Monthly Archives: September 2012

Keep the Momentum Going, Roald Dahl

One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!

ROALD DAHL

Jonah Lehrer "How Creativity Works"

Predictors of Success (creative or otherwise):

How committed are you to this goal? Is this a goal you take seriously, always wanted to do?

How do you react to the inevitable frustrations and failures along the way – are they interpreted as a sign by you to try something else, or, that you should double down.

“The grittiest win. Creating something new is always going to be hard. If it were easy it would have been done already. It’s always going to involve lots of frustration, lots of failure, lots of edits, lots of drafts, iterations, and that’s why it takes grit. That’s why grit is such an essential component of creative success. Woody Allen has this great quote, ‘Creative success if eighty percent about showing up.’ Well grit is what allows you to show up, again, and again.”

“Everyone says, ‘Make the company bigger, grow the bottom line.” So they get an expensive bureaucracy, lots of fixed costs, but they’re no longer able to innovate at the same rate so they become more reliant upon their old ideas, for their new ideas they’ve got to invest in expensive acquisitions, but eventually those old ideas no longer work. They’re no longer useful. And those acquisitions don’t pan out. And that’s when companies go belly up.”

“Because cities don’t try to maximize creativity they end up doing exactly that. Companies on the other hand they try to micro manage the process. These well paid CEOs say, “I know how to do this, I know how to get the most out of my employees.” So they tell you which problems to work on, and they tell you who you can talk to, they tell you were you can go, they tell you not to drink a beer in the afternoon – they tell you to focus, focus, focus. Stay in your cubicle all day. Tell you to brainstorm when brainstorming absolutely doesn’t work. And all these things – many of which are done with the best of intentions – they actually get in the way.”

“Imagination has always seemed like a magic trick, but, the good news is, by finally understanding where new ideas come from, we can hopefully have more of them. The science of creativity can make us just a little bit more creative.”

Catalyzing Empathy with Factual Fiction: Steven Pinker on The Surprising Decline of Violence

“Empathy may be catalyzed by exposure to histories, journalism, memoirs, and realistic fiction, travel, and literacy – which allows us to project ourselves into the lives of other people, who formerly we may have treated as subhuman. And also to realize the accidental contingency of our own station in life – in the sense that “There but for fortune go I.”. It helps us imagine what it is to be someone else. Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else, may increase your moral consideration to that other person.”

Story of a Writer: Ray Bradbury on Storytelling and Human Nature in 1963 Documentary

“The first year I made nothing, the second year I made nothing, the third year I made 10 dollars, the fourth year I made 40 dollars. I remember these. I got these indelibly stamped in there. The fifth year I made 80. The sixth year I made 200. The seventh year I made 800. Eighth year, 1,200. Ninth year, 2,000. Tenth year, 4,000. Eleventh year, 8,000 … Just get a part-time job! Anything that’s half way decent! An usher in a theater … unless you’re a mad man, you can’t make do in the art fields! You’ve gotta be inspired and mad and excited and love it more than anything else in the world! It has to be this kind of, ‘By God, I’ve gotta do it! I’ve simply gotta do it!’ If you’re not this excited, you can’t win!

I’m a storyteller — that’s all I’ve never tried to be. I guess in ancient times, I would’ve been somewhere in the marketplace, alongside the magician, delighting the people. I’d rather delight and entertain than anything else.”