Category Archives: Writing

What do you do to break a creative block?

Posted on by

I’ve been wanting to get back to blogging for a while now. Unfortunately a combination of graduate student life and not wanting to spend even more time than I already do in front of a computer has made me put that off. At the same time, I’ve been having some bursts of activity on Quora. I think Quora is an interesting site and serves a a good purpose, but I’m not very happy about its Walled Garden policies and I would like the information I put in to be more generally available (at least the stuff that doesn’t involve the more obscure points of Tolkien’s legendarium). So for today at least I’m going to report an answer I wrote up while i was waiting for my experiments to finish.

The post asked about overcoming creative block, in particular writer’s block. The poster said that time was sometimes, but not always a factor and that s/he had been writing quite prolifically before. (The previous sentence made me realize that English desperately needs a gender-neutral third-person pronoun that isn’t ‘it’.) Given my blogging predicament, I avoid this uncannily relevant. Anyways, without further ado:

Personally I’ve found that what helps is a combination of three things: good routine, new experiences and boredom.

First, routine.  If you’re having trouble getting time to write, or trouble sitting down to write even when you have time, a strict routine can definitely help. As Somerset Maugham supposedly said : “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” Find a quiet space, free of people and distractions, grab some coffee (or tea, or just water), turn off the Internet and your phone and just write. Write anything. It doesn’t have to be in your preferred genre or what you’re trying to write. It can be an essay, a journal entry, a letter to friend (or an enemy). The point is just to get into the habit of writing. Once you’re comfortable with sitting down for some time each day and just writing something you can move on to what you actually want to write.

Second, experiences. If you’re going to be a serious writer then it helps to have things to write about. While it’s definitely possible to create interesting by isolating yourself in a cabin in the woods (see Walden by Henry David Thoreau), I think it’s a safer bet (and far more interesting) to gather lots of interesting experiences and ideas and weave them together in interesting ways. Travel new places and keep your eyes, do things you thought you’d never do, talk to people you normally don’t interact with, eat foods that look strange and unfamiliar, look up random topics on Wikipedia, explore a new subject each month. The more ideas you have in your head, the easier it will be to have things to recombine and use as a basis for interesting writing.

Third, boredom. As a complement to the above, as you’re gathering experiences you need to have the time and energy to put them together. Spend a Saturday on the couch (or the hammock if you have one) with the TV off and without any people around. Stand in the checkout line and just stand. Get bored sometimes, don’t rush the mindless things like doing the dishes and vacuuming. You need to put interesting things in your head but you also have to give yourself the chance to let them interact and recombine. This part is often hard to do because you feel like you should be doing something productive, but I believe this stage of just letting ideas percolate and react is crucial to any creative activity.

Finally, to make the most of the above: carry a notebook and pen always. It doesn’t have to be a fancy Moleskine or anything of the sort. It just needs to be something where you can record interesting experiences and ideas and look back on them later.

Good luck and good writing.

To Share is Human

Posted on by

Last week I wrote about my break from writing and how I’d spent it doing a good amount of reading. I noted how I’d stumbled across a particularly interesting (and good quality) “curation” site called Brain Pickings which collects interesting reading material (and some videos) from around various books and around the web. As a tangent to that, I’ve been seeing an increasing tendency to make reading (which by itself is a solitary activity) more “social”. I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good thing.

A few weeks ago I found an interesting little service called Findings that lets you clip little snippets of text on the web and present in a quotation format with a proper citation. Though I don’t know how Findings can hope to make money (or how long they’ll stay up without a revenue stream) but they’re an interesting little service. Amazon’s Kindle devices and apps allow you to highlight passages from Kindle books and share them. So does the excellent Readmill app which I use to read free ePub books on my iPad.

The recent rise of social media is almost entirely built around the idea of sharing. I suppose it’s not really surprising. To share is human, we want to tell our stories and be heard. We want to tell people what we’re interested in, what we like and what we don’t like and we want to find people with similar interests so that we can share experiences. In some ways I suppose we share for the same reasons we live in families and communities: connecting with other human beings is a natural thing to do (though not for everyone and certainly not all the time). Sharing is one way of connecting.

Sharing may be a fundamentally human quality, but so is individuality. (There’s a Star Trek reference in there somewhere.) And that means that there are some things that we do not want to be shared, or at least not shared with the world at large. That’s why we have curtains and doors with locks on them. There are some experiences that should be limited to a single human being at a time (or we have agreed that should be the case). We value this notion of individuality and privacy highly enough that we have laws to explicitly protect it (though Mark Zuckerberg might want us to believe differently).

