Francis Bacon’s wise words worth imprinting in memory:
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not.
Writing is not just about placing one word after another. Neither are those words just to be placed to give you a grammatically correct sentence. The hope is that those grammatically correct sentences, formed from words placed one after another, also convey great ideas in the best form possible. That is what constitutes great writing.
This constant urge to create something out of nothing can be a powerful driving force. Much of my writing career has been shaped, and I suspect will be shaped, by this urge. Now, Gary Klein’s The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights has given me just the perfect phrase to capture this mindset — creative desperation.
Klein uses the term in a different sense. He uses it as part of a model that may help us “change our story”. For me, creative desperation has chiseled out a story.
Akshat Rathi 