Writing, Briefly An Article by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it; start writing when you think of the first sentence; write about stuff you like; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it. v0.crapThe situation talks back writing
Writing and Speaking An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. writingspeechcommunicationpractice
Write Simply An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. Several Short Sentences About Writing writing
The Age of the Essay An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com EssayerExpressing ideas helps to form themFlow interesting (The Meander) Follow the brushThe Anxiety of Sequence writing
Early work An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do. The right way to deal with new ideasFocus on the rate of change creativityskillideas
What doesn't seem like work? An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you? workinterestlife
The Top Idea in Your Mind An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. ideas
Cities and Ambition An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Boston says you should be smarterFlorence and MilanA city speaks to you mostly by accidentCity messages citiesambition
Taste for Makers An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff? You feel this when you start to design thingsGood design is simpleGood design is timelessGood design is often slightly funnyGood design is hard, but looks easy+3 More Beauty in flight beautytastedesign
Good and bad procrastination An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The absent-minded professorYou can't look a big problem too directly in the eye
The still life effect A Fragment by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late. ideasart
How to do what you love An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com To do something well you have to like itWow, that's pretty coolPrestige is just fossilized inspirationAlways produce worklife
Hackers and Painters An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com A great painting has to be better than it has to be
Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space An Essay from Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface by Michael Auping To absorb it or build your ownA stealth architectThe measuring unit of all spaceThe walls are reserved for the sunA little too something+1 More
To absorb it or build your own Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them. The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own." Conditional art architecture
A stealth architect By the 1970s, Irwin was in effect a stealth architect. We often talk about the ephemeral qualities of light and space in Irwin's installations, but what make those qualities palpable to our perception are practical structures—windows, walls, corridors, doorways, and skylights—in other words, architecture. And Irwin was keenly aware of how best to use all of those structures. One of his greatest talents has been to engage bad or benign architectural situations, disappearing into their details, changing them, and creating and entirely new quality of space. architecture
The measuring unit of all space The piece was titled The Portal, referring to a large opening in the center of the wall. Whether you want to call it art or architecture, it was a testament to the amazing presence that can be shown by a simple wall, which [Tadao Ando] has referred to as "the measuring unit of all space." wallsspace
The walls are reserved for the sun Maria Nordman always insisted, "Nothing should hang on a wall. The walls are reserved for the sun." It was like being inside a large cardboard box that had been gently slit open with an X-Acto knife, allowing thin planes of light to emerge. It is well known that Nordman avoided using the camera to document her installations, feeling that it abstracted and framed various aspects of the experience, which is best absorbed more holistically. It is ironic that Nordman's rooms often took the form of a kind of architectural camera in which slits in walls and corners created mysterious apertures that allowed light to leak into a room at a glacial pace. Being inside one of Nordman's spaces is like being inside a camera operating in exceedingly slow motion. wallsphotography
A little too something As Irwin had chosen a stairwell for his UCLA installation because it was curious in its banality and innocuousness, Bruce Nauman became interested in corridors and shafts as overlooked and slightly eccentric spaces. He was particularly interested in those that had "a kind of constriction that wasn't natural or was a little too long or a little too something—like the architect just hadn't really thought it out." Merely a building
Various titles of Bruce Nauman artworks Sound Breaking Wall Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room False Silence Flayed Earth Flayed Self (Skin/Sink) Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care Bruce Nauman horroreuphony