Derek Magill

blackout poetry

Newspaper + Marker = Poetry.

A month of newspaper blackout poetry

I challenged myself this past month to create a month’s worth of newspaper blackout poems, which are poems made by redacting newspapers with a permanent marker.

I’d never done a blackout poem before and as I noted in the first post, my creative muscles had atrophied a good deal over the past few years. It was hard.

One interesting thing I found was that Arts, Profiles and Obituaries are the best sections in the newspaper for blackout poetry. Politics is near impossible because of all the boring writing and big names.

It’s also very difficult not to bias the theme of the poems coming into the activity. I often found myself wanting to create a poem around a particular topic and then struggling to find a newspaper that would work for that topic, which is really not how blackout poetry is supposed to work.

My favorites of the month are To create first collect, Dominique, Art will shape you, Just exciting enough, and Intro to a graduation speech. To be sure, none of these are poetic masterpieces and I’m not even sure the last one qualifies as poetry at all, but I’m glad I did them. I have enough here for maybe 1/4 of a book of blackout poems! I even had a couple people ask for prints.

Here’s the complete list of poems:

I don’t want to put anything concrete in writing about my plans moving forward. I may or may not continue doing these, and at what frequency, I have no idea. It was a valuable, fun activity and it was a nice changeup to the kinds of things I’ve grown accustomed to writing and thinking about over the past few years.

Here’s a video covering how to do your own.

30-day challenge ideas


It’s a new month tomorrow. That means you’ve got roughly 30 new days ahead of you, the perfect time in which complete a 30-day challenge for something meaningful that you’ve been putting off. In other words, a time to answer this question for yourself: do I want to “be” or do I want to “do?”

This past month I challenged myself to blog publicly and make a new newspaper blackout poem every day. Funny enough, those daily activities laid the foundation for a mostly happy and productive January. I’m thinking more clearly and originally, communicating more effectively, and feeling far more focused than before.

The traffic on this blog has also grown tremendously, I’ve got a ton of new content ideas, and if I never blog again, I’ll always have at least 30 posts to point to, which is more than most people can say.

Of course, I do plan to blog again, and in addition to daily blogging, I’m going to issue myself another daily challenge this coming month. Since I’m not settled yet on what to do, I’m going to use this post to think publicly and hopefully help you find a challenge for yourself.

I tend to prefer challenges that end with something that requires a bit of public creative output. For any of these, consider that you should do a blog writeup every day tracking your progress. I also don’t recommend trying to stack too many of these but if you can, go for it.

  • 30 days of blogging
  • 30 days of vlogging
  • 30 days of reading 30 pages per day
  • 30 days of Ayn Rand (one essay per day)
  • 30 days of writing poetry or short stories
  • 30 days of photography
  • 30 days of Bitcoin Cash content consumption
  • 30 days of “lost world genre” film watching
  • 30 days of coding
  • 30 days of language
  • 30 days of skill building
  • 30 days of wine tasting reviews
  • 30 days of interviewing interesting people
  • 30 days of Yale Open Courses
  • 30 days of trying out marketing tools & softwares
  • 30 days of GoFundMe donations
  • 30 days of emailing someone new
  • 30 books in 30 days (aka the Tai Lopez challenge…)
  • 30 days of cooking
  • 30 days of Paleo dieting 
  • 30 days of writing prompts
  • 30 days of the Austin Kleon Steal Like an Artist Journal
  • 30 days of list making
  • 30 days of Latin or Ancient Greek
  • 30 days of Quora answers
  • 30 days of sending letters
  • 30 days of public thank-you’s (maybe gets over the top)
  • 30 days of yoga
  • 30 days of blackout poetry
  • 30 days of graphic design
  • 30 days of podcasting
  • 30 days of reading a blog archive

If you’re new to this, it almost doesn’t matter what you choose. The act of doing something creative and valuable every day is enough to start seeing a return. As I wrote this month,

…small acts of deliberate creative work yield far better results than waiting for big wins.

Think of yourself like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Living the same day over and over is tragically underrated.

And so it is.

Redacted

Like newspaper blackout poetry, life too is often more about what you take away than what you add.

In dieting, for example, it’s better to remove sugar, vegetable oil, and grains before you focus on introducing other foods. Similarly, Tim Ferriss recommends negative visualization as a tool as valuable or more valuable than positive visualization.

In my own life, exiting situations — redacting things — from my life, has made some of the biggest differences. High school football, bad relationships, college, all redacted.

So, redact. Then redact some more.

You’ll have to work


My work with Praxis puts me in touch daily with young people at the beginnings of their careers.

The hardest lesson they have to learn? Nobody cares about your wants. Your friends don’t. Your colleagues don’t. Nothing you think or say can help you cheat reality.

You’ll just have to work.

You will be unappreciated


It seems there is almost an inverse relationship to your long term success and the amount of recognition you receive early on in your career. There’s a great quote by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead that says this better than any poem I could make:

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.

Just do your work. Do it well.

Describe what you do more than who you are

Everywhere I look there’s someone with a “25 under 25” title or some other ultimately meaningless accolade or self-description like “forward thinking,” “driven,” or “innovator.” Generally it’s not good to lead with these.

It’s not that they are necessarily bad, but most of the truly successful people I know are too excited to talk about what they do to care about talking much about who they are.

A good example I like is Pieter Levels’ Twitter description:

Notice that it’s all things he’s built. Sure he calls himself a “serial maker,” but his claim is proven immediately after that by listing what he’s created, and he frankly doesn’t even need to say it. I know it already just by looking at the links.

This is hard to do because it doesn’t allow you to cheat reality. If someone checks on something you claim you did and you haven’t, you’re in trouble. But in a world where everyone is trying to self-describe as “entrepreneur” or “innovator,” the personal branding reward for someone who can point to something concrete is big.