Matthew's Blog
Podcast Listening and the “Bad” Guest
The other day I listened to one of my favorite podcasts—one that unfortunately had a bad guest. What do I mean by a bad guest? In this case I mean one who speaks in platitudes without relaying any useful, interesting or actionable content i.e. feel-good jibber-jabber....
What Photography can Show Writing About Finding “Voice”
In photography, if you want to find your voice then you focus on mastering the tools of the craft. This takes time, patience, curiosity and volume. I suspect the same goes for writing.
Creativity and Permission
One thing I’ve observed in my recent photography class: in a group of people who don't know each other well, most people need permission to be creative. When a photography assignment is given a set of certain restraints or rules, if just one person goes to the edge of...
Chaos ⇏ Creativity
Chaos doesn't necessarily lead to creativity, or to something "better." Random solutions rarely are effective for problem solving —and much of creativity is problem solving. In practice what this means is when we increase chaos we increase the number of random...
Create, Market, Relationships, Think
I like to divide my creative life into four domains: creativity, marketing, developing relationships, and thinking. Usually, in a given week, my percentages look like this: Create: 10%Marketing: 30%Relationships: 5%Thinking: 55% (Unfortunately, by Marketing, I am...
Vulnerability
One retrospective benefit of my progressive hip arthritis and the first few weeks of my subsequent hip replacement? It was a good reminder of what it felt like to be physically vulnerable—something I haven’t had to contend with since my “being-bullied-days” of junior...
The Keyboard: A Writer’s Tool
Tools matter. Tools matter for writing. And one of the most important writing tools? The keyboard. A 50,000-word novel, if you consider spacing, editing and rewriting requires at least one-million keystrokes. That’s a lot of finger-work! For example, I recently...
My 2023 Writing Platform Change?
I am beginning to get a handle on what I want to do for a platform change. I am moving towards the idea of changing my daily blog to a weekly blog, going much deeper into tools for physician-writers. This may involve a weekly podcast, concurrent LinkedIn posts, and...
Writing’s False Summit
In mountain climbing, are false summits. These are the ridges that seem to rise out of nowhere at the end of the climb which the climber falsely believes to be the actual summit, only to be disappointed when. after reaching it, to realize the hard part—the crux of the...