Craft Advice from George Saunders
Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from... See more
Brie Wolfson • Notes on “Taste”
I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.... See more
A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me
Paul Millerd • Losing Yourself, Ambition, Writing, 40k Books, Surrender | #247
Be ambitious about the process, not just the outcome. (To use my own hobby as an example, when I bake, I put on some good music, I take my time, I eat too much batter. That way, if the recipe implodes–like when I accidentally mixed up powdered sugar and flour–the whole thing isn’t a wash.)
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning.... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • This Will Change the Way You Think About Ambition
There Was Some Essential “Me-Ness” In It
For years, the writer George Saunders tried to write technically perfect stories. “I wrote story after story,” Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, “and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even though, in real life, I reflexively turned to humor at
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