Category: writing

• Ten popular Bandwidth highlights, annotated

  A while back, Goodreads asked me to annotate ten of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. I love snatching glimpses into other people’s creative processes, and these notes give you a sneak peek into mine. Let’s dive right in. The highlights from the novel are indented and my notes follow. There was a deeper…

• 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…

• Brad Feld on Nietzsche for creators

  “One man had great works, but his comrade had great faith in these works. They were inseparable, but obviously the former was dependent upon the latter.” -Nietzsche I didn’t write my first novel to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a writer. I wrote my first novel because I was a voracious reader, and there…

• Blake Crouch on writing Summer Frost

  Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is a technothriller in miniature. Only 74 pages long, it conjures a complete, compelling narrative arc through a near-future where a non-player character in a computer game evolves into an autonomous AI. As thought-provoking as it is propulsive, this is a story that will suck you in and stick with you long after…

• “Can I get your take on something?”

  When you face a tough decision and need advice, start by writing a description of your situation. Define the problem, stakes, options, and tradeoffs. Identify questions and risks. Explain what you think is important and why it matters. Read it out loud to yourself. What’s missing? Add it. What’s irrelevant? Cut it. What’s confusing? Clarify…

• Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?

  Danny Crichton interviewed me for TechCrunch about the feedback loop between imagined worlds and the real one: Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fiction, reality needn’t be plausible. The world is complex and even the wisest of us understand only a tiny sliver of what’s really going on. Nobody knows what comes next.…

• 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…

• Literary leverage

  As a writer, it’s important to remember that only a tiny percentage of people read, far fewer read full articles instead of just headlines, fewer still read books, and—even if it’s a massive hit—only a minuscule fraction of those rarified few will read your book. Knowing that you will never reach everyone frees you to…

• Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas

  Stories are Trojan Horses for ideas, a metaphor that proves its own point. Composed thousands of years ago—initially in Homer’s Odyssey and later in Virgil’s Aeneid—Odysseus’s gambit still reverberates through our culture, evolving as it leaps from mind to mind, seeding generation after generation with images, archetypes, and ways of making sense of the world. You…

• Cory Doctorow on writing Attack Surface

  Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Attack Surface, is inseparable from the zeitgeist—both are riven by insurrection, corruption, misinformation, and inequality—and the near-future it portrays illustrates how technology and politics are inseparable. The story follows a self-taught hacker from San Francisco who helps build the American digital surveillance apparatus out of a genuine sense of patriotism, only…