Half Ideas

Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.

I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one d... See more

ON WRITING INSPIRATION:

Anything is interesting if you’re honest enough. Anything. I cannot stress this enough. You could tell me how you decided what to eat for dinner last night, and if you did it with the right combination of lucidity and fearlessness—unpacking the little idiosyncrasies behind why you think the way you do and the backstories tha... See more

This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing pr... See more

when you're just starting out on a project, when you're in that early stage where you're still trying to figure out what you want to write in the first place—at this stage, it's the frailty of memory that causes problems. This is because most good ideas (whether they're ideas for narrative structure, a particular twist in the argument, or a broader... See more