Personally, I’m on the more open side of the spectrum. My Twitter stream and Facebook account is probably more active than I’d care to admit. But I have my boundaries. I don’t post pictures online (partially that’s because I don’t really take many pictures) and I’m also somewhat skeptical about the whole “social reading” thing (see, all stuff about social reading services had a point after all). I believe that thinking, actual deep thinking, is best done alone or at most in small groups. Reading and writing are both forms of exchanging thoughts. To write well you must collect your own thoughts, organize them into a narrative and put them down in a coherent structure. To read well you must be in a position to absorb thoughts from a series of symbols, you must interpret them in the framework of your own experiences and judge which of those thoughts are to be accepted and incorporated and which are to be checked or discarded. Mandy Brown’s article on Ways of Reading is instructive, but like all such things, your mileage may vary.

While I like the idea of sharing quotations, writing book reviews and talking about books and the ideas behind them, all of those are secondary activities to the act of actually reading. They are preferably done at a later time, possibly in a different place. Now I’m certainly not one to tell you how you should go about reading. For one thing, I’m no Luddite, I love the Internet and all that has allowed. I think that sharing is by and large a good thing. Also, if I am to suggest that reading is a solitary activity then I probably have little right to tell you how to go about it. However, perhaps it’s best to keep in mind why we’re reading in the first place. Sometimes we read for information, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes to escape and sometimes to connect over particular books, authors and genres. I wonder if perhaps the rise of “social reading” might be the beginnings of a re-imagining of Ye Olde Book Club, but in a distributed, ad-hoc fashion. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe it’s just different. We shall see. But whatever you do please keep reading.

And if you’re not in a committed relationship, consider dating a girl who reads.

Book review: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

Posted on by

“Follow your passion is dangerous advice.”

Cal Newport’s newest book opens with an interesting and controversial piece of advice. That’s perhaps not surprising given how interesting Cal Newport himself is. He’s a new professor at Georgetown University and a Computer Science PhD out of MIT. He’s also the author of a popular blog and a number of books on student life, acheivement and productivity. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” is his most recent creation and this book might just change the way you look at your career and your life in general.

But first, let me tell you a little about myself. If you follow this blog regularly (and I hope you do) you’ll know that I’m a second year graduate student at Cornell University’s Computer Science program. I’m no longer a “new” graduate student but I’m certainly not a veteran of the research trenches yet. I’m still pretty early in my career and I’ve been grappling with some of the issues that come with the territory. In particular I’ve been thinking about what sort of projects I should be pursuing, what to do about projects I’m interested in but not 100% excited about and how to balance getting published with working on fun stuff (the two don’t always overlap). Newport’s new book has given me some good perspective on these matters.

The central thesis of this book is that the common wisdom of “follow your passion” is dangerously flawed. We shouldn’t be waiting for our dream job or our life purpose to fall into our laps. Instead we should be building “career capital” – valuable skills and expertise that we can exchange for jobs that are fulfilling and interesting.

The book opens by digging into the idea that passion is a basis for a remarkable life and bringing forth evidence that passion is rarer and less useful than we are led to believe. Newport then goes on to show that the alternative to passion is to become so good that they can’t ignore you. Concretely this translates to cultivating skills that are rare and valuable and that will let you negotiate your work and working conditions on your own terms. Newport cites studies that show that the actual determinant of career satisfaction is not “passion” but a trio of competence, control and relationships. The jobs we like are the ones that require skills, give us control over our work and life and bring us into contact with good coworkers. Finally we are shown how we can go about generating the career capital that we need in order to get these things in our work lives. In particular the book talks about deliberate practice, making small but continuous improvements in your skills and doing work that will make others sit up and notice.

Throughout the book Newport shares stories of both people who have followed the “passion hypothesis” and his proposed “career craftsman philosophy”. The examples are carefully examined and include a large group of people including venture capitalists, developers, farmers and professors. Instead of simply providing them as proof, Newport walks us through how his experiences with these people changed his own views on the matter and brought him to his current ideas on what makes a remarkable career.

While I’m generally skeptical of self-help books and books that claim to help you “follow your path”, this one is different. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Newport’s examples (and their discussion) are “scientific” but they are thorough and well researched. Furthermore, he acknowledges that the exact path will be different from person to person and that he is still figuring things out.

Personally, I found this book very helpful. It put to rest any worries I had about working on the “wrong” project. I’m still very much in the stage of my career where I’m earning career capital and most projects will be full of chances to learn and prove myself. But that doesn’t mean I should sign up for any project that walks in the door. The best projects are the ones that force me to learn something new and don’t require huge up front investments of time and energy (with little chance of results). As this book shows, excellent careers aren’t just by-products of luck, nor is it enough to just follow your interests. The best careers are crafted and take large investments of energy and effort over long periods of time. It helps that I love my job, but I don’t need to worry about picking the perfect project and being passionate about it, as long as I’m learning and gaining capital, I’m good (and getting better).

If you’re just starting out in a career, looking to switch or just want to give your career a jumpstart this is definitely a book worth reading. It’s never too late (or too early) to start improving. You don’t need to have a life mission set in stone before you get started either. Long story short, So Good They Can’t Ignore You is better life advice than “follow your passion”. Thanks to this book it’s probably easier to implement too.

