draft, the more the focus of feedback was on quality of content and the less on presentation. This focus on refining the what before the how is one of the things that freed Amazonian writers to focus first and foremost on generating high-quality ideas. More prize-winning pigs, less lipstick.
Combining these two ideas: the riff. I think of a riff as an untemplatized document written within a specific prefixed time limit (ideally 30 minutes) that is intended to communicate an idea as completely as possible while placing the least amount of reasonable weight on how the idea is communicated; since there is a tension between these goals, the former should be prioritized over the latter. Over the years I have liberally used riffs as a tool to help unblock and accelerate my work. Unsurprisingly, I often have equally as much trouble getting my thoughts into a document as I used to have getting them into Logic Pro. (As of this writing, I have no fewer than 10 blog posts in some stage of being written.) Still, why go to the trouble of defining a riff and informing the reader when something is a riff? (Deep breath) Because hopefully if I know that you know that the sole purpose of this document is to quickly communicate an essential idea, I can anticipate that you will focus more on the content and less on my run-on sentences, which will allow me to minimize my attention to any perfectionist tendencies I may or may not have and maximize the amount of energy I spend on my primary goal: sharing my thoughts. If you frequently find yourself getting stuck or in a rut in your own head (and particularly if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Type A perfectionist), I encourage you to get riffing. I would say more, but I’m out of time.
