🧭 craft

Creative endeavors are inspiring because the scope of the problem often feels bigger than your capacity to solve it. But because you find that problem so worthwhile, you’re willing to put in the effort required to provide the best solution possible. Through this process, you become a more capable person, which allows you to address more worthwhile... See more

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

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What we are trying to do influences what becomes salient to us. If you are looking for a friend in a crowd, faces become salient to you, faces that would have otherwise passed you by. If you are making videos, you will notice patterns in the videos you watch. If you’re not, you can watch a thousand videos and have them pass through your head

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From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:

the writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,

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Funnily enough, the only way to produce our best work is to take the requisite time away from it. It is only through a still and relaxed mind where we can think clearly and make the most of our talents and abilities.

Cameraperson by Kirsten Johnson

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF WHAT THE CAMERAPERSON ENABLES For the cameraperson: —Access and a reason to stay in worlds not of one’s own —Permission to behave, ask, do in ways that are transgressive/ outside social norms —Complete distraction from one’s own life —The creation of evidence of experience —The chance to be

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But I don’t think obsessive hustling makes good literature, or good writers, because writing is only the second part of the work. Most of the work is just existing. Writing, like, I suspect, any creative art, is just an attempt to transcribe infinity. And you have to sink into infinity slowly.

"I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.

Just as I... See more