On reading, writing and taking breaks

Posted on by

I’ve been taking a break from writing for a while. For the last few weeks I’ve been taking a break from this blog (and my tumblelog) as an experiment to see what life would be like without a regular writing commitment. The good news (at least I think it’s good news) is that I prefer having writing a staple part of my daily routine. Writing has a strange way of concentrating your focus and your direction. It encourages you to calm down and concentrate your thoughts into a single coherent narrative. In some ways, I think daily (or at least regular) writing is almost a form of meditation. It’s perhaps not quite as relaxing and focusing (especially if you’re on a deadline or you need to constantly look things up) but having a daily discipline is beneficial.

While I was on break from writing I did some more reading to fill up the time. I read more books and I read more blogs on the Internet. In particular I subscribed to a friend’s blog and to the excellent Brain Pickings. I’ve always loved reading, perhaps even more than I love writing. But the interesting thing is that on this break I grew just a little bit afraid of reading. Sites like Brain Pickings are ostensibly “curation” sites, their purpose is to gather the best content fitting a certain (often loose) theme and gather it in one place. In an age of abundant, often overwhelming information, curation and filtering are important services and we need them. One could say we desperately need them. But at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if maybe we’re missing something. In the rush to curate, to collect, to filter and gather I wonder if we forget to create. One thing I felt during my break from writing is that when you’re reading (or watching a lot) your head tends to fill up with ideas and thoughts and arguments (at least mine does). It’s good to have an outlet, a way to organize and then clean out everything that’s in your mind. That’s part of the reason that this break isn’t lasting any longer. There’s too much stuff in my head and I need to get it out.

I think there is a danger in always reading and collecting and never writing. Each piece of writing is a thought, no matter how brief, no matter how hastily formed. As we read we fill our heads with other people’s thoughts, with their experiences and emotions and worldviews. And that’s a good thing, something to be cherished and encouraged. But all that reading and curation and collection, all that absorption of other people’s thoughts only really make sense if we then put those thoughts to good use. For me at least, reading is incomplete without writing. It doesn’t have to be for an audience, it doesn’t have to be perfect or polished or presentable, but it has to be there. While reading gives me access to other peoples’ thoughts, writing gives space for my own, a little breathing space for my mind. And that is very important. Writing is how I take a break from the world, even if the ultimate goal is to put something out into the world.

On a related note, I’m starting to think that it’s a good idea to take regular breaks from things, including (especially?) things that we enjoy or are important to our lives. This includes breaks from work but also breaks from play. Now that my break from writing is over, I wonder what to take from next. I’ve been thinking it should be television. I don’t watch actual television, but I do spend a fair amount of time in front of Netflix, not a lot, but more than I’d like to. Netflix is great, of course, and I love a good story as much as the next guy. But television tends to fill your head with other people thoughts’, much more so than reading. And while I don’t mind good writers like Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who and Sherlock) filling my head, I don’t want it happening all the time and I certainly don’t want to be watching the same thing over and over.

And now that I’m writing again, I know just how to spend all the time that I do save from not watching TV. Stay tuned (pun intended).

Sunday Selection 2012-09-16

Posted on by

Around the Web

There is something magical about Firefox OS

As much as I love my Android phone and think that Windows phone UI is pretty interesting I’m starting to wonder if the phone software ecosystems aren’t starting to get a bit stale. Especially with the iPhone 5 release it looks like we’re getting to the point where manufacturers only make small incremental updates to their systems instead of really improving. I’m hoping Firefox OS for mobile devices will shake things up in much the same way that Firefox did for the desktop

The Joy of Quiet

I love the Internet. I love being connected. I love being able to talk to my parents across the world for virtually nothing every day. I love being able to exchange snarky quips with friends I haven’t seen in years ( and writing that sentence made me feel really old). But I sometimes I can’t help wonder if it isn’t all getting just a bit out of hand. I’m not at the point where I’m willing to pay money to get disconnected (and I went without Internet for a week in the summer with no withdrawal symptoms). But I am starting to tone things down a bit, watching less TV, unsubscribing from RSS feeds and trying to spend some time each day reading good old dead tree books and just hearing myself think.

Why I write: George Orwell’s Four Motives for Creation

The flip side of consumption is creation. Part of the reason I want to tone down my connectivity is so that I can consume less and create more. George Orwell has a somewhat unusual take on the reasons behind creativity: it’s less Zen and passion and more a combination of ego, pride and simple pragmatism. It’s useful to realize that not all creative types are driven by some diving inspiration by way of a capricious muse. Some people just want to be heard.

Web services

Findings

The Internet is a great medium for sharing, even better than a soapbox in a park or a podium at a forum. Findings in an interesting service for sharing text either from your Kindle or from the Web. They also place emphasis on proper attribution. I don’t know how they plan on making money but it’s well put-designed and I hope they add support for sharing from other reading platforms like Instapaper and Readmill.