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Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
— Gloria Steinem

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Some days I don’t have time to write, but today I have a different problem. I have time, technically, but don’t have the mental space to write. 

And that has to be ok. 

Do what you can, where you are. For me today, that means being ok with the fact that writing is off the table.

Until tomorrow!

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Photo by Valeria Lendel on Unsplash

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“In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it.”

— Paul Allen

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Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

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The other day, I started a book billed as a mystery for fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club. Premise, fine I guess. Characters, meh to mediocre. Overall story, tone and execution? Not for me. It takes a lot for me to put down a book, particularly before the first body falls, but in this case, I did it.

I only share books I like here, so I won’t mention the title. I will say that it’s lovely to find a reliable author. The good news is that Osman has started up a new series and I am looking forward to it. Here’s an interview with Osman and Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher books.

And while I think the idea that writing is a good job for those who have already had careers is a mite limiting, it certainly has worked out for these two authors.

‘I wanted to write a suburban Reacher’- Richard Osman talks to Lee Child about class, success and the secret to great crime writing

To me, it’s never about what happens. It’s about: why do I care what happens? And that’s all character…

My default is to write commercial fiction, because that’s just how my brain is. I want to do something that the maximum amount of people love; I want to write something that’s good and then sits right in the heart of popular culture. You want the sort of book where, if you’re on a long-haul flight and you open the first page, it takes you through that entire flight – that sounds trite, but it’s not, because how do you keep someone through an entire flight? You keep them with story, and you keep them with character, and you keep them with wit and with a personality that people want to spend time with.

— Richard Osman

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Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash

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Typing monkey would be unable to produce ‘Hamlet’ within the lifetime of the universe, study finds

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the authors muse.

So human writer monkeys can rest easy. In case you were worried!

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Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash

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A few thoughts on AI from one of the leading sci-fi writers of the day.

Scalzi on Film: Hollywood Totally Lied to Us About AI: Why Cinematic Cyborgs Are So Much Smarter Than What We Have in the Real World

Behold! Science has caught up to fiction, and the age of Artificial Intelligence, long promised by science fiction in film, literature, and video games, is here! And in this golden age…tech companies expend vast amounts of energy to create search engine assistants trained on partially or fully stolen data, who tell us it’s okay to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, and chatbots who “hallucinate” answers to queries, i.e. confabulate bullshit based on a statistical regression to the textual mean. Our “AI,” as it turns out, is less intelligent than a chicken, even if it has a better vocabulary.

Will the technology continue to change? Certainly, and with rapidity. Will it move more concretely from “applied statistics” to a more humanized “artificial intelligence”? We shall see!

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Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

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Write. There is no substitute…But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here.

The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot…it’s effort and practice. Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.

— Rebecca Solnit

So write bad stuff. Good stuff too, just try not to worry too much about which is which.

Just keep going.

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Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

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“That thing that gives you butterflies, that lights you up. That world you see when you close your eyes. Chase that.”

— Eddie Pinero

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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…but it doesn’t have to be boring. 

(This also reminds me of a clock I would love to make: 365 Knitting Clock by Siren Elise Wihelmsen)

Slow, but so cool!

Here’s to bringing inventive creativity to even the most ordinary of tasks!

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Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

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Stretched out in bed as morning rays usher in the day, it helps to remember that

today’s weather

the world’s weather

what to write

note: look up major volcanic eruptions in the modern era

if the cat moved two inches to the right I could breathe

bills

donations

bills

ouch, why do my feet hurt

location of the Golden Spike

the garage is a mess

write write

the neighbor cut down the milkweed before it went to seed

odds of a power outage this winter

dinner

breakfast

a certain Tuesday in November and

what comes next

write write write

should have bought more than two boxes of Girl Guide cookies

but at least they’re mint

work work work work work

doesn’t matter

yet, just

Now.

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Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

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