Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Flash Fiction as Art Form: What Extreme Brevity Demands from a Writer A complete story in under a thousand words. In five hundred. In two hundred. In six. The last example is the one credited to Hemin...
Read article →Haiku as Mindfulness Practice: Slowing Down to See the Moment The haiku is the most minimal serious art form in the world. Seventeen syllables, arranged in three lines, typically presenting a concrete...
Read article →The word elegy carries weight before it is even read. You know, opening an elegy, that it is about loss. You have been warned. And yet that warning does not prepare you — not fully — because grief is...
Read article →There is a letter I wrote when I was twenty-four to someone who had hurt me in a way I couldn't articulate out loud. I wrote three pages, front and back, in a handwriting I didn't recognize as my own...
Read article →Memoir Writing as Therapy: Making Meaning from Difficult Experience Writing about your own life is one of the more courageous things a person can attempt, and one of the more demanding. Unlike journal...
Read article →The Incubation Period in Creativity: Why Stepping Away Solves Problems Every creative person knows the experience: you push on a problem for hours, making no progress, growing increasingly frustrated,...
Read article →The Personal Essay and the Art of Vulnerability on the Page The personal essay is among the most intimate things a person can write, and among the most technically demanding. It invites the writer ont...
Read article →Poetry Therapy: How Writing and Reading Poems Supports Adult Mental Health Poetry has been used for healing in one form or another for as long as written language has existed. The ancient Greeks under...
Read article →Spoken Word Poetry: How Performance Builds Healing Community There is something that happens in a room where spoken word poetry is being performed that is different from almost any other cultural gath...
Read article →Sleep and Creative Problem Solving: How Your Brain Works Overnight The sleeping brain is not dormant. It is running a complex maintenance and processing operation that, among many other functions, wor...
Read article →Why Daydreaming Is Actually Creative Work Daydreaming has a reputation problem. In school it was the thing you got in trouble for, the sign of an inattentive mind, the opposite of productive engagemen...
Read article →Walking and Creativity: The Research on Why Movement Sparks Ideas There is a long tradition among writers, philosophers, and composers of thinking on foot. Wordsworth composed poems while walking the...
Read article →Why You Get Your Best Ideas in the Shower: The Science of Insight You have almost certainly had the experience. You are not trying to solve anything. You are performing a routine bodily task, your min...
Read article →Environmental Design for Creativity: How Your Space Shapes What You Make The relationship between physical environment and creative output is something most people sense intuitively but rarely investi...
Read article →The Creativity of Boredom: Why Doing Nothing Might Be the Best Creative Strategy Nobody wants to be bored. The entire architecture of modern digital life is designed to prevent it — the phone fills ev...
Read article →Building a Creative Routine That Actually Works for You Ask ten creative people what their daily routine looks like and you will get ten completely different answers. One novelist swears by writing at...
Read article →Constraints and Creativity: Why Limitations Often Make Better Art It seems counterintuitive. More resources, more time, more options — these should produce better work. And yet creative history is lit...
Read article →When fans engage creatively with the music they love, something interesting happens to both the music and the people engaging with it. Fan music and remix culture represent one of the most dynamic cre...
Read article →How to Enter a Flow State for Creative Work There is a particular quality of absorbed concentration that every creative person recognizes immediately — the hours that disappear, the work that seems to...
Read article →Anyone who has attended a fan convention with genuine attention has noticed the creative energy that fills these spaces. It is not merely enthusiasm, though there is plenty of that. It is something mo...
Read article →Walk through the art section of any major fan convention and you encounter a visual culture that is simultaneously derivative and wholly original. The same characters appear in thousands of pieces, an...
Read article →There is a particular creative act that happens in fan communities that deserves more careful attention than it usually receives: the creation of an original character, developed within someone else's...
Read article →There is a body of work that most of the people who created it will never be credited for. Fan translation communities have spent decades converting video games, manga, anime, light novels, and films...
Read article →Somewhere on the internet right now, several hundred people are in the middle of an ongoing story none of them could have predicted when they started. Characters that one person created are responding...
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