For creative people there's a compelling moment to consider when approaching complex projects. Ask yourself if the organizational structure of your idea and your organization simply exists because you understand it. Ask yourself if the hierarchy is fundamentally sound for the particular project. If it exists because that’s the way things have always been done, you might want to start over.
Read MoreACTS OF REBELLION (first of a two part series)
Acts of rebellion are always disruptive. Acts of creativity are almost always acts of rebellion. Therefore, acts of creativity are almost always disruptive. Creative acts are always the result of what’s come before, and while new works emerge as a result of incremental modification, those modifications are always about one thing fading out while another thing begins to glow.
Read MoreHEARTS AFIRE
A romantic existence, just like a romantic story, deals with extending life into the future. Ultimately the extension of all of our lives into the future is why we invest ourselves in our children, in our values whatever they may be, or in our great creative enterprises big and small. Romance is about preserving a moment or an idea into timelessness.
Read MoreFIVE REASONS TO AVOID ARTICLES THAT LIST THINGS
Not too many years ago short-form non-fiction was called a magazine article. Then the world melted into “listicles”.
Read MoreBEAUTY
Beauty is a trait often found during moments of transformation, full of implication and promise. Beauty resides in the levitating silence filling camera crew headsets five seconds before a live broadcast begins. It's the perfectly timed bare-handed pickup of a baseball between second and third base. It's a successful parallel parking maneuver on the first try.
Read MoreTHE ART OF LIVING
I recently spent some time with a young, passionate emergency care nurse about to ship out with Médecins Sans Frontières, aka Doctors without Borders. She’s headed to Monrovia, Liberia for a six to eight week deployment on the front lines of the Ebola outbreak. Not yet thirty, she’s already an MSF veteran in parts of the world that most Americans can hardly find on a map, to say nothing of being able to imagine themselves working there for a single day. To meet her you’d never know.
Read MoreGIVING THANKS
Trust is not simply about hearing the truth, or counting on someone to pick you up at an appointed time. Trust is about counting on insight and integrity mixed with courage and confidence. Trust is about knowing that people have your back while remaining unafraid to tell you you’re wrong.
Read MoreTHE COLLISION OF IMAGININGS
In the main hall the ceiling will soar above everyone, underground, with near magical light shining on opportunities and courageous perseverance and solidified resolutions of city officials, consultants by the score, and financiers. The transit station will declare the power of some, but it will profoundly serve the diverse needs of all.
Read MoreUBIQUITY
Ubiquitous ability to create things of all sorts may be a profoundly positive trend, but the cultural challenge it presents requires careful consideration. Without a deep appreciation for a professional class of creators, the average quality of many things may rise tremendously, while professionals—those people who actually move various disciplines forward—gasp for air.
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Novelists and journalists both use the same tools. Pens, paper, computers, and digital audio recorders are really at the bottom of the list. Narrative tales, regardless of which camp tells them, require information to start, followed by synthesis, context, and perspective. From there, the potential for interesting results grow.
A REPORTER AND A NOVELIST WALK INTO A BAR…
That experimental space of narrative invention is simultaneously the great dividing line between fiction and journalism, as well as the bridge between the two camps. Where journalism trades in carefully considered observations, backed up by sources and evidence, fiction makes sense of how received information fits into a larger cultural context. Where journalism digs up hard-to-reach raw minerals, fiction polishes them into jewels.
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