Category: creativity
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life as a two-headed monster
Almost ten years ago now, I had the chance to meet Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers for Saturday Night Live. In a freeform Q&A with a circle of students, he talked about writing for television and his creative process. The thing that always stuck with me was his…
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a kind of alchemy
About a year ago, Ben Gibbard became a massive presence in my life. I’ve always enjoyed Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, but my interest could be described as casual at best. But in March of last year, as the world shut down, Gibbard’s music and creativity became…
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nothing personal
My roommate and I have talked at length about how you can’t make your art personal. “Personalize it,” he’ll always say. “But never make it personal.” He’s 100% right, but as an artist, sometime it’s difficult to be honest with yourself. I recently scrapped an idea for a novel that…
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setting a song free
Making mixtapes has been my thing since seeing High Fidelity in middle school. Actually, if you want to get technical, I was making mixes even before that, shuffling songs around in Napster and burning them to CDs to play on my boombox. But it was John Cusack’s ranting and raving…
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seven questions no one asked me
Once again taking a page from Austin Kleon’s book, I really enjoyed reading and responding to this New York Times article, in which 75 artists were asked about how they spent the last year. Here are my own responses (even though no one asked me): 1. What’s one thing you…
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keeping the main thing the main thing
My roommate is an actor. He and I have had many a conversation about artistic work, the creative process, and maintaining personal integrity. One of his main tenants is “keep the main thing the main thing.” It’s easy to get distracted. For me as a writer, it’s easy to get…
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the power of juxtaposition
In his famous interview with François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock details the power of placing two images beside one another: [Pudovkin] describes an experiment by his teacher, Kuleshov. You see a close up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back…
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breaking my schedule
I’ve stuck to a pretty strict schedule for the last few months. Wake up, put on a pot of coffee, meditate, write a blog post, then onto the fiction work. If you look back at the journal I use to keep track of my days, almost every day for the…
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build yourself a playground
One of the things I set out to do in the last few years was make my living space a playground. Not so much in the literal sense, but more in the creative and artistic sense. A few years back, my roommate and I had a friend over. What started…
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looking for the launchpad
In an interview with Marc Maron, Matthew McConaughey described looking for “a launchpad line” to access a character: That line is not an attitude. It’s a part of his constitution. It’s an encyclopedia on that guy and that belief. It’s like The Wolf of Wall Street. The way I was…
joshua chamberlain 