Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders is a good one I read pretty recently. It’s about using fiction both as an escape from and as a commentary on reality, and it has a ton of really interesting ideas about worldbuilding and what kind of characters are interesting and also about emotional and less technical aspects of writing. I’d say it’s definitely worth a read. Also, it has really good writing exercises.

I don’t. I ask my friends if I can steal their ideas instead. If we’ve been friends long enough, I’ve probably done it to you.

(This is only partially a joke.)

There are 3 main categories of books about creativity, in my opinion:

1. Self-help books (which are, in my opinion, terribly useless, though they sometimes include a few interesting ideas).

2. Books written by researchers (which tend to make more objective claims and which I personally find more interesting).

3. Books written by journalists, which tend to be either/or.

So I want to talk about this poster briefly (it’s from Michèle Provost’s installation at the SAW gallery)¹.

Mainly, I want to talk about why I dislike it.

The text on the poster was “Words will always be this clumsy approximation of something that can be best explained through drawing.” I’m not including the actual photo, because it looks terrible.

The first time I saw the poster it wasn’t even at the show – it was on a picture my friend took of the installation on her phone so she could tell me about it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

My favourite sentence to pull out when a bunch of people start having technical discussions and act like I’m not there is “I understood about 5% of what you just said.”

Never be afraid to tell someone you have no clue what they’re talking about (and definitely ask them to explain).