You may recall that one of my summer reads was The Luminous Solution: Creativity, resilience and the inner life by Charlotte Wood. In the book, Wood shares work that she has written – and rewritten – over many years in her pursuit of understanding other people’s creative lives. Her astute observations about not only her…
Tag: self-awareness
Writing yourself into the story
I expect there’s more writing rules and pieces of writing advice out there in the world than there are writers. So, figuring out what works for you can be a bit of a trial-and-error process. As someone who spends most of my day in the business writing space, I’m still trying to figure out how…
We spend our lives not seeing what we saw
It’s writing exercise time, again! This time the task was to use the prompt We spend our lives not seeing what we saw to draft three micro pieces – some poetry, some fiction, and a personal response. As always, I did these under time pressure and with the understanding that exercise of any kind isn’t…
For the (photo) record
I don’t take many photos. It doesn’t matter if I’m at a family wedding, catching up with friends I don’t see very often, or on some amazing travel adventure (remember them?); you just won’t find me behind the lens. Lately I’ve been thinking about why this is. The best reason I can come up with…
Not. Not. Not. Not.
I have notebooks piled up around my study. One of them is my ‘Book of Memories’, where I scribble down random memories that pop up, usually triggered by some current event. Another, my commonplace book, records words and phrases that I like (I’ve talked about my commonplace book before). Yet another captures story ideas, in…
Embracing the bad
Kyle A. Massa’s recent post on his most embarrassing writing fails is a cracking read. But it’s not the writing fails that makes it so good; it’s Kyle’s retelling of events and his ability to look past the cringe of reading back through old writing to find the lessons therein. Those lessons being, if I…
Today I celebrate my tiredness
Today I woke up tired. It’s the end of the week, I didn’t get a great sleep last night. I have hay fever, client deadlines, parents to worry about. And this covid thing still won’t go away. Enough. It isn’t often that I wake up tired, which is great, but sadly it means that I…
The freedom to explore, change course and back-track
This post is a bit of a muddled reflection of how conditioning in childhood to ‘never give up’ can impact how we exercise our ability (and right) to change our mind in adulthood (of course, these days we like to call it ‘pivoting’ or some other inane descriptor in an attempt to make the fact…
Praiseworthy failure. Yes, it does exist.
A few years ago, as part of my MBA, I took a course on company renewal and failure (amusingly, the university promoted it under a different name because it didn’t want to publicise that it offered a course on failure). Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about failure. While getting older seems…
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