Category: Creator Confidential
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An advantage and disadvantage to publishing at a blog
If you publish your work at a blog, very few people are going to read it. There is an advantage to this: your source of feedback is more introspective. Posting your work at a blog trains you to focus on your own responses to your work. You learn to focus on the process, not the…
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Philip Glass’s composing practice
Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music, has been very energizing to read. One of the more interesting passages describes how he developed more rigorous work habits to accommodate his learning at Juilliard. In order to better focus on composing music, Philip set a goal to sit at a piano at home for three hours. He…
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Creative Doing, at Creative Odyssey
I appeared as a guest on Emil Drud’s Creative Odyssey podcast. We talked about Creative Doing, Prologue, and my career path, amidst all sorts of other stuff. This feels like one of my better guest appearances. It was also one of the first podcasts I’ve joined since starting New Material. As I was listening to…
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A good example is worth the effort
Finding good examples, references, and stories is one of the most important, and undervalued, aspects of writing. It remains a good opportunity to make your work better: Is the example too well known and common? Can a reader relate to this? Does this example say what I want it to say? Does the metaphor work?…
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A lesson this blog has taught me
I write here every day, and I don’t take it for granted. It’s not difficult for me to imagine a world where I stopped writing altogether. It almost happened a decade ago. (I mentioned it here briefly.) While I wrote very wholeheartedly at the time, I also didn’t treat my work very well. I felt…
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Discover what you want to say by writing every day
I was reading a post I wrote recently, and I realized that I’d actually excerpted the same quote twice. That was inevitable—I’ve written over 1,000 posts at this point—and it created an opening for me to explore why it continues to resonate throughout the years. I started reading each of the related posts as well.…
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Your brain’s ecosystem
Virgil Abloh really DJed. Music, hanging out, and DJing shaped his brain—they were key fundamentals to his ecosystem. This ecosystem would enable him to take his skills and approach into fashion and creative direction. I write every day at this blog. It’s a key part of my ecosystem. In a recent interview, I was reminded…