Painstaking Bother

Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read th

... See more

Recently, this quote from the musician and composer Brian Eno in Eric Tamm’s biography has been floating back into my mind:

“The difficulty in feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and these are very important times. It’s the equivalent of dream time, in your dail... See more

"I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens." And now, in his most improbable guise yet, as artistic director of the 2010 Brighton festival, Eno wants to programme works that demonstrate why surrender is key to the sort of music and art that excite him. "I came to this idea because I noticed that when I set up ... See more