There was a great article in the L.A. Times of August 19 about the B-52 bomber. Remember Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, straddling a hydrogen bomb in the bomb bay of a Strategic Air Command plane, then dropping into thin air while cutting loose a Rebel yell? That was a B-52. In real life the aircraft first saw service in the 1950s. It’s still flying today. With the latest upgrades, the B-52 is expected to remain as the Air Force’s #1 workhorse bomber into the 2040s. But here’s the sentence from the article that leapt out at me: Now the plane,…

My apologies to everyone who got psyched up, a few weeks ago, to learn more about the Foolscap Method (which I wrote about then in this space and promised to write about again), only to have me drop the ball completely. Sorry! There’s a reason. We’ve been working feverishly over the past few weeks to re-jigger this site to handle some new long-form material that we want to make available to our regular readers. That’s what the FIRST LOOK ACCESS box is all about, above and to the right. Bottom line: the Wednesday after next, we’ll be ready. We’ll start…

This post first ran November 9, 2011. We’re revisiting it today as I approach another deadline and am reminded of those 10,000 hours. I’m not sure whether Malcolm Gladwell was the first to identify this principle or was simply responsible for popularizing it. But his name is definitely associated with it. The rule says that in order for an individual to master any complex skill, be it brain surgery or playing the cello, she must put in 10,000 hours of focused practice. Since a thousand hours seems to be more or less the maximum we humans can handle in one year,…

[I never do this—pull a post from another site—but this one is so good (and I am in such passionate agreement with it) that I couldn’t resist. [Thank you, Tim Ferriss, from whose blog this came, and thank you, Kevin Ashton, for writing it. Kevin is the co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors. He also created the Internet of Things. Here’s Kevin’s article:] A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing. One of the most interesting things…

Do you remember the infamous incident from the 80s when David Geffen sued Neil Young for recording music that was “not representative” of Neil Young? I’m thinking of this in connection with recent posts by me and Shawn about commercial-versus-artistic, publishable-versus-unpublishable. Specifically this comment sent in by Susanna Plotnick: If we are working on our own, creating new forms, breaking rules, aren’t we courting ‘unpublishability’? Where do we draw the line between courting publishability and being a hack? An excellent question. But first back to Neil Young: When David Geffen launched Geffen Records in 1980, he paid big bucks to…

Continuing our discussion about the difference between publishable and unpublishable: I said last week that real = unpublishable, and artifical = publishable. Let me qualify that a bit. “Artificial,” in the sense I intend it, does not mean fake, phony, made up. It means crafted with deliberate artistic intent. “Artificial” means employing artifice to achieve the expression of a Deeper Truth. The artist is seeking the real by means of the artificial. Have you ever seen any of Monet’s Water Lilies in person? If you stand back at a viewing distance of, say, twenty feet, the illusion is astonishing. The…

We’ve been talking for the past couple of weeks about making the leap from unpublishable to publishable. [More on “the Foolscap Method” in another week or so.] Some factors we’ve cited are artistic distance, thematic organization, the process of evolution from amateur to professional. Today let’s address the difference between real and artificial. In a nutshell: Real = unpublishable. Artificial = publishable. When I say “artificial,” I mean crafted with deliberate artistic intention so as to produce an emotional, moral, and aesthetic response in the reader. What do I mean by “real?” Real is your journal. Real are your letters…

On the theme of progressing from unpublishable to publishable (and taking off from Shawn’s Friday post, The Itch), I offer herewith a few words on a technique I call “the Foolscap Method.” The Foolscap Method is a way to get a big project started—a novel, a Ph.D. dissertation, a new business. It’s a trick, but a very wise and astute one. It’s not just a technique for organizing one’s thoughts, it’s a way to outfox Resistance. I’m going to continue on this subject for the next week or two, as well as putting up a couple of ten-minute videos. Details…

How hard is it to stop drinking? How hard is it to overcome an addiction? How hard is it to break free of a toxic relationship, a twisted family dynamic, a destructive marriage? How hard is it to make those changes permanent? When we talk about the switch from the mindset of the amateur to the mindset of the professional, we’re talking about a total, fundamental, life-overthrowing revolution. That’s why it’s so hard. The amateur is in the habit of yielding to Resistance, just as the alcoholic is in the habit of taking a drink. I can’t prove this, but…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a book publishable. A friend once described me, during my years in the wilderness, as “the man who has written more words for less money” than anybody he knew. I know I’m not the only one about whom such an observation has been made. Why was that early stuff so bad? How did it get better? What’s the difference between work that editors sling into the trash and work that they proudly put their names on? I can’t speak for anyone else, but there’s one factor that played a huge part…