James Somers • More People Should Write

When you find something that resonates, its use is not always immediately apparent. A line in a song might be the seed for your next coding project or inspire the title for the book you’re writing. It can be difficult to predict how something that resonates today might be useful in the future.

It is about knowing what and how to observe and directing your attention accordingly: what details do you focus on? What details do you omit? And how do you take in and capture those details that you do choose to zoom in on? In other words, how do you maximize your brain attic’s potential? You don’t just throw any old detail up there, if you rememb

You should write because when you know that you’re  going  to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called  Field Notes on Science & Nature , a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about  notes ? — but in execution

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better; everything w

James Bridle is an inveterate read-arounder too: Something seems interesting enough to make a mark about it, but you also leave the door open: you don’t see that thing in isolation, you start to notice other things that are like it in some way. Or, crucially, you start to notice a territory that is defined by these apparently disparate but actually