Just out of curiosity

I get it when fiction-writer Dean Wesley Smith says that we have a 'creative voice' and a 'critical voice'. Smith always writes with his creative voice, never with the critical one, not even when rewriting the text, simply because he never rewrites. He says the best work is done with the creative voice (and actually, it is the way to enjoy the process the most). It is easy to distinguish between the two voices: the critical voice is always finding problems, and difficulties, it is negative, complaining, judging; the creative voice says 'let's play!' . I think this is the best description I have ever encountered about creative voice: 'let's play!'. No judgment, no evaluation, no worries about reaching the objective. That is why the creative voice is so important: because it does not create barriers, it allows anything to happen ; it does not stop action by analysing it, evaluating it, judging its value, measuring its importance.  The creative voic...

Randy Ingermanson came up with the "Snowflake method" for outlining novels. It is an analytical approach to plotting, based on iteratively refining ideas for the novel.  I will give this method a try. Given that I am quite analytical myself (Ingermanson is a doctor in Physics), maybe his method will suit me well. I will not explain the method here, but I give a link at the end. I was listening to an interview with Ingermanson and there are  three particular points that thought of sharing: 1. The one-sentence summary.  The first step of the snowflake method - there are ten steps in total - consists of writing down a one-sentence summary of the novel. This is actually pretty difficult to do and, therefore, easy to get stuck there. Ingermanson recommends dedicating just one hour to this process and then moving on to the next step. This is not a problem because after each step we can revise and update the previous ones, so this one sentence will evolve during the process. I l...

After more than a week of starting this blog, I realized that there is something about it that I really like: the revision part. Normally I write quite a lot by doing journaling and putting down ideas or random thoughts. But this type of writing, even though it feels nice, it never gets a proper revision - it is never written having in mind that someone else may read it. I like the revision part: the purification of the text, the evolution of the original idea, killing the darlings, erasing unnecessary words, and reducing the text as much as possible. With a big text, revision can be tedious, but blog entries are bite size.  It is the revision process that gives me the feeling of getting a final product and the satisfaction that comes with it. There is also an inner transformation during the process - sometimes the original message can transmute. Brandon Sanderson - I already talked about this author - wrote more than ten novels before getting published, but he never got down to ac...

“Writing apparently filled a void I was feeling in my heart, just before I turned thirty.” – Haruki Murakami

Following the previous post , there are even more analogies between writers and researchers in mathematics. Typically writers are categorized into two types: the discoverers (they write without a plot in mind) or the plotters (the ones that organize all the scenes, the points of view, and the structure). Discoverers do not know what is going to happen next, plotters know everything. Typically writers are in between these two extremes. I think researchers are more the 'discovery' type. We have some kind of end goal that can be more or less vague, and some initial path to get there, but that is where our understanding of the plot ends. When walking the initial path new things are learned, new questions are asked, new curiosity is spiked and new motivation is born. So we keep changing paths, goals, and the story. As a consequence, we create a lot of work that will go to the bin: piles of written papers that will not appear in the end product, but that was necessary to reach the de...

Tomorrow, back to work. It has been the first long holiday (2 weeks) in a long time. Among other things, I read the book "Someday is today" by the novelist and storyteller Matthew Dicks. I found it great. It is especially useful for creative people that do not manage to find the time (and strategy) to get things going. Dicks is a brave and generous guy: he goes out there and exposes his journey and vulnerabilities. I found him a true source of inspiration. Reading "Someday is today" and "Storyworthy" (another book of his) , I found quite a few analogies between being a researcher (in mathematics) and being an artist: Despair (of not knowing if you will make it or if you will be good enough): Apparently, both Matthew Dicks and Stephen King (and others) had a moment of despair where they thought that they would never become novelists; nobody was going to buy their books. The same tends to happen in maths: PhD students (and post-docs) tend to go through a ...