Be extreme.
Do the thing that frightens you.
Be irresponsible.
Zig when others zag.
Question when others nod.
Take chances and liberties.
Apologise rather than ask permission
All creativity depends on this attitude. It’s that relentless, questing need to go beyond the boundaries of good sense. It’s not quite a philosophy – more an instinctive [...]
If you were to stop some random strangers in Queen Street and ask them what a poem was, you would probably get a lot of strange looks. Such behaviour is not normal.
But – having reassured your interviewees that no cameras were waiting to capture their embarrassment or perplexity – you would perhaps get a [...]
The decadence of ancient Rome is a subject that never gets old. Stuffed swans and fattened dormice served at banquets. Wild beasts devouring criminals and Christians for the entertainment of the mob. Emperors becoming clinically insane with power, and appointing a horse to the most prestigious office of state.
The last example is drawn from [...]
Every reader is offering you something precious: his or her time. Time is finite and eventually runs out. To repay readers for the gift of their time, writers need to offer something in return.
Here are four ways in which writers can show they value the time their readers are investing.
1. Attention
The difference [...]
The late Douglas Adams, when he wasn’t writing about hitchhiking around the galaxy, took time to compile a curious little book called The Meaning of Liff. Co-authored by John Lloyd, this work was intended to provide words for familiar concepts and situations that lacked a name.
All the ensuing terms were culled from a list [...]
A bar in Boston fills up every night with a motley assortment of losers. The owner is a non-drinking alcoholic. The barman is a borderline simpleton and the manager is a frantic bundle of neuroses, barely in control of her life. The regular customers include an overweight, unemployed accountant and a pathologically irritating know-it-all who [...]
If you want to accomplish something, what’s the most logical way to get started?
Perhaps you should write a plan, study the field and use your brain to look at all the angles. That could be the answer. It would mean using one of our most outstanding human qualities – intelligence – to find the [...]
It’s 1942. America is at war with Germany and Japan. The US Government mobilises thousands of scientists and puts them to work on the war’s most pressing problems, such as creating radar devices that let fighter pilots spot enemy bombers at a distance.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the hubs of this [...]
Michael Lewis may be one of the most successful non-fiction writers of the last 25 years. His books – Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short – have sold millions of copies and even been made into films starring Brad Pitt. A recent interview gave some insights into why this might be.
The first reason was [...]
