Starting with what you have
In 1996, librarian turned restaurateur Stephanie Alexander published a new type of recipe book.
Rather than simply a collection of recipes, The Cook’s Companion let you build a dish around an ingredient. It started with the constraint.
Have a turnip? Here’s what you can make with it.
Wilting broccoli? Here’s what to do.
Unremarkable now that we have internet search, but at its time a revelation because it was designed around the user.
When it comes to your work,...
Adding is easy. Subtraction is hard.
On how technology has changed the craft of writing, author Neil Gaiman remarked;
“Typing is not work. Choosing is work.”
Since moving from typewriters to computers, he noted, the average word count has blown out from 3-6,000 per article to 9,000 because "it’s not hard to include two ways of saying something”.
I can’t shake this insight because it says so much about how we behave. At work. At home.
When writers drafted in longhand, it was painstaking to...
