“If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
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Posts Tagged ‘creativity’
Live Well
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, Thoughts, Writers, writing on December 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Advice for a Monday
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, Thoughts, work, writing on December 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“Take your job seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously.”
— Alex Trebek
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Keep Moving Forward
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, classes, creativity, genre fiction, Mary Robinette Kowal, Writers, writing on November 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“If we wait for the perfect time, we won’t ever write.”
Writer, audiobook narrator, puppeteer and award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal knows that external pressures can do a number of your writing, and that the best way forward is to keep moving forward.
As a way to help, she’s offering a Free Class: Barriers to Writing
Hey there… have you been having a hard time writing? Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around right now.
This class looks at what keeps people from writing. It’s less about problems with the story and more about all the external things. It covers environmental factors, mental health, and tricks for compensating for all of this to write.
I’m sharing this class for free, because I suspect we could all use both the boost and distraction now and in the coming months.
Hope this helps.
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Leaps of Imagination
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, inspiration, Thoughts on November 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“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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Do What You Can
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, Thoughts, Writers, writing on November 23, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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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Seeds of Success
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, failure, persistence, success, Thoughts, writing on November 15, 2024| Leave a Comment »
“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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Something to Look Forward To
Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, commercial fiction, creativity, Thoughts, Writers, writing on November 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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.
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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Writers, Rejoice!
Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, #writingscience, creativity, Writers, writing on November 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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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In This Golden Age
Posted in Science!, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, #C3PO, AI, creativity, innovation, Thoughts on October 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »
A few thoughts on AI from one of the leading sci-fi writers of the day.
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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The Road Is Made of Words
Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2024, creativity, persistence, Thoughts, Writers, writing, writing advice on October 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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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