I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting. And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality. The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write [...]
discipline
Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]: Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to [...]
I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
Becoming a subject and future panelist for the UWO Online Journalism class’s EduPunk team has thankfully put my ass into gear. Education strayed off my radar for a bit; but looking back, a lot of what I’ve written is even more consistent with EduPunk than I knew. Sometimes these cut-and-paste sessions make everything more coherent… Creative Learning [...]
I’m looking through my notebook and remembered that back in February I was starting to develop a Buddhist-like ‘practice’ based on writing. I’m going to make another effort. It looks like I was onto something. A few months ago, in search of discipline, I started copying out Upanishads during my breaks at work. My intention was [...]
Concerning blogging, I was just thinking about the importance of establishing certain expectations and meeting them consistently… In the last day or two I’m having trouble getting up stamina for the big, synoptic, sustained posts I tend to write when I’m on a roll, and which I’m developing a kind of discipline for. I’m just going to jam a little and [...]
Credibility vs. Notoriety: not sure which way to go with this… I’ve experimented a little bit with obscenity and attention-mongering; the results are indifferent but lean slightly towards the affirmative. For the most part I’ve exercised a lot of restraint, done a lot of editing and self-censoring, employed a lot of discipline, and striven for a high degree [...]
I could try to call this ”philosophy” but I avoid using the word whenever possible. There are too many meanings I don’t want to associate with.
As pointed out in the last post, some members of the current generation of news brass aren’t managing to see the future of their business because their vision is obscured by the conventional newsroom lens. They only see the competition that’s closest to their own conventions, but the range of threats they need to recognize are much more diffuse. Here [...]
