An Architect Aims for Creativity and Discovers Writing
To refine her skills as an architect, Nicole Voss went searching for the meaning of creativity. What she found was writing.
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Essays
31 posts
Essays to read, to seek, to learn
From Writer to Filmmaker, and Back Again
Stephen Newton shares his path from world of fiction to documentary film making. Stories told with the permission, and earned trust, of the films' subjects.
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Creativity is the Human Condition
Throughout the majority of humanity’s existence, creativity has been regarded as a mystical enigma. Architect and architecture critic Robert Furneaux Jordan asserted that “to comprehend [creativity] fully would be to be God. We can never comprehend God.” Thanks to this prevailing opinion, it wasn’t until the late 1940s that the study of creativity even started down the path toward legitimacy. In the seven decades since, the psychological and neurological basis of creativity has been fully extracted from the occult and shown to be ingrained in our species.
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Making It Up
My mother was a great reader of romances. Not the classic kind. The sort that make money. In my far-back childhood in the last century, reading a book was still a usual way to pass time.
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Parts of Me: Reflections on Reviewing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
In this Writer's Journey essay, Carol Ann Wilson shares how, in reading and reviewing The 1619 Project, she also uncovers "parts of a bigger me to be discovered and explored."
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Never Gonna Give It Up
I guess I am a lesson in never giving up. I’m almost 70 (well, I just turned 69 so 70 is a year away – still seems like almost). I…
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It’s a London thing
Ever find yourself rolling your eyes when you hear that phrase ‘back in the day’? As often as not uttered by some grisled cynic bemoaning the loss of an older…
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On Telling a Fractal: Parsing Patterns in My Prose
When you look at a mathematical fractal, you see self-similarity; not only do different parts of the figure look almost alike, it looks the same as you zoom in and out of it, its form governed by the parameters of the iterative algorithm that generates it. Can narratives similarly iterate by filling time rather than space, recapitulating condensed or expanded versions of events and examples of themes?
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Tell Me a Fractal
Think of a snowflake forming around a molecule of water clinging to a tiny particle of something, how it blossoms and diverges as other molecules join in, seeking their hexagonal destiny, becoming a perfect thing of beauty. Then think of it melting, its sharp edges blurring, its interstices blotting out until it plops to earth. That’s a story, right there, in full surround. Matter, space and time at play.
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The End of the Beginning
Building the Structural Foundation When I write, I have a plot sketched out in my mind and sometimes laying out the groundwork can be laborious and even boring. It’s essential,…
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