Seeing invisible details and avoiding predictable, conditioned thought (ZAMM series)
Updated: 2024-06-26 07:00:00
In this essay, I explore the idea of seeing the unseen aspects of things. I discuss several authors on this topic: Rob Walker, an art critic; Viktor Shklovsky, Russian formalist literary critic; and Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My main point is to avoid predictable, conditioned thought by pausing to ask questions about our experiences and the environment around us. In a world where prediction algorithms constantly direct us toward the most likely next word, pushing back and embracing creative ways of seeing and interpreting the world can inject new ideas and perspectives in ways that rejuvenate us.
An unfortunate controversy erupted on social media over the weekend when a literary agent, Hilary Harwell, tweeted that she wanted to see a novel similar to a query she just rejected: This appalled Book Twitter/Threads to no end, with many accusing her of stealing the original author’s idea. Harwell was subsequently let go from KT […]
This week! Books! I’m going to be going on an early summer hiatus the next few weeks, returning to a normal schedule later in June. There may be a post or two popping up in the interim, but otherwise things will be as quiet around here as a publishing house on a summer Friday afternoon. […]
If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in the discussion forums: Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your […]
With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion! The social media landscape is certainly chaotic these […]
Romance or romantic women’s fiction or chick lit or whatever we’re calling it these days often gets a tremendously unfair rap from a craft standpoint. I don’t think most readers and critics appreciate just how tricky it is to hook the reader and keep them engaged in a way that’s very common in the genre. […]