The middle is where the work is
Every project has a long, unglamorous stretch after the idea stops being interesting and before the end is in sight. That stretch is the job.
4 min read
Tag 14 posts
Attention
What we look at, for how long, and what it costs to look away.
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Reading forty books a year, honestly
How many I finish, how many I abandon, and the rule that changed both numbers.
3 min read
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What I got wrong about mornings Members
It is 4:52 in the morning in February and I am standing in a cold kitchen waiting for a kettle, because at five
4 min read
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What the stonemason said
Nineteen years on one cathedral, and one sentence that reorganised how I think about a desk.
4 min read
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Nothing happened for an hour
I sat in a yard for an hour with a camera and did not press the shutter. A note on what that is for.
1 min read
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Notes on rereading the same four books
I stopped chasing new titles two years ago. Here is what a decade of rereading gave back instead.
1 min read
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The walk that fixed the paragraph
Forty minutes rewriting one sentence, then four thousand steps, and the sentence wrote itself.
1 min read
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A quieter kind of ambition
Wanting less on purpose, without pretending that wanting nothing is a personality.
3 min read
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Against the productive weekend
The case for two days that produce nothing at all, made by someone who kept failing at it.
1 min read
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On finishing things badly
A finished draft you dislike is worth more than a perfect one you are still describing to people.
1 min read
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The letterpress test
An hour setting one line of type by hand, and what it does to the way you cut a sentence.
1 min read
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Three things about deadlines
Two of them are obvious. The third took me about eleven years and a broken promise to a publisher.
1 min read