The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best—write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, “What would make a better story?
The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use—do the work you want to see done. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon Schedule your sleep. Everyone likes flexibility but this you need to maintain and keep to a regular system. I remember hearing of a genius who wore the same clothes every day so he didn't have to think about it. It is that kind of thing. Sleeping reshuffles the deck, and you need to it function at a high rate. This is a case of maximizing your resource when awake, and to do that, you need sleep.
D I once had a Professor in college who told me that he remembered the time when he first heard the Beatle's Sargent Pepper album when it was played at a party that he was at.
Music was playing, people were dancing, and the music set the background tone. Then someone put on the Sargent Pepper album, and the dancing literally stopped. People sat down, got very quiet, and listened to the lyrics and music and the sounds of the album. No one had heard anything like that before. I play music constantly, and my headphones are often on my head as I work, and today I learned how to know when you are in the presence of art. I was listening to the new Fiona Apple album called; The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. I was working and very focused and then slowly the album moved from the background in my mind to the front, and I started listening intently to the lyrics. I had to sit down and really listen to the words, so I stopped working and listened. I got up to find the case, i had to find the case, to get the booklet with the lyrics, and I looked at each of the lyrics and read the individual lines, and then studied the drawings, and then listened again harder to the phrasing, to the slant rhymes, and the interesting word choices. I stopped what I was doing and just listened to the whole album. The whole world stopped. When done, I then had to tell someone, so I wrote this. That is art. D I went to college on an art scholarship and never took an art class.
I won awards at photography and had my own darkroom and never showed anyone that I knew. I joined a creative writing class, wrote some stories that the class loved, the teacher said I was smarter and more talented than he was. I stopped writing after that class. In the same class, someone was so impressed with my creativity they wrote me in their story. I walked away without talking about it. I used to draw and make cartoons and haven't drawn years, and it is a skill, and it has faded. My apartment used to be filled with paintings and books, and I threw them all away. I remember applying to an art school but delayed the portfolio and put it together at the last minute so it was not the best it could have been. I did not make it. I never applied to another school and got an MBA instead. I have started writing and then dropped so many books I lost count. The list could keep going, I have not done or finished so much. The time of self destructing my creativity is over. D I have become fascinated with the concept of strange loops,
Implicit in the concept of Strange Loops is the concept of infinity and I fascinated by the ideas of fugue and canon within a narrative structure. Think of the drawings by Escher. "The "Strange Loop" phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. (Here, the system is that of musical keys.) Sometimes I use the term Tangled Hierarchy to describe a system in which a Strange Loop occurs. As we go on, the theme of Strange Loops will recur again and again. Sometimes it will be hidden, other times it will be out in the open; sometimes it will be right side up, other times it will be upside down, or backwards. "Quaerendo invenietis" is my advice to the reader." - Godel, Escher, and Bach. I don't remember where I got the quote below, but it fascinates me. The question arises, "Can a brain be understood, in some objective sense, by an outsider?" Minds and Thoughts. The preceding poems bring up in a forceful way the question of whether languages, or indeed minds, can be "mapped" onto each other. How is communication possible between two separate physical brains: What do all human brains have in common? A geographical analogy is used to suggest an answer. The question arises, "Can a brain be understood, in some objective sense, by an outsider?" D “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing From my adventures in the subculture of addiction recovery, I’d learned that the trajectory of one’s life often boils down to a few identifiable moments—decisions that change everything. I knew all too well that moments like these were not to be squandered. Rather, they were to be respected and seized at all costs, for they just didn’t come around that often, if ever. Even if you experienced only one powerful moment like this one, you were lucky. Blink or look away for even an instant and the door didn’t just close, it literally vanished. In my case, this was the second time I’d been blessed with such an opportunity, the first being that precious moment of clarity that precipitated my sobriety in rehab. Looking into the mirror that night, I could feel that portal opening again. I needed to act. But how?
In truth, I needed an entirely new lifestyle. Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll |
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