I was preparing Monday’s podcast today – it’s longer than usual, and chewier too: Cory Doctorow on copyright and creativity. If that sounds like your bag, make sure you listen to the full interview in The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Monday. But in the meantime, here’s one gem from Cory on writing, and why you shouldn’t get too hung up on how it feels when you’re writing, whether it seems like you’re channelling a muse or hacking at a lump of rock:
‘To be honest, the words you write when you’re inspired and the words that you write when you feel like you’re writing very badly, those words are in all likelihood indistinguishable from one another from the distance of cold reason once you’ve given it enough time for you to cool down and see and forget which words you wrote when. Certainly that was my experience. I think that the way you feel about the words that you’re writing is more endocrinological than artistic, that it’s about your blood sugar and your stress levels and your sleep levels and the amount of caffeine you’ve had, not any objective metric.’
I think this may be the first instance of the word ‘endocrinological’ on the podcast, but hopefully not the last.