On this week’s show, Matt and Lisa meet Tris Oaten to discuss whether writing tools actually matter—and the answer might surprise you. While musicians have interfaces like Ableton and sequencers that fundamentally reshape their creative output, Tris argues that writers’ real tools are invisible: patterns of thought, environmental context, and the mental associations we build with certain albums or spaces. It’s a fascinating reframe that challenges how we think about creative tools entirely.

The conversation tackles why we’re still trapped by document formats designed in the 1980s, with passionate disagreements about whether Microsoft Word is an accessibility triumph or “awful garbage” that tricks you into formatting instead of writing. They explore alternatives like Typst and markdown, debate whether templates liberate or constrain creativity, and question why there aren’t more playful, experimental writing tools when musicians have entire ecosystems designed to spark new ideas.

But the real insight comes when they dig into the relationship between consumption and creation. Tris claims that writer’s block is actually reader’s block—your creative output depends entirely on rich inputs. They discuss techniques for breaking out of established thought patterns, from Bowie’s cut-up method to the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, and challenge the romanticization of suffering in creative work. Why do we assume writing should be painful when it could be joyful? It’s a conversation that moves between deeply practical advice and genuinely thought-provoking questions about the nature of creativity itself.

Transcript automatically created by Descript:

Lisa: Welcomed episode 337 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Matt Ballantine, and Tris Oaten.

Well, we’re back here again, Matt and I, and we’re welcoming Tris onto this week’s episode. And Matt, how has your week-ish been? What’s been going on for you?

Matt: My week-ish. So well a couple of weekends ago now. ’cause time flies like that. I had the delight of taking my mother to Venice for a long weekend, celebrate her 80th birthday, just her and me and it was amazing.

It’s the third time I’ve been to Venice and I don’t think it’s a place you can tire of, or maybe I’m just getting old, I don’t know. But it’s just, I mean, it’s, it’s utterly surreal. It’s completely beautiful. It’s touristy as hell in many ways, but there’s bits of it. And we were staying in a bit with just a little bit off the tourist trail, which is quite nice.

We went out to Lido, see the beach, which is totally different. We went out to Murano to look at very overpriced glass stuff that was nice. And then just pood around walking. Pops into a few museums, went to the Peggy Guggenheim Institute, which is a amazing modern art gallery , so that was great. And then I’ve been back, I’m taking taking a role at work with one of our bigger clients, which is, quite exciting. I’m also gearing up though for going on jury service in a week and a bit. And so trying to be able to fit what I can in before that.

And it’s, it’s a strange thing, jury service. It’s the second time I’ll have done it. And it does mean that you basically had to put your life on hold for unspecified period of possibly up to two weeks, but maybe more or maybe significantly less. Who knows? So I’ll be pood along to a crown court near you soon to be able to do my civic duty.

So that’ll be that. And apart from that, I’m, I think I’m losing my voice and I know that my mother is actually she’s fine, but has come down with COVID again. So I do wonder with my voice starting to fade out, whether I’m also gonna have COVID to delay on top of everything else, which would be great.

Amusing fun. That,

Lisa: that sounds like if that is the case, will that mean you won’t be able to do the jury service, I suppose.

Matt: I think you might need to be actually technically dead to not be able to take part in jury service, but we’ll, we’ll see. They’re quite strange. Right.

Lisa: Okay.

Matt: Which, you know. Fair enough.

But yeah, there we go. How about you, Lisa? What have you been up to?

Lisa: So the last week or two has been quite manic. My end. The famous book that we’ve talked about on a few episodes has finally gone out into the wild. Friend of the podcast and according to his post on LinkedIn, friend of me, Chris King, hi Chris, found a copy in actual Waterstones in Leeds, which is very exciting ’cause I’ve not yet been into a physical bookshop to find it.

And I wasn’t expecting it to be actually physically available for some reason. So That’s lovely. But yes, the last couple of weeks has been quite a lot of, I feel like I’ve become a bit of a content factory with it all. Because. As somebody else said, like once it’s, once it’s published, that’s just the beginning of all of the rest of the stuff that comes with.

So that’s been keeping me busy except it’s not been that that’s keeping me the busiest. What I’ve actually been doing recently is swapping SharePoint for PowerPoint. So the last few weeks I’ve been working with an Irish client who are doing some innovation training for a bunch of businesses in Ireland, and they’ve got several different suppliers and several different speakers.

And I’ve been trying to pull everything together into like a more cohesive templates and trying to make things a bit more keep things consistent for people. So I’ve swapped SharePoint for PowerPoint, which is a lovely change. But I did have a conversation again this afternoon about SharePoint, so I can’t.

I can’t escape it.

Matt: I think it’s worth pointing out at this point, my long held view that doing PowerPoint isn’t real work. But you know,

Lisa: what is real work? Is it something that you do, that you get paid for?

Matt: PowerPoint is the one of those things that you can just, I mean, so much time can be plowed into it. I guess putting the sort of work that you are into it is helps people to avoid that so they can actually focus on the actual bits that matter rather than working out whether 18 point or 22 point font is the right thing and whether it should be Crif or San Crif because you’ve gone through all of that for them.

Lisa: Exactly. That’s exactly why I’m there. I’m helping ease their cognitive burden by. Bringing it all into one template. So I might be losing my sanity, but hopefully everyone else is keeping theirs.

Matt: And how from a obviously your, you are specialist subject now around accessibility of content. How does PowerPoint fare these days, and especially how does some of those automated parts of PowerPoint enable you to be able to do things automatically?

Lisa: some of it is very good and some of it, the automated stuff that it spits out in the first place is very bad. The, the built in accessibility checkers in PowerPoint are great. All of the suggested color palettes when they create this, I, I love a smart art graphic ’cause if, if you use it, if you create a smart art graphic, it’s built off a list of bullets.

So it’s already starting with a list of structured content. So it’s not a li it’s not 17 text boxes on a page that have got lots of lines between them that you’d have to try and describe. But the color contrast is often not right. It often suggests white text on a yellow background, which is hard to read for everyone.

So yes, some things are really good. Once you’ve created, once you’ve done the work, making all the page layouts and templates, do what you need to, it actually makes it a lot easier to make a, a consistent experience and something that’s usable. But it takes some fiddling and also. Once you’ve made a template, when you actually start using it in earnest, you start finding it.

Actually, that’s not a great color scheme. Or, oh, I, I didn’t make the ...