When you start a project, what do you call it?
Imagine you’re just getting started with a new creative work. If it’s a book, do you say “this story I’m doing about guilt, fear, and cakes,’ or is it “The Ministry of Fear?” If a painting, do you say ‘this thing  with a bearded guy and a couple dead people’ or “The House of  Death“?
Which sounds less like an impotent attempt to describe a creative work?
Which seems more real?
No matter what kind of project you’re working on, giving it a concrete, …

Do you ever feel like someone replaced your brain with a cinder block?
Has your river of brainy brilliance turned to a sluice of stumped stupidity?
No matter what kind of work you do, sometimes you run into a wall; the ideas dry up and you feel anything but creative. It happens to everyone. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. You need a break. You need a strategy. You need a saga.
Here’s your saga, delivered in 16 steaming hot points. Use them, abuse them, but do tell me how they work for you.
1. …

“Why would you bother to learn Korean? You’ll never use it when you leave here, it’s a useless skill.”
When I heard these words, I rolled my eyes and thought the speaker had had too much soju. Later, though, I realized his attitude was a fairly common one. Many people see learning things like Korean, falconry, card tricks, and origami as investing time in useless skills.
I’m not sure how this idea began to spread, but I think this attitude springs from two causes. One, a belief that a person should only …