In 1965, the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth set up an installation titled One and Three Chairs. It consisted of three things: a photo of a chair, a physical wooden chair, and a dictionary definition of the word “chair.” Kosuth was asking the question that haunts every writer: Which one is the real chair? The object, the image, or the definition? Now shrink the problem down to a single word: red. A car, a winter coat, and a traffic light can all qualify as red. …
Writing as a Thinking Practice Writing is a powerful exercise in refining thought, unearthing new insights, and building clarity. As William Zinsser famously said in his On Writing Well classic: Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. One sharpens the other as writing forces us to slow down and organize our thoughts in ways that speaking or thinking alone often cannot achieve. At its best, clear writing transcends the personal and becomes universal by tapping into shared human experiences and …
Writing is more than stringing sentences together; it is boiling down thoughts on the relentless whiteness of the page, even though there is a tension between the limitation of language and the freedom of our thoughts. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly. Khalil Gibran – The Prophet Acknowledging this constraint, repetition in writing is a response to language’s limitations, an …
Before the printing press, only a small, literate elite, largely confined to the Church, had access to books, ideas and learning. The power of the Church was rooted in its exclusive access to scriptures and through them to the word of God. This gave the clergy unrivalled control over the people’s minds. The printing and distribution of books unleashed a voracious appetite for literacy and disseminated ideas across national and cultural boundaries on a scale that was previously unimaginable. Sir Ken Robinson – Out of …
Sappho is counted as one of the greatest poets of Antiquity, often named “The Tenth Muse” or “The Poetess”. Historically, the “lesbian” term originates from the name of the island of Lesbos, Sappho’s birthplace. A more in-depth description of what sapphic means nowadays can be found on the lgbtqia.fandom.com website. Sappho wrote thousands of verses, but only about 650 lines have survived. Perhaps the Catholic Church disapproved of her poetry (there are claims that Sappho’s works were burned on the orders of Pope Gregory VII). Or maybe the dialect …
So much has happened in 2021, so little has occurred. Coups d’état, lockdowns, controversies, wars, destructive climate disasters, 2021 was a terrible year. There is no denying there were some sparks of hope. For example, we saw the massive collaboration effort that contributed to the delivery of almost nine billion Covid jabs. This endeavour was not without troubles along the way, such as uneven access to vaccines or variants that seem to evade the vaccine. 2021 also brought the world’s first 3d printed school, built in …
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?” Annie Dillard – The Writing Life As I started writing articles for this blog for over a year now, I thought to review the lessons I learned about writing during this journey. When to Write What started as stealing time to write, here and there, progressed into a much more organized framework. Most of my …
Finishing a Book is Optional There is a cognitive bias called the sunk cost fallacy. We hesitate to abandon a strategy or a plan because we already have invested time, money, energy in it, even if dropping that specific action would be more helpful for us. With the sunk cost fallacy in mind, we would gain more if we do not finish a book we do not enjoy. Time is non-regenerable and is not worth spending our time on boring or bad books. Usually, after …