Wrap Your Head Around This:

Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works

Source: Wrap Your Head Around This:

I used to live not far from Kitty Hawk. It can be very windy there, which certainly helped that first flight.

When you get to the reblogged site, follow one of the links (YouTube or the podcast), and learn about another way to think about creativity.

I think this is important for writers – especially Indie Authors – because of the frequency with which they can be afflicted by “imposter syndrome.”

Almost nothing has never been done before.

While it’s important to strictly avoid plagiarizing anyone else’s work, nobody has a copyright on ideas. This means that it’s not trite to write in a particular genre, or even just to tell a new story that entails the concepts “Boy Meets Girl,” “The Little Tailor,” or “Gains the World but Loses Own Soul.”

You’re not an “imposter” because you didn’t invent a completely new genre. By telling your own story idea, the one that sprouted between your own ears, you’re innovating: doing something that improves the genre in which you’re writing, because it involves an aspect of that kind of story that hasn’t been told before.

So don’t let anybody (even your inner editor) tell you that you’re an imposter. Write what the Muse is bugging you about. Write according to the concept or genre you’ve chosen (or which has chosen you!). Write using the best grammar and punctuation you can command. Write by using the whole descriptive lexicon of your language – including adverbs!

Just write! Polish it up. And then publish!

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He Takes No Prisoners!

“I TOLD YOU to put that thing down and PET ME! NOW will you listen?”

What’s YOUR Claim to Fame?

IRISH FIREBRANDS: A Novel ~ and Other Works by Christine Plouvier, Indie Author

Here’s mine!

How can I make this claim? Easy. I write like Edward Bulwer-Lytton … or like a contemporary Irish journalist.

I think I was born using big words. When I was in kindergarten, like all the new schoolchildren, I was sent to Miss W., the school speech therapist, for evaluation. She sat down with me, on those ridiculously small kiddie chairs, at one of those ridiculously large, round kiddie craft tables, set up in the cloakroom at the end of the hallway (she traveled the school district, so she had no office at this school), and she shuffled her flash cards before dealing them out, one at a time. The cards had no words, only pictures, and the test was for me to state the name of each object that they portrayed.

I was careful to enunciate clearly, for I had learned to read aloud by the time I was 4…

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