Colleagues, what are your favorite mid-to-long form articles and essays about #writing and #creativity
I’m teaching a new upper-level seminar on writing and creativity. We’ll be thinking about topics like process, inspiration, cognition, collaboration, and tech tools (generative AI, but not only that).
Chapters from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic are already on my radar. What else do you suggest? What authors or creators’ reflections on their own work do you love to read?
We seek things. Not for the sake of attaining them. Not in the hopes of actually having them, but only in an effort of avoiding something else. We seek company to avoid solitude, to avoid loneliness. We want power to avoid impotence and vulnerability. Financial success to avoid the feeling of having less, of being less. We try to grab as much as we can to avoid letting go.
Check out this excerpt from the first interlude of my novel, Below the Heavens - JiangXi.
I have the entirety of the novel published on Royal Road for free. I'm actively publishing the second novel of the series as well! You can find the link to both in my bio.
From threshold to threshold, we step through entry ways and rooms. Closets, doors, and walls. A residence covered in night. Present and estranged. Familiar and astray. We trace the edges of our openness. The grain of our enclosed space. The parts that have collapsed. Those that remain. The ones that can still be saved.
Moving on starts with mourning, with grief, with sackcloth and ashes. A burial. A long black veil. You will have to say goodbye to the possibility that things could have been different, that things could have ended another way. The things that never were, will never be. Everything that was, will never be again. Handfuls of dirt dropped on to a casket. You close your eyes, take a breath, and walk away from the grave.
Check out this audio excerpt from the first chapter of my novel, Below the Heavens - JiangXi.
I have the entirety of the novel published on Royal Road for free. I'm actively publishing the second novel of the series as well! You can find the link to both in my bio.