Category: creativity

• How to do interesting work

  If you want to do interesting work, a great starting point is to work on things you find interesting. Instead of trying to optimize for what you think others are likely to find interesting—chasing the market is a Sisyphean task—just keep digging deeper into what you find interesting. That way, making your work interesting to others…

• 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…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias

  Global pandemic. Raging wildfires. Political upheaval. Never-ending Zooms. Twenty-twenty is the dystopia Hollywood has always dreamed of, sans a satisfying narrative arc. In times like these, nihilism beckons. Just give up, history seems to be saying. There’s nothing you can do. The best you can hope to for is to protect your own as you…

• 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…

• Stories are bicycles

  There’s a myth that puts storytellers on pedestals. It says that storytelling is the province of poets, novelists, and screenwriters. It says that there must be a moment of perfect inspiration, that the muse must whisper in your ear. It says that stories are supernatural, the revealed truth of someone of extraordinary talent and insight…

• Creativity is a choice

  It’s easy to make your creativity dependent on your environment. You can’t write that book until you escape to the perfect cabin in the woods. You can’t produce that song until you find the ideal recording studio. You can’t initiate that difficult conversation until the time is right. When I’m working on the rough draft…