Writing

To write about something hard to explain, write a detailed letter to a friend about why it is so hard to explain, and then remove the initial “Dear Friend” part and you’ll have a great first draft.

Finishing means failing. If you always stay in the drafting stage, success—however you define it—is always on the horizon. But failing is how we teach ourselves to write.

writing is a way of connecting with yourself, your deepest thoughts and feelings, particularly when the first seem mysterious and the second hard to fathom.

Music done right captures a resonance between math and language.

Harmony/rhythm is basically a space/time language that is mathematical (an octave is a unit of space, a measure is a unit of time, and it’s all about how you carve and layer within those units). Lyrics are obviously the linguistic half of it. In the most basic songs, a nice poem is

Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet them on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides

Writing isn’t recording your thoughts; it’s thinking on the page.