On writing
Rereading is training, practice for remaking and unmaking—and, yes, razing—the world. Rereading draws your best thoughts close, keeps them at the ready, prepares you to think thoughts with them, prepares you to act with them at hand. Your favorite reads are your armor and your weapons and your shelter all in one. What have you gathered about you? W... See more
Mandy Brown • The case for rereading
Lauren Crichton added 12h
Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which yo... See more
Mandy Brown • The case for rereading
Lauren Crichton added 12h
The shelves tell me about who I’ve been and who I want to be, and they tell me that I can be easily broken down into categories, and it strangely doesn’t feel like a bad thing: It feels clarifying. There’s also a good tension in figuring out where my research ends and I begin, and noting the juicy spots where these meet.
Alicia Kennedy • On Culling My Books 📚
Lauren Crichton added 13d
"That for which we find words is something that is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking."
— Nietzche
I disagree with this.
Lauren Crichton added 2mo
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 wi... See more
jsomers.net • More People Should Write
Lauren Crichton added 2mo
“I want to do a different thing. I want to actually improve over time. I want to develop my own takes. I want to understand everything. And this is how the podcast improves over the long run too - by me becoming smarter and learning more shit. That is the underlying beta. Everything else is a temporary benefit at best (and more often, a total
... See moreLauren Crichton added 3mo
Every time I cut something, I'll never delete it. I just copy and paste it under a line at the bottom of the document. That's how I know I'm making progress – the graveyard gets larger and larger and the only things that are left alive are the things I didn't think I should kill.
Lauren Crichton added 3mo
Write it down
"Most good material is forgotten. Write down the funniest or most interesting thing that happens to you each day. Most days will be boring, but if you write something each day, then you'll have 5 to 10 entertaining stories within a year or two. People are sitting on more funny stories than they realize because they do not have a habit
Lauren Crichton added 4mo
Lauren Crichton added 4mo