“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already—and all you have to do now is find it?”—So Steward Brand wrote, in an email to Brian Eno, and so Eno reports to us, in “About This Diary,” the preface to A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, 1995.
The Jobs anecdote about crumpling paper is perfect. The tension between compression and clarity maps onto alot of creative work beyond poetry, like interface design where too many features mean nobody uses any effectively. I've always thought Frost's approach is underrated because it lets the structure do the heavy lifting while the language stays grounded. The framing of writing as finding rather than creating flips pressure into possibility, makes the blank page less terrfiying.
The Jobs anecdote about crumpling paper is perfect. The tension between compression and clarity maps onto alot of creative work beyond poetry, like interface design where too many features mean nobody uses any effectively. I've always thought Frost's approach is underrated because it lets the structure do the heavy lifting while the language stays grounded. The framing of writing as finding rather than creating flips pressure into possibility, makes the blank page less terrfiying.
The figure for the advance on Brian Eno's book cannot possibly be right. I suspect it was a joke on his part.
I wouldn’t be surprised if every word of the book was false.
Ha!