SIX at 6: Swiss Cheese, in the Heights, Wylie Dufresne, STORY, Owning Your Style, and the Fallow Periods

Go too far to please the audience and you become a hack. Lose your point of view, lose your reason for doing the work, become a hack. Focus only on the results, become a hack. On the other hand, if you ignore what you see and simply create for yourself, you’ve walked away from empathy. If there is no change, there is no art. The professional unders

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Similarly, whenever I’m writing something and get stuck, I like to return to my private "phrases" collection, a home for sentences I find particularly resonant.

The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard kernel with a hammer and chisel, one should simply let it sit in water and wait. Over time, the shell softens and opens with ease. This is also true in writing; time is the only non-substitutable ingr... See more

Sometimes you might let something drag on too long: you miss deadlines or opportunities; you realize you’ve fallen behind on your vision; you imagined you were Lin-Manuel Miranda slowly cultivating a masterpiece, but then one day realize you’ve actually just been procrastinating. It’s tempting to react to these periods of depressed productivity by

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It’s always good to step back and look for pain points on your work-creation path to not only figure out how to be more efficient but also to evaluate what your favorite parts of your process are so you can do those more often. No matter how good you are at self-evaluating, asking your peers for help and criticism is incredibly important. Setting u

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