Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, and I sit here in Alexandria, Virginia, once again marveling at our collective ability to over-hype. I don't mean to play down the impact of this storm, just because I never saw the high winds and tree losses the experts had predicted for my area; plenty of folks on …
Month: October 2012
How to Neither Show Nor Tell in Your Writing
Let's set the record straight right here at the start: This post is inspired by a McSweeney's essay by Colin Nissan titled, "The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do." In it we learn that "writing is a muscle" and a laptop is "a machine like the one at the gym where you …
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Are Creatives Born or Made?
It's a provocative claim, made right in the headline: "Want to be a writer? Have a literary parent." I included this London Independent article in last Friday's Creativity Tweets of the Week, and it's been gnawing at me ever since. As I am wont to do with The Artist's Road, I will now turn the …
Creativity Tweets of the Week — 10/12/12
Because you have too few demands for your attention, I present to you six links on writing and creativity I tweeted this week. Enjoy! "Is Blogging a Time-Suck for Writers?" Jody Hedlund: I can answer that question in one word: yes. But as Jody points out, every investment has some return. "What Are You Blogging …
Wrestling with Art vs. the Market
We all know William Shakespeare appealed to the common man, with stories that touched on moral truths built upon jokes about sex and farting. He followed a path well paved by giants like Euripides, who in a tragedy about the slaughter and enslavement of a population slips in a fat joke. I can imagine a …
The Balance Between Authenticity and Creativity
What does it mean to live authentically? To me it means finding comfort with the choices you make in your life. But that isn't always an easy thing to do. The artists I interviewed on my cross-country road trip ranged dramatically in their level of what we might call "professional" success. Most of them were …
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The Artist's Road 