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Join NOW!Maria Popova collects the advice of Cheryl Strayed and uses Strayed’s words to deconstruct motherfuckery. Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was “lazy and lame,” Strayed recounts how she “finally reached a point where the prospect of […]
...more(n.) an abnormal fear of failure or defeat; from the Greek kakos (“bad, evil”); syn. atychiphobia Everybody in L.A. fails. We just do. —Moby, from “Creativity and Freedom to Fail” Maria Popova of Brainpickings pertinently asks in her March 2014 review of Sarah Lewis’s insightful book The Rise, “How, then, can we transcend that mental block, […]
...more“Art-typing,” or using a typewriter to create visual art, first stemmed from experimenting stenographers and then blossomed in the 1950s with the concrete poetry movement. A new anthology, Typewriter Art, looks at the history of this form. Brainpickings has a review and some stunning samples.
...moreTake an awe-inspiring five minute journey through your computer screen into H.G. Wells’s imagination. From filmmaker James W. Griffiths and PBS Digital Studios, A Solitary World pits text adapted from five of the legendary writer’s most celebrated works against stunning landscapes. Narrated by Terry Burns and scored by Lennert Busch, the film makes a strong case […]
...moreThe folks over at Brainpickings have unearthed a video from 1974 from a show called Day at Night where guest Ray Bradbury talked about writing, love, and life. “I use a library the same way I’ve been describing the creative process as a writer — I don’t go in with lists of things to read, […]
...moreIn 1928, author William Wallace Cook catalogued every narrative plot “through a method that bordered on madness,” ending up with 1,462 plots and the how-to manual Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Brainpickings reviews the book, which was reissued last month by Tin House. “[Plotto] is a reference guide that is at once dense, […]
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