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Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. Much like fiction writers, poets struggle to remember how to make sense of existence. They share a passion for language, and a common, driving need: to imagine the world not just as it is, but how it ought to be.

Poetry tends toward silence. It accounts for the void in a way that fiction is not always able to do. Poetry aspires to be a song, more than a story, to be lyrically rich. It is also full of primal messages that, somehow, can express the inexpressible. There is more than meets the eye. Fiction writers can directly benefit from reading poetry in this way; lines inspire sentences, stanzas transform paragraphs, as poems animate pages.

Why fiction writers should read poetry. Pair with how to enjoy poetry and Coleridge on what a poem is.

science and technology science philosophy thought and opinion culture and society

There could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists.

[…]

The dismissive “Just shut up and calculate!” to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists’ picture of the universe is simply inadequate. “It is time” physicist Neil Turok has said, “to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both”. This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.

The Guardian’s Raymond Tallis on why philosophy isn’t dead yet.

Also see Dorion Sagan, son of Carl, on why science and philosophy need each other.

Dan Savage thought and opinion marriage equality culture and society politics love

Rather than extend the same license to women that men have always enjoyed … we’ve imposed on men the same limitations that women have always endured.

Essential read: Dan Savage on marriage.

writing quote thought and opinion Tessa Hadley culture and society philosophy

Novelist Tessa Hadley adds to our ongoing archive of advice on writing.

Complement with this reading list of great writers’ collected wisdom on the craft.

Joss Whedon thought and opinion advice psychology culture and society interviews

You have to completely lose yourself in something, even if you have to lose yourself in something else 45 minutes later. If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It’s like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention. The secret to multitasking is that it isn’t actually multitasking. It’s just extreme focus and organization

Joss Whedon, who recently shared his life-wisdom with graduating seniors, joins in the effort to debunk the myth of multitasking.

Losing yourself is, of course, a function of having found your purpose and engaging in fulfilling work.

activism politics women culture and society Patrick Stewart thought and opinion

“Violence is never, EVER a choice that the man should make.”

Patrick Stewart’s infinitely moving account of how his childhood experience shaped his work on ending domestic violence against women, articulately arguing that this is not a “women’s problem” but, rather, its eradication is up to men. Amidst the epidemic of sexual assault on women in the military, Stewart points out the life-warping manifestations of PTSD across the spectrum of violence.

Please consider supporting Refuge, Stewart’s UK charity against domestic violence, and Joyful Heart Foundation, who do remarkable work to end sexual and domestic violence in the U.S.

(The Dish)

media and communication journalism culture and society thought and opinion advertising Jeff Jarvis

If we’re doing what we do to fool the public, to sell them crappy content or a shill’s swill, to prioritize paying customers’ interests over readers’, then we will cannibalize whatever credibility, trust, and value our brands have until they dry up.

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My advice to news organizations: Move out of the content — and sponsored content — business and get into the service business, where content is just one of your tools to serve the public.

Jeff Jarvis on sponsored content and “native advertising.”

A newspaper editor worried about this very issue nearly a century ago, and E.B. White admonished against this downward spiral of media almost four decades ago.

Jarvis’s essay sounds painfully reminiscent of Mark Twain’s lament:

“In the newspapers … you can use the editorial voice in the editorial columns to defend any wretched and injurious dogma you please by paying a dollar a line for it.”

quote culture and society thought and opinion philosophy Vernor Vinge

All evil and good is petty before Nature. … We take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Vernor Vinge, echoing Ptolemy, in A Fire Upon the Deep (Zones of Thought).

(↬ projectMONA)

Debbie Millman commencement education advice thought and opinion media and communication art and design creativity and innovation creativity art

Fail Safe – not your usual fluff-advice on living the creative life to the fullest.

Patti Smith poetry music history and literature lit culture and society thought and opinion

Patti Smith’s poetry

Walt Whitman poetry history and literature quote thought and opinion lit

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Happy birthday, Walt Whitman.

Amanda Palmer thought and opinion culture and society Media and communication music art and design crowdfunding publishing

Palmer’s logic here is itself generally identical to cold, hard free-market capitalism.

