Category: creativity
-
water your vine
Like everyone else in America, I’m still swooning over Amanda Gorman’s performance of her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at the Presidential Inauguration this week. But a one line stood out to me above the rest: Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and…
-
failure’s pretty great
Yesterday, my roommate and I had a conversation about failure. I told him a story about writing my first full-length play. When I finished it, I printed out copies and invited a group of friends to come over and read it. This night was among the top five most embarrassing…
-
my favorite coffee mug
A few years back, some friends and I shot a web series. It was about our lives at the theater company where we worked and no, it wasn’t very good. I wrote an episode about dealing with writer’s block. The opening shot featured my desktop, including my favorite coffee mug…
-
why feel guilty?
There are a fair amount of things I enjoy that aren’t cool. They’re not culturally bulletproof, they’re cheesy, they’re sentimental. They’re not high art. These are the things we might call “guilty pleasures.” “The guilty pleasure is always the enjoyment of some form that is not high art,” says Fran…
-
why i love musicians
I truly envy musicians. A friend of mine from college used to talk about hanging out in the studio while recording music and how it fostered collaboration. One time I expressed my jealousy. “But dude,” he said. “You’re a writer. The world is your studio time.” Fair point, but landing…
-
“be patient”
A few years back, I went to see a Broadway play. Afterwards, I hung around outside the stage door and wound up talking to the director. “Be patient,” he said when I asked for advice. This is something at which I’ve never excelled. Be it waiting for a break, waiting…
-
here and now
In the final episode of The Last Dance, Mark Vancil had this to say about Michael Jordan: Most people live in fear because we project the past into the future. Michael’s a mystic. He was never anywhere else. His gift was not that he could jump high, run fast, shoot…
-
the machinery of storytelling
The more I write, the more I come to think of storytelling as building a machine. The basic formula for story is a character who wants something and must confront an obstacle in the pursuit of that desire. But there are other parts to the machine as well, with metaphors,…
-
the stories we tell
I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey, which in light of recent events, feels all too apt. “A mortal folly comes over the world,” reads the epigraph from Antonin Artaud. Couldn’t have said it better myself. One passage in particular stood out, especially when read alongside James Wood’s…
-
Austin Kleon on parenting
In times like these, I often wonder if the greatest service I can do my future children is preventing them from being born in the first place. (Yes, I’m aware that’s a dramatic way to say I’m sure about having kids.) Austin Kleon is someone to whom I’ve turned time…
joshua chamberlain 