🧭 craft

loving the process

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, ac

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

Substack • Notes | Substack

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace,

Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly

I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. S... See more

In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and humanity... See more

Medium • Rewilding the Imagination

Increasingly, the work that stand out will be more raw and incomplete (because — by definition — new ideas haven’t been optimized because…they are new).

Eno explains:

"[On one end, you have] auto-tune that perfectly puts music into tune…which is sort of flawless and faultless. [In contrast, the other side] is clumsy, awkward, crude and unfinished thi... See more

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 close

There’s also something to be said about collating and curating in the slow writing process—facts, knowledge, smells, descriptions, stories, passport stamps, headlines—until the collection becomes part of the transformation process. Through acute and critical attention, away from the drive of production, toward the singularity of studying a branch, ... See more

loving the process

Substack • Notes | Substack

Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly

Medium • Rewilding the Imagination

Melissa Matthewson • A Revolution in Creativity: On Slow Writing