March 13, 2012

Steinbeck on writing

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Home
Tyranny of the explicit
Steinbeck on writing

Maria Popova spots this great comment from John Steinbeck.

If there is a magic in story writing and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it.

I feel the same applies to vast swathes of human experience which business books reduce to apparently precise formulae.

HT a tweet from Haroon Bijili via Syamant

The tyranny of the explicit

I think that business suffers from the tyranny of the explicit. Its desire for measurability and proof makes it focus on the explicit element of

We’re all talk radio hosts now…

Jonah Lehrer suggests thinking can often serve to confuse us. He reports research where students had to rate different jams. They managed to come out

The divided (and interconnected) brain

Towards the end of this RSA Animate video, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist quotes Einstein: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is

Tyranny of the Explicit

Following up on yesterday’s post, a second of our tyranny coatpegs it the Tyranny of the Explicit. Viv talks about it here and it’s something

The perils of the complicated

Chris Corrigan has a good post on how complicated models masked the complexity of the financial system – and made the perpetrators very rich at

Transcending language

Andrew Sullivan quotes Christian Wiman: I don’t think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have

When reflection doesn’t help…

Good post from Mind Hacks: When giving reasons leads to worse decisions Hat tip; @IdeaFestival

Conversations in layers

I stumbled on this crude graphic that I blogged back in 2004. I was making a point about a specific piece of marketing jargon, “brand

Podcast: The tyranny of the explicit

Yesterday I recorded a conversation with Viv McWaters and Roland Harwood on the theme of The Tyranny of the Explicit. We explore how the need

Bureaucracy, targets and pseudo-surveys

Mark Fisher picks up some fairly grim examples of bureaucratic bullying in the public sector and the abuse of targets and surveys. Just reading the

More Updates

Lessons from “The Logic of Failure”

Fascinating insights into the patterns of failure

20 April 2018

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

30 June 2017

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

3 November 2016

They’ve seen it before…

Don’t get attached to your favourite process

24 September 2016

Keeping it simple

The virtues of stripping back your processes

31 May 2016

In a network, in a mess, or in a mesh?

Sometimes it’s ok to stay confused and entangled

1 May 2016

It’s hard not love a good pirate

According to this Swedish news site Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws. The group has

14 January 2007

Conversations of quality

More thoughts on thinking and doing, and the power of creating conversation, citing a great entry by Brian Alger.

15 April 2004

Some Gradgrindian hard facts on word-of-mouth..

I pointed to this discussion thread [corrected link see comments below] about Word of Mouth the other day. I wanted to share Paul Marsden‘s contribution here.Skeptic says – “‘WOM’ IS

26 February 2006

A celebration?

I see that two weeks today, on the 26 April we’ll have a chance to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day. WIPO, the inventors of this, says this year’s theme is

Steinbeck on writing

Johnnie Moore

Share Post

More Posts

More Updates