Category: art

• A Swing, a Miss, and a Burrito

  To whomever needs to hear this: I just took a big swing, gave it my all, and missed. I’m not gonna lie, it sucks. The details don’t matter, but this does: If I had known it would work at the outset, it wouldn’t have been worth doing. Making art requires taking real risks. Courage isn’t…

• Loosen the straps

  When water leaks into your SCUBA mask, beginners tighten the straps. But this warps the seal, letting in more water. Experienced divers loosen the straps because they know that the ocean provides all the pressure you need and the straps are just there to keep the mask in place. The same principle applies to creative…

• Ideas aren’t unique, execution is

  In his seminal book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly notes that while we celebrate Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the same theory of evolution around the same time, both of them inspired by Thomas Malthus’s ideas about population growth. Likewise, Albert Einstein is history’s archetypal genius, yet the same year he…

• Reassurance

  When I ask for advice, often what I’m really looking for is reassurance. But the work I’m most proud of requires taking real risks with no possible guarantee of success, so seeking reassurance that things will turn out okay is a trap. Trust yourself. Trust the process. * Complement with Most successful people have no…

• A pop band that talks about complicated emotions

  “At the heart of Sylvan Esso is this really fun argument —Nick wants things to sound unsettling, but I want you to take your shirt off and dance,” says Amelia Meath of the band she cofounded in 2012 that now boasts two million monthly listeners on Spotify. “We’re trying to make pop songs that aren’t on…

• Quantity is a route to quality, not its opposite

  There’s a school of advice that claims good writing is the result of endless, painstaking, comprehensive rewrites that iterate toward perfection, but I’ve learned much more about craft writing and publishing nine novels than I ever would have rewriting my first novel nine times. Quality versus quantity is a false dichotomy. Quantity is a route…

• Italo Calvino on what makes great writing great

  From Six Memos for the New Millennium: From its beginnings, my work as a writer has aimed to follow the lightning-fast course of mental circuits that capture and link points that are far apart in space and time. In my fondness for adventure stories and fairy tales, I have always sought something like an inner…

• Lasting value

  There are so many books to write, so many things to build, so many meals to cook, so many messages to send, so many songs to sing, so many experiments to run, so many conversations to have, so many dreams to realize. Everything burgeons with possibility, and the more abundant your curiosity, the more active…

• Chapter 0

  Whether you make books, music, software, or sandwiches, how you describe what you make is a crucial part of how other people experience it. Some authors submit their manuscript and expect their publisher to handle the rest. But a book’s cover, dust-jacket copy, and marketing materials are promises to the reader about the journey on…

• Broken, but not irreparable

  Six weeks ago I finished the rough draft of a new novel. While I was writing it, this book felt perfect—a spitfire of a story. When I reached the end, I knew that, barring minor edits, it was ready to rumble. I was more confident of it than any other rough draft I’ve written. I…