“Find your own voice.” “Make each character sympathetic yet unique, with no stereotypes.” “Give the main character a meaningful arc, someone the reader can root for.” These imperatives appear, over and over, in courses for writers. I’m noticing that our atmosphere of complex cultural chaos – in the news, online, among friends and family, and […]
You Do the Math (or Not)
February 28, 2012 by
Getting the giggles about the collision between two emails this morning: one, from webwizard Seth Godin, saying that what we do, in life / business / culture is not math (simple on/off duality), and the other, from a long-ago meditation teacher, pointing out that we live too much from the wrong-headed math of surface interpretation. When […]
Adaptation: Not Always Second-Hand
January 15, 2012 by
Once again, a word-origin is revealing a hidden coherence: ap, which becomes apt, adapt, aptitude, adept and inept. It’s about fittedness, fastening two phenomena, one or both of them in motion. Like dancing: the fittedness being between the music and the body, or between two or more bodies, in spontaneous or rehearsed choreography (on a […]