the nature of creativity

Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations

To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.

You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.
Small is more rewarding than big -

Cameron, you’ve said that when you’re not feeling particularly creative, you listen to a song, or watch a movie, or read a book, and before long you get “the urge to respond.” We typically hear the creative act described as, you know, there’s a void, and a flash of lighting cracks through it. But I really like that idea of response as intrinsic to... See more

I’ll leave you with a touching passage from Christopher Alexander on the nature of attention ⟣

One of the most moving moments in my life, was also one of the most ordinary. I was with a friend in Denmark. We were having strawberries for tea, and I noticed that she sliced the strawberries very very fine, almost like paper. Of course, it took longer

Nix • the delight of specificity

When you learn something about a writer, say, that Rousseau abandoned all of his children, it inflects the way you understand their writing. But even that isn’t quite the right example—it’s not about filling in the biographical details, it’s about realizing that the thing you’re reading comes from somewhere. Good writing is thick with that... See more

Adam Mastroianni • 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

I wonder if AI will lead to the rise of neologisms as a mark of the human touch—comingfromness, finchness

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by... See more

Adam Mastroianni • 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

Gmail

All writing about despair is ultimately insincere. Putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is secretly an act of hope, however faint—hope that someone will read your words, hope that someone will understand. Someone who truly feelsdespair wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it because they wouldn’t expect it to do anything. All text produced in... See more

Adam Mastroianni • 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they... See more