June 11, 2023
A writer I follow on Twitter recently posted about her writing process, and it surprised me because her approach flies so strongly in the face of received wisdom. Whenever she starts a WIP, she wrote, she checks first to see if it’s commerciable. Then she sits down to start a mood board. That’s right. Mood board.
Wow, I thought, writers will do anything to avoid writing.
I’d never done a mood board before—never even thought about doing one—but I’m weirdly fascinated when I see them on Twitter. It’s amazing how much of a story you can deduce from one little square, filled with a patch-work of pictures. Also, I’m lazy and I like to look at pictures.
And because I have two, enormous deadlines for my editing certificate looming this week, plus two sick kids, wet dogs and a house that needs tidying, I decided to sit down and spend hours working on one. Like hours. Seriously, there’s a learning curve involved.
I ended up with three separate boards (three different moods, I guess?) but it’s addictive because it’s like putting together a little puzzle. And on rainy afternoon in southern Ontario, I’d rather be looking at pictures of Greece.
I feel like I have a hobby now. So that’s nice. But I still haven’t finished my editing work.
August 2019
What do Occam’s razor, Chekov’s gun and Schrodinger’s cat all have in common?
Really not all that much. Except that they are all enterprising ways to organize the world around us.
A philosophical principle, a dramatic event, a confounding scientific paradox: what do you see when you look out your window?
The fact is that the world is a very strange place. Why should fortune favours the bold be taken with a grain of salt? What do eggs have to do with tennis? Why did water nearly boil at 0 degrees centigrade? And why is an obscure, 18th-century Swedish botanist the type-specimen for our species? What even is a type-specimen?!
As Mark Twain said: The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.
Which, frankly, seems like a good place to start.
Lynne Bradley 