Category: philosophy

• 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…

• The Mad King

  The mad king’s madness was the source of his power, for by wrongly ascribing subtle reason to his actions, his enemies defeated themselves. But having vanquished his enemies, his victory proved Pyrrhic, for the mad king’s madness stoked internecine feuds just as surely as it had undermined his foes. The mad king was never dethroned,…

• 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…

• How to make sense of complex ideas

  You know that feeling when someone is explaining an idea and you’re struggling to make sense of it—like peering out into dense fog, hoping to glimpse the outline of an approaching ship? Maybe it’s because they’re using unfamiliar acronyms or taking leaps of logic, or maybe it’s simply not something you have any personal experience…

• 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…

• Viktor Frankl on success

  From Man’s Search for Meaning: Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself…

• Lewis Thomas on the awe-inspiring collective project of human language

  From The Lives of a Cell: There are lots of possibilities here, but if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere,…

• Cultivating a sense of presence

  For me, writing fiction often boils down to cultivating a sense of presence, of being fully immersed in a scene, of stepping outside of self and into a character. It feels surprisingly similar to runner’s high or meditation, only in this case thoughts are displaced by imagination. Unfortunately, I find that maintaining that sense of…

• The life lesson that Edward Snowden learned from Super Mario Bros.

  From Permanent Record: It was the NES—the janky but genius 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend of Zelda, I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man, I learned that my enemies have much to teach; and from Duck Hunt, well, Duck Hunt taught me that even…

• Maria Popova on reality’s density of wonder

  The remarkable opening line of Maria Popova’s Figuring: All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had,…