The artist is a collector

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An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Austin Kleon, How to Steal Like an Artist

Give Yourself Time to Write

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Many smart people tell themselves lies like, “I do my best work at the last minute.” It’s not true. Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don’t worry that what you write is not very good and isn’t immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don’t just write down ideas.

Denise K. Magner writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Is it relatable?

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"Relatable" is in the eye of the beholder, but its very nature is to represent itself as universal. It's shorthand that masquerades as description. 

The problem arises when "relatability" becomes the sole interpretive lens.

Can you "relate" to being enslaved, for example?  Probably not, but that should make the prospect of reading Frederick Douglass all the more enticing. Many popular texts printed in the United States before the 20th century dwell on religious thought in a way that seems strange to us now. How can nonreligious people living in the 21st century "relate" to that mindset? The realization "I don't relate to that" could be followed by a subsequent self-examination: "What is it about my life, and my time, that has made it so that I don't really get it?"

Rebecca Onion writing in Slate