> Formerly, when anyone said music I presented was experimental, I objected. It seemed to me that composers knew what they were doing, and that the experiments that had been made had taken place prior to the finished works, just as sketches are made before paintings and rehearsals precede performances.

> Learn to look; compare what is before you with your familiar or secret ideas. Do not see in a town merely houses, but human life and history. Let a gallery or a museum show you something more than a collection of objects, let it show you schools of art

Iteration. Good for iPhones. Also, Terminators. The T-800 is a perfectly adequate time-traveling murder robot, but Skynet gave the T-1000 a crucial feature: laminate flooring mode [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsyn-9VLVA]. (Who needs to transform into a beat-up Chevy? Bumblebee’s got nothing on Robert Patrick.) Plus, the

Compare and despair: maybe there’s no use fighting it. A college writing prof once told me that fury about the success of her peers gave her the strength she needed to continue working. Comparisons tire me out, personally, but if resentment fuels you, why not use it? Even the

Roald Dahl was not a nice person. In fact, he was a real BFG. (The F does not stand for “friendly.”) The legendary Bob Gottlieb was Dahl’s American editor at one point. When Dahl threw a fuss about pencils—we’ll get to Dahl and his pencils in a

> The funny thing is, you don’t know when you’re at your best. You can wake up with a hangover and then go to work with three hours of sleep, and do great work. Or you could be rested up for a week and come down here and

First, a couple of apéritifs to whet your appetite: Todd Henry invited me on the Accidental Creative podcast for a chat about getting to the best idea [http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/getting-to-the-best-idea-with-david-moldawer/] . I was Todd’s editor on his first book and it remains a fondly remembered collaboration

Trinitarily, my father, my son, and I went to see Avengers: Infinity War yesterday. Did I enjoy it? ¯\(ツ)/¯ There was awe. I’ll give it that: awe at the film’s scale, its craftsmanship, at what so many people had collaborated to create. The post-credits scene—with its geektastic

It’s Saturday! Lose the digital avatar. Time to be human again. Take off that VR headset and return to your body. Select some premium vinyl—Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, perhaps—and lay it down on the turntable. Drop the needle gently; you don’t want to scratch it.

Ship! the gurus tell us. Everyone should ship, all the time. Always Be Shipping. For writers, this means, essentially, share your work with the public. Early and often. Better to publish an unbaked draft, solicit feedback, and then refine that published work over time. It’s trivial to change an