Sometimes our relationship with the muse feels like a situationship. Our connection has many of the characteristics of a serious romance, but none of the commitment. Like a couple, we’ll listen attentively to each other’s problems, we’ll text each other “how’s your day?”, we’ll kiss, we’ll have sex. We might even go to Saturday brunch … Continue reading
When you think of a writer, many words come to mind but fashionable probably isn’t one of them. Dark and depressed? Certainly. Above average intelligence? Perhaps. But fashionable? Unlikely. The popular conception of a writer is a bearded man in a dirty bathrobe hunched over his desk. He hasn’t showered in weeks, his hair is … Continue reading
Man’s relationship to his muse has always been tempestuous. When the muse arrives predictably every day at our desks, we’re enraptured by our work, in love with our every superb sentence. Words seem to flow from our fingers with little help from our intellect. We’re not so much writing as taking dictation. Our work feels … Continue reading
We live in an age of distraction. Silicon Valley’s brightest engineers deliberately design apps to be addictive and monopolize our attention. “It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you coming back,” former Mozilla employee Aza Raskin told BBC, “Behind every screen … Continue reading
What does it mean to lead a creative life? When most of us hear the words “creative” or “artist,” we imagine aloof hipsters in berets and black turtlenecks. A “real” artist, we’ve been told, is someone who makes a living from their art— and takes their work very seriously. The mythology of creativity can be … Continue reading
For me, writing has always been a steamy love affair. Whenever I can, I snatch a few moments to scribble: when I have five minutes to kill before heading to work, when I’m waiting on my boyfriend to finish getting ready for dinner. Writing is something I lust after. Yet at times writing is a temperamental … Continue reading
Why I write. I stole the title of this piece from Joan Didion who stole it from George Orwell. “I write,” she confessed in her superb 1976 essay, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Much like … Continue reading
“People claim to want to do something that matters,” Ryan Holiday, author of Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts once said, “yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate … Continue reading
On one of my favorite Q & A shows, Lori, a long-time watcher, asks for advice. Like most of us who are ambitious, she suffers from a widespread malady- heart-breaking disappointment at the revelation that her dreams aren’t manifesting in the way she wants: “I’m clear on my goals and take daily action toward my … Continue reading
When Cheryl Strayed was 33, she sat in a hushed cabin in the Massachusetts woods to write “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” the book that would eventually earn her dazzling literary success and worldwide acclaim. She, of course, had no way of knowing that her memoir would go on to sell … Continue reading
The Blank-Faced Confidante 