Substrate

Every time it’s a new thing.

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.” —Peter Gray ​ 2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest.

when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.” It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

“But, for writers, maybe it’s not just returning to the things we love… maybe it’s embedding the things we love in new things that we write that keeps those fish alive.”

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits. The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.” —David McCullough In his Paris Review interview, David McCullough talks about how important seeing is to the writer and historian, and