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creativity

Welcome to Finishing School. Let’s get started.

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In Finishing School people come together to help each other stay on schedule with creative tasks and get projects finished. And we always begin every new session by asking each participant to say a little about themselves and about the project. So this is a little online form to gather some information that will help us work together more efficiently when we start. That’s all we need for...

I Miss Playing the Ukulele: Finding Moments of Creativity in a Newly Full Life

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Dear Cary,  I miss writing and I