Feel creatively dead, can't come up with ideas and keep circling between old ones. Need a fun marketing/advertising book to come up with new ways of looking at things. I'm being vague here because I want to get a variety of recommendations, anything that's really worked for you or something you still refer back to whenever you hit a wall. Thanks for the suggestions.

Feel creatively dead, can't come up with ideas and keep circling between old ones. Need a fun marketing/advertising book to come up with new ways of looking at things. I'm being vague here because I want to get a variety of recommendations, anything that's really worked for you or something you still refer back to whenever you hit a wall. Thanks for the suggestions.

Writing is creative work, and there are many approaches, so what follows is just an opinion.

So, I am like a lot of you who keep receiving the same advice, no matter what question you ask: "Just write" or "keep practicing."

At times I've found the advice dismissive or even insulting. But it is useful in many cases.

You see, we need to trust the process. And writers must write. Yes, they also think and plan and do a lot of other things, but putting words down is what you have to eventually do. You could plan a dozen novels in your head, and they could all sound perfect, but what use are they if you can't get past the first page?

I know, there could be hundreds of reasons for not writing, including doubts about yourself or this line of work. I have those doubts all the time too. But when you force yourself to write, you are breaking through these emotional walls. You are showing your resourcefulness and commitment to the craft.

It's not easy. One way I do it is that I sometimes tell myself that the goal is to write some narrative, that is all. In other words, it could be something crappy, a story that goes nowhere, characters who are boring, pages and pages filled with grammatical mistakes, etc. No, I am not saying that my goal is to suck. My goal is to have no expectations and make no judgments. This gives me the freedom to write.

Do what works for you. Reward yourself for writing, form a group to increase your commitment, practice your Nobel Prize speech, whatever. And if you're having a really bad day and nothing coming to you, just copy down a story that you love.

But do write something fairly regularly. Strengthen those muscles. Not the muscles of procrastination. And once you have something written, then you can polish it at a later time. And then share it with supportive people and ask for their guidance.

So I constantly find myself wanting to write about people in occupations or social classes that I do not know well. Perhaps it's because my personal experience is so very limited.

Sometimes it's just a matter of age, like writing about elementary school children interacting with each other and their parents. Other times it's about social class, like wealthy people. Or those in certain occupations (e.g., tax accountant) or environments (e.g., villagers). The list is long.

So, how do you do the research needed to be able to write about these people's concerns and to write natural-sounding dialogue?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jclp.23598

An editorial in Journal of Clinical Psychology

Thank you.

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You ever seen a movie and then when it's over, you think, What the heck did I just watch?

The kind of movie where reality and dream or absurd things get mixed up or ones where you're not quite sure what is really happening. They mess with your perceptions in a variety of ways, and not all are like that from the beginning to the end. Some have moments of screwing with your mind only. Like the movie Taxi Driver, I think the ending was not easy to tell if it's actually happened or is a dream or a fantasy. But the truth here is important enough because it kind of affects your understanding of the whole movie and ability to get closure, so it's a kind of big mindfuck in my opinion. But it's a pretty good movie so it forces you to try to think about the ending over and over, at least the first time you seen it. It's one of my favorite films.

Many movies we consider classics (i.e. the best) were made many years ago, like in the mid 1900s. For instance, Citizen Kane. While some received recognition at the time, others were met with "meh" or even negative reviews from critics and/or fans and only gradually were recognized for their brilliance or innovation.

I think these days we are producing way more movies than before so it's really tough for a movie to stand out the year it comes out, let alone to be referred back to a few years later as one of the greatest movies ever. But if you could travel to the future, to 2100, assuming we are still making movies, which movies from the last 20 years might be considered among the greatest?

How important is being quick in this field? I am talking about people who are working for somebody else, not hobbyists. For instance, when you get a new project, how quickly you need to look up things you don't understand, teach yourself what is needed, code, debug and review it for errors, and meet deadlines?

I mean imagine a perfectionist in this profession who takes a long time and keeps thinking what is the best solution to the problem. Or a procrastinator who doesn't want to commit to one particular solution. Or someone who is a slow thinker and will take a while to see a pattern or come up with ideas and implement them. How will these people do?