Exploring the ways in which artists, artisans and technicians are intelligently expressing their creativity with a passion for culture, technology, marketing and advertising.
For Shared Worlds 2013, we have asked some of speculative fiction's finest artists, editors, and writers to write advice on their own hands and send us a picture.
Here are some of my favorite images and advice from the Shared Worlds 2013 Hand in Hand project:
The New Yorker has been writing about science and technology for almost a century. In one of the magazine’s earliest science articles, “Invention Factory,” from 1931, the reporter Malcolm Ross visits Bell Telephone Laboratories, which occupies a ten-story building on the Hudson, at West and Bank Streets in the West Village. Ross tours the building, eager to see the research that, “depression or not,” the telephone company is funding to the tune of nineteen million dollars a year. On the roof, to test its durability, telephone equipment is being prematurely aged in the wind and rain; inside, technicians are working to find the combination of metals that will most efficiently carry a signal. In one lab, hundreds of researchers have been working to create an automated switchboard; in another, a hushed “sanctum,” mathematicians are exploring the relationship between population density and what we’d now call bandwidth. For the past year, Ross writes, “two airplanes have been flying around New Jersey, by day and by night, in the worst weather they can find,” so that Bell Labs’s scientists can improve the radio systems that connect airports to pilots; related technologies are being developed for Hollywood, to help clean up “the buzzing noise which is continually present in all talkies.” Ross speaks to one scientist about the prospects for 3-D cinema but has sad news to report: it’s unlikely that “movie heroines will soon appear on the screen with the rounded effect of your Uncle Stephen’s stereopticon collection of stage beauties.” But there’s better news in the ultraviolet photomicroscope lab, where a microscope Bell commissioned to look at metals is now being used to peer at chromosomes.
The New Yorker has launched NewYorker.com/tech and plans to feature current coverage and articles from the archives, which as the excerpt above shows goes back a long time (and proves the more things advance the more the process of progress is the same.)
I am curious to see how the new content will be received given the reaction by some tech writers to a recent post about Apple.
Starting today you can visit WordsMove.Me to view all the Smarter Creativity writing related content.
The adverb is not your friend.
"Adverbs, you will remember ... are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They're the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. ... With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn't expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
Every so often I re-read Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This time around the passage above was the thing that resonated with me the most.
In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it's f*cking great. I say this as somebody who spent years earning exactly zero dollars for my writing (while waiting tables, like Mr. Tepper) and who now makes many dollars at it. But zero dollars or many dollars, I can honestly say it's the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege. What's more, you have no boss to speak of. You're not exposed to any sexual abuse or toxic chemicals on the job site (unless you're sexually abusing yourself, or eating Doritos while you type). You don't have to wear a nametag, and--unless you are exceptionally clumsy--you rarely run the risk of cutting off your hand in the machinery. Writing, I tell you, has everything to recommend it over real work.
As I have mentioned before I didn't discover Elizabeth Gilbert through her books, but rather through TED. I find her to be charming and witty in a way that motivates. In an essay for the wonderful Bookish site, quoted above, she takes Philip Roth to task for telling a newly published author who was waiting on him (Mr. Tepper above) the following:
"I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you."
A collection of links, ideas and posts by Antonio Ortiz.
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