J.K. Rowling, on writing
Earlier this year, the most influential living writer in the English literary world (save your emails, she is) published a short Q&A on her website, and somehow I just now found it. While brief, it contains phenomenal advice for the writer who wants to grow:
Q. Do you have tips for others trying to write?
A: I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing. Something rebels in me when I’m told what I have to do before I’m fifty, or have to buy this season, or have to write if I want to be a success.
Ten Habits All Best-Selling Writers Have In Common. These Five Tips Will Transform Your Writing! Follow J.K. Rowling’s Golden Rules For Success!
I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.
So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’
She then goes on to list five important traits for an artist be: a reader, disciplined, resilient and humble, courageous, and independent. There are several more valuable answers in the post as well. If you are a writer or aspiring artist, this is worth your time.
Inevitable erosion
It should be clear by now that the modern miracles of technology are—at a minimum— a Faustian bargain, if not worse. From the seeds of doubt sown in our electoral system by foreign governments and the degradation of trust in public institutions, to the violations of privacy every day, or the fact that most weather apps on your phone sell your location history to the highest bidder (seriously, they do), we have willingly marched into a digital Panopticon that knows more about us they we do.
Almost two weeks ago, Vox published a piece by Rose Eveleth that shines a light why those in tech (and the rest of us, frankly) continue to whistle past this particular graveyard. It’s fascinating for many reasons, particularly because of Eveleth’s main point:
As a reporter who covers technology and the future, I constantly hear variations of this line as technologists attempt to apply the theory Charles Darwin made famous in biology to their own work. I’m told that there is a progression of technology, a movement that is bigger than any individual inventor or CEO. They say they are simply caught in a tide, swept along in a current they cannot fight.
Ah, the always inevitable “progress”. She goes on to argue persuasively that the reason this logic is simply an echo of the great American ideal of “progress at all costs.” She’s right, of course. This article is worth a read to understand how pervasive this mindset is in the tech industry. But also because by the end, most readers will want to take the writer’s final conclusion much further than she does: “But the ‘natural evolution of technology’ was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what ‘progress’ actually means.”
Faster than ever
Saturday morning in Vienna, Austria, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in less than two hours! This was not a normal marathon, but instead a “challenge” set up for Kipchogee to attempt to break the two hour barrier. The New York Times explains,
For all its magnitude, the accomplishment will be regarded largely as a symbolic one. The eye-popping time, which was 10 seconds quicker than the 1:59:50 time Kipchoge and his team had set out to achieve, will not be officially recognized as a world record because it was not run under open marathon conditions and because it featured a dense rotation of professional pacesetters.
For those unfamiliar with competitive running, a marathon in under two hours is INSANE. Kipchoge was a part of Nike’s very visible, but failed, attempt to do the same thing in 2017. Similar to that effort there Kipchoge ran this marathon in a tightly controlled controlled environment with the most advanced gear, a rotating pacing group, and even a pace car laser projecting a mark for the group to follow. This is no ordinary marathon, but his time is still an extraordinary accomplishment.
As always, thank you for reading and please share with someone if you enjoyed it. Have a great week!
Brian