{"id":3676,"date":"2011-01-13T01:18:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T01:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/?p=3676"},"modified":"2011-02-24T21:55:42","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T21:55:42","slug":"malcolm-gladwell-advice-to-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/13\/malcolm-gladwell-advice-to-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"malcolm gladwell. advice to writers."},"content":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Gladwell on The Big Think<\/a><\/em>: This I think is true, not just of writers, but of anyone who is in a creative space, that you have to reverse the normal human tendency, which is to edit. So a lot of… and occasionally this is, I think, a source of a great deal of frustration that exists between people in creative and non-creative universes, which is that creative people I think are trying to… their lives and their brains, their brains are messy. Their imaginations are messy. Why, because they don\u2019t want to throw anything out. Why don\u2019t they want to throw anything out? Because they believe on some level that there is always something of interest or value in whatever they encounter. They know enough about how mysterious and serendipitous and unpredictable the creative process is that they realize that it\u2019s dangerous to kind of make too hasty a judgment about the value of anything that they come across. <\/p>\n

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People in non-creative universes have exactly the opposite relationship to information\u2014or to experiences is a better way of putting it. They\u2019ll see something and they\u2019ll say “Is it relevant to what I’m doing?” And if it\u2019s not they should push it aside and focus on what they\u2019re kind of task is. If you’re at Proctor & Gamble and you\u2019re the head of Ivory soap you\u2019re job is to sell more soap and if you get distracted by some interesting, but ultimately marginal subsidiary issue you won\u2019t sell as much soap. And that is an extreme example, but that’s a world that demands focus. If you\u2019re a surgeon and you\u2019re operating you cannot let your imagination wander about some idiosyncrasy of the operation. You have to kind of zero in. So I think that is a kind of… That embracing of messiness and understanding its contribution to the creative process is something that writers and creative types, artists, whatever have got to cultivate, have to learn to be comfortable with. Because it goes against a lot of our kind of instincts and training as kind of educated people. December 16, 2010<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Gladwell on The Big Think: This I think is true, not just of writers, but of anyone who is in a creative space, that you have to reverse the normal human tendency, which is to edit. So a lot of… and occasionally this is, I think, a source of a great deal of frustration<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3676"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5857,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3676\/revisions\/5857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}