One thing that’s always fascinated me is the difference between the traditional and simplified Chinese characters for “Love”. Here’s what they look like. The four red strokes in the character on the left represent the word “heart” in Chinese. It’s replaced by a single stroke in the simplified character. In traditional Chinese, the heart is…
Only The Dead Have No Problems.
The graveyard’s both the most expensive real estate on the face of this earth, and the only place you’d find people without troubles. “Only the dead have no problems.” Three things about that statement: My shrewd Christian readers would note that it’s not theologically sound; if one dies without Christ, one spends their after-death existence…
“Nice Picture To You As Well”
I don’t like the idea of joining my voice to the uproar of conflicting, often half-baked opinions of another million writers coming to grips with the emergence of ChatGPT (partly because, try as I might, my thoughts would probably be the most unbaked ones of them all). But a few things happened in my interactions…
Writers Don’t Know Anything About What They’re Writing
It’s funny how instinctively people reading something would assume that the writer knows what they’re writing about. It’s as if they believe that they’ve got to have figured out what they were going to write before they actually wrote the tweet, blog post, book, or what-have-you. It’s as if they trust the writer to know…
It’s All a Mind Game
I was teaching my sister to sing yesterday. Nothing fancy; just two girls with a beautiful song and an upright piano. As I walked her through how I produce sounds (and demonstrated examples), she told me three things: What I was saying doesn’t make sense (and is impossible to perform) She could understand what I…
Eye Contact
Two pairs of eyes glancing into each other, pupils glittering with a thrilling sort of intensity and connection. That instant is both audaciously invasive and extremely vulnerable. You may look away immediately and go on as if nothing has happened. Yet you feel as if you’ve been exposed temporarily, as though you’ve allowed them to…
The Tyranny of Potential
There exists for the creative three general modes of being: not having done, doing, and having done. The first stage, of course, is the first; this is where we often stay the longest, where we struggle most, and where the greatest graveyard of all that has ever entered the human consciousness lies. What has not…
The Creative Process
It’s an elusive thing, isn’t it, what we call the “creative process”. Sometimes it eludes us altogether, and we don’t create as we should, as much as we should, or create at all. A while ago I came across three simple points that, to me, lay out a fair starting point for any creative process.…
Brilliant Ideas
I’m not the only one who holds on to ideas I think are brilliant, waiting for the right moment or place to do something with them. I fear letting them go from the safety of my mind, thinking there’s always a better way to bring the idea to life, there’s going to be a better…
Write Stuck
Sometimes the words come easy. Sometimes they don’t. That’s not an excuse to stop writing. Athletes don’t just play when the sun is shining, when their body is in perfect condition, when they feel like playing, and when they’re at the top of their game. They play because they must. They play even when the…