Office Hours
When Emerson wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood,” he was not focused on developing a blockbuster, nor was he trying to appeal to the masses. But he was speaking a lot of truth.
Sometimes you’ll be ahead of your time or the joke won’t land or the recipient of your email won’t give you the time of day. Sometimes you’ll be the runner up. Someti... See more
Sometimes you’ll be ahead of your time or the joke won’t land or the recipient of your email won’t give you the time of day. Sometimes you’ll be the runner up. Someti... See more
Caroline Cala Donofrio • You Can't Win Them All
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; y... See more
How to Do What You Love
This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic,
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
if you’re not (sad to say) a rare genius, and you wish to, gradually, over time, raise the level of the (more or less limited) talent you do have, and make it into something powerful, I believe my theory might be of some value. You toughen up your will as much as you can. And at the same time you equip and maintain the headquarters of that will, yo
... See moreHaruki Murakami • Novelist as a Vocation: The master storyteller on writing and creativity
Discovering and developing a genuine beef into an artful calling card that lands you gigs is hard work. That’s why it’s a costly signal. You can’t fake it with simple bullshitting. You have to put in the work of: spotting a widespread pattern of disillusionment in the margins identifying the prevailing orthodoxy driving the disillusionment analyzin
... See moreVenkatesh Rao • The Art of Gig, Volume 1
Ira Glass, which could be called the Taste/Talent Gap. All of us who do creative work . . . we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good . . . It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s
... See moreRyan Holiday • Ego Is the Enemy
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 which they will write the stories only they could write, using what m... See more