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I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it’s not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson she offers. Yes, she’s correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties. Its content isn’t like a newsletter mailed discreetly to private homes; it’s like a magazine on a newsstand, asking to be purchased. Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else. … It’s amazing how many of the decisions Palmer makes wind up exposing precisely that disconnect, between the way things look to the interested and the way they look to everyone else.

There’s little question that in an attention economy where readers are treated as sellable eyeballs, what passes for journalism thrives on controversy — even if manufactured. But rarely does a magazine manage to miss the point as completely, for the sake of cheap controversy, as the New York Magazine piece on Amanda Palmer excerpted above. Padding the easy jabs and commonplace truisms, disguised as some sort of meaningful cultural observation, is the gobsmacking, intentionally dry reductionism of Palmer’s infinitely insightful TED talk, robbing it — no doubt for melodramatic effect — of all its lyrical candor and beauty. (This is where Palmer’s recent, equally compelling keynote on the joyful rewards and trying punishments of sharing your art online resonates with particular poignancy.)

But perhaps the silver lining of an article like this is that it points to a systemic challenge with the age of crowdfunding: For all its creative empowerment, one of the toxic byproducts of Kickstarter culture is that everyone contributing money now feels like they can contribute creative input as well — ironically, warping the very integrity of the art they’re enjoying enough to support in the first place. And, above all, it illustrates, by its very virtue of missing the point, that one of the internet’s greatest gifts is precisely that it allows us to turn to what we’re interested in and turn away from what doesn’t. The tendency to point ever-swelling fingers and shout insults at that which does not interest or please us is not a failing of the internet, and most certainly not of Amanda Palmer, but of human nature at its worst.

thought and opinion philosophy quote

One third of all criminals are nothing but failed adventurers.

A 1929 meditation on our core contradictions.

writing women thought and opinion history and literature lit culture and society interviews

I do think it is a gender thing. I intuited that writers like Beckett and Burroughs were not keen on that terrible old phrase – the pram in the hall. When I was a teenager, I was reading about how to live. I couldn’t fit my sloppy, messy, hopeful, female side into that austere, male framework.

Novelist Tessa Hadley reflects on gender and writing.

Pair with Margaret Atwood on literature’s “women problem.”

writing history and literature lit thought and opinion advice media and communication

1. Don’t go out to lunch.

2. Don’t go online until lunch.

3. Don’t start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they’d do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days – weeks, months – being them until they thicken up and start to breathe. VS Pritchett said, “There’s no such thing as plot, only characters.” Once you know them well they’ll lead you into their stories. If you start too soon you won’t have a clue what they’re going to do and all is chaos.

4. However hopeless and inadequate you feel, leave that self behind. Psych yourself up until you’re confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.

5. Don’t “write”. “Writing” is about showing off, or imitating other writers. “Writing” mistakes solemnity for seriousness. Just write. Have courage, be truthful, be true to your characters.

6. Don’t be daunted. Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it’s going well it’s more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don’t panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue. Of course it’s a long haul, but you always knew that, didn’t you?

7. If a character stubbornly refuses to come alive, switch to the first person. Suddenly they’ll be speaking to you. Later you can change it back again if you need to.

8. I have to know the ending before I can begin. Map out as much as you need but don’t over-plot or you can constrict your characters. Let them change it as they go along.

9. You don’t have to know the ending.

10. In other words, you don’t have to listen to anyone’s advice. There are no rules to break. That’s the pleasure of it. Read The Paris Review interviews with writers – everyone has their own methods and if a novel is truly alive it will break all their rules too.

11. Discover the times when you’re most creative – mornings, nights, afternoons – and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk.

12. Sort out your priorities. Don’t clean your home, other than as a displacement activity. There won’t be time. You’ll probably neglect your friends too, and even your personal hygiene. If you have children, however, try to keep them fed.

Deborah Moggach’s rules for writing. Complement with rule sets from Henry Miller, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Helen Dunmore, Zadie Smith, Kurt Vonnegut, David Ogilvy, and John Steinbeck, and wash down with the essential collected wisdom of famous writers.