plocool

No experience is educative that does not tend both to knowledge of more facts and entertaining of more ideas and to a better, a more orderly, arranging of them.

Of course I know that writers, like everyone else, have to pay the bills. But I believe that blind subservience to an imagined final product is harmful to body and soul and is also often unnecessary.

Please! Try not to acquiesce too quickly in projects that you know aren’t right for who you are. Think about other financial solutions that will free you to focus on the primary task of becoming a writer. Give more thought to the longer trajectory of your life. Your most important work-in-progress is not the story you’re working on now. Your most important work-in-progress is you.

It takes listeners longer to determine what a word is—to understand c-a-t to be cat—when that word has lots of neighbors. That’s because when we hear a word, everything that sounds like that word becomes slightly more accessible in memory. With a large neighborhood at the ready, it is more difficult to eliminate the words that were not said; it’s harder to rule out the possibility that the talker said cut or kit or cot or cad or cap rather than cat. A word like gem, which has fewer neighbors than cat, is simply less confusable, and thus, all else being equal, requires less work to identify.

Someday, no doubt, we shall be spied upon from space platforms equipped with television cameras. And all this time the welfare state has been developing — in the main, of course, as a response to technology. It may be that a disrespect for privacy has been on the increase, too, but what is certain is that those of a trespassing inclination are infinitely better equipped today and have infinitely more excuses for their incursions.