I love to write. Why is that? Well, Nicole Krauss, writing about Roberto Bolano in the Guardian last week beautifully describes one of the main reasons…. Writing is always an expansion: a writer, given only one life, is compelled to manufacture other lives, other stories, other realms. The one life is not enough; it is [...]
Archive for the ‘writing’ Category
Writing
Posted in books, from the reading room, writing on October 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The importance of stories – fictional stories
Posted in books, creativity, education, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, psychology, writing on September 11, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I’m a great fan of stories. In fact, I think we understand ourselves and others by using narrative, and the central way in which I work as a doctor is to hear people’s stories, and help them to change them from stories of being stuck or in chaos, to stories of flow, and flourishing and [...]
The shapes of stories
Posted in creativity, from the viewing room, video, writing on April 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s a very entertaining four minutes or so of Kurt Vonnegurt explaining the shapes of stories, using a blackboard……
The World is made of Stories
Posted in from the reading room, writing, tagged narrative, story on March 5, 2011 | 4 Comments »
The World is made of Stories, by David R Loy [ISBN 978-086171-615-9] is a wonderful little book, full of memorable quotes about the place of stories in our lives. I read a lot about stories, as well as reading, and hearing, stories every day, but this book is a bit different because it’s written from [...]
nanowrimo – or where I’ve been for the last month!
Posted in creativity, writing, tagged nanowrimo on November 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »
If you’re a more regular reader of this blog, you might be wondering why my posting rate has plummeted this month……well, the answer lies in that little winner’s badge here. nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November and the deal is you sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 [...]
playing with words
Posted in from the dark room, photography, writing on January 2, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I do enjoy word play…..finding other meanings in phrases, or words which sound similar, for example. One thing I really notice about French is how they often love to find the words within words, breaking down a word into separate sounding parts and revealing a relevant meaning within. Here’s a simple example I spotted the [...]
Resilience
Posted in from the living room, personal growth, writing on May 18, 2009 | 1 Comment »
If control is a delusion, and it’s pursuit is ultimately futile, what would be a better strategy? Given the complexity of human, social and global life, accurate predictions are not feasible. The grander the scale of the prediction, the more likely it will turn out to be wrong. However, at a personal level, we need [...]
The End of Control
Posted in from the living room, life, writing, tagged control on May 12, 2009 | 7 Comments »
One of the most amazing capabilities of the human mind is the imagination. However, this great ability brings certain difficulties, not least of which is being able to imagine our own mortality. It’s this existential fear which underlies most, if not all, other specific fears. Whilst very few people actually believe it’s possible to escape [...]
Myths which improve life
Posted in from the living room, life, narrative, philosophy, writing, tagged myth on February 3, 2009 | 4 Comments »
People often use the word myth as if it is the opposite of the word truth. It’s juxtaposed to reality. You hear that a lot. An explanation about something is dismissed as a myth, meaning that it’s not true, not a fact, that’s it’s unreal. It’s quite strange how we’ve developed this way of using [...]
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