Writing & uncertainty: “I’ve got a high tolerance for not knowing…I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing…” Heather Sellers

The Gift Of Face Blindness

Sellers says that, in a strange way, her inability to remember faces served her well as a child, because it taught her to cope with uncertainty. That ability is still useful to her as an adult and a writer.

"I think a lot of brilliant, talented writers have a hard time staying in that chair long enough to get through the inevitable chaos that comes when you sit down to make a piece of art, and I've got a high tolerance for not knowing," she says.

"I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing; I've been doing it my whole life," she says. "And I've trained myself, when I don't know, to not freak out, to just keep looking closer."

For years, Sellers looked for a cure, an end to her face blindness. But now, she says, she would never give it up. "It's allowed me to engage with the world in a meaningful way, and to talk to people with depth and authenticity. I don't know that I would have come to that without this disorder."

Face blindness "forces me to say right away the most vulnerable thing I could say to someone: I may not know you, but I want to."

via "Living With Face Blindness: Who Are You, Again?" : NPR.org

Posted via email from Carissa Thorp's Posterous

An iPad trick to write "morning pages" style

For long typing sessions, I found myself putting the keyboard on my lap while placing the iPad off to the side—sometimes not even in direct eyeshot. For longer writing, there's a sort of freedom that comes from not even looking at the screen while you type. (My friend Quinn Norton said that on longer writing jags, she sometimes uses her wireless keyboard in a completely different room from her computer, a sort of modern twist on the big-keyboard-tiny-screen experience of early laptops like the Epson HX-20, which were for years favored by some journalists even as laptops with larger screens were commonplace.)

via m.gizmodo.com

I've read similar tips in the past where people suggested turning off your computer monitor.

Posted via email from Carissa Thorp's Posterous