Emperor Penguins by Paul Nicklen / National Geographic
Some arresting photography from the World Press Photo Awards 2013 photo contest. The entrants and winners are all gorgeous, and run the gamut from inspiring to the dispiriting and terrifying.
The above photo is one of many in Paul Nicklen’s prize-winning gallery for the story “Escape Velocity” in National Geographic.
Some great advice from marketing guru Seth Godin about why and how stuff gets broken – and even a few tips about how to fix it.
“Be orderly in your normal life so you can be violent and original in your work.”
-French novelist Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Gertrude Tennant, 1876
“I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.”
-Sir David Attenborough
“To experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder — that’s where the real meat of life is to be found.”
–Explorer Ben Saunders in his TED Talk, “Why bother leaving the house?”
Alastair Humphreys is an author, motivational speaker, and adventurer. In 2011, he made a resolution (actually, it was more of a manifesto) to spend a year seeking out “microadventures.” These were all adventures that he could find in his own backyard, without completely abandoning his life and becoming an adventuresome vagabond.
“I started to think that it was possible to have an adventure anywhere,” he told National Geographic when they recognized him as an Adventurer of the Year 2012. ” That it was really just a state of mind, committing to get off your backside. If that were true, I figured you could do this anywhere.” He continued:
I decided to do the most provocatively mundane adventure that I could think of—the M25, the highway that goes around London. It’s filled with traffic. Everybody hates the road. I walked a lap of the M25. I set off in January. It was cold. It was snowy. It was physically challenging. I saw new places. I saw some beautiful places, which I hadn’t expected to find at all. I met interesting people. That week ticked all of the boxes that my four-year bike trip around the world ticked. I came back buzzing. It was quite stupid and silly, but it had been a genuine adventure.
That M25 hike inspired Alastair to embark on his year of microadventures, which he documented on his website.
I’m lucky enough to be able to live and work in Portland, Maine, a small city on the southern Maine coast. It is still, however, the largest city in Maine, and a whole lot larger than the small rural town I grew up in. The city honestly seemed quite daunting and metropolitan to me when I arrived (what with its trash pick-up, public transportation and ferry terminal). Small as it is, Portland still isn’t the country, and it’s good to have a reminder that adventure is just a few miles away.
“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”
―Stephen King, On Writing
“Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won’t think you’re going gaga.”
–David Ogilvy
Simon Rich reads from “Center of the Universe,” which
will appear in his new book The Last Girlfriend on Earth
I racked up a lot of my early writing clips in college writing humor pieces for websites like Yankee Pot Roast, Points in Case and CollegeHumor. I just recently started actively writing humor again, so I was delighted when I received an issue of The New Yorker last month that featured a story from Simon Rich titled “I Love Girl.” Back then, when I was writing and pitching humor pieces daily, I picked up Rich’s first book Ant Farm at the college bookstore. It’s a book I still flip through regularly, along with Jon Stewart’s Naked Pictures of Famous People, Steve Martin’s Pure Drivel and McSweeney’s Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, whenever I need inspiration or just a good laugh. There seems to be a trend among comedians towards publishing more memoirs and confessionals, but I’m still a fan of the short humor collection above all else.
“I Love Girl” is the story of a caveman who is in love with a girl:
I have been working on Girl’s path for many years, picking up the black rocks and carrying them away. I never throw her rocks off the cliff like normal rocks. Instead, I put them in a pile next to my cave. I like to look at the pile, because it reminds me of how I am helping Girl. My mother, who I live with, says the pile “has to go.” (I worry that she will move the pile, but it is unlikely. After all, she is an elderly thirty-two-year-old woman.)
Somebody sent an article from Fast Company’s co.create blog around the copy department last week, and I saw that one of their writers, Joe Berkowitz, had recently conducted an interview with Rich. He offers some great insight into his process and how he jumps between different genres and forms (Rich has written for Pixar and SNL). I found this tidbit about generating ideas particularly inspiring:
I find in general that if I don’t have any ideas on what to write about, I just research whatever at the moment I’m extremely interested in. I read a lot of nonfiction on subjects I’m interested in, and that usually knocks something loose. A few months ago, I was stuck and I wasn’t really sure which of my projects to work on, and I was kind of bored with some of the stuff I was doing, so I just spent a few days reading books about monkeys and sign language and teaching them how to talk. Nothing came of it really, but by the time I was finished reading about monkeys, I was ready to jump back into my novel. Reading a lot of nonfiction helps. Wikipedia is also a big help. There’s always something interesting on Wikipedia–the random article button is great. When I was writing Free Range Chickens, I had just discovered Wikipedia and one of the ways I came up with ideas was to just keep refreshing, and keep clicking the random article until a premise occurred to me.
“The blank page is a magic box. It needs to be filled with something fantastic.”
Jake Christie 