making sublime

Newspaper reporters call this a “morgue file”—I like that name even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.

“Instead of finding the product through discovery and iteration the goal is to reverse engineer the vision,” he explains. “If you take an incremental, discovery-led approach, then you might find yourself with product-market fit in a local maximum, building a company that you don’t want to lead.”

Writers have kept notebooks since time immemorial. The auctorial equivalent to the artist’s sketchbook is the “commonplace book,” which can contain everything from newspaper clippings to grocery lists to attempts to capture those inspirational bolts out of the blue.

I’m sure that somewhere out there, there is a writer who is far more disciplined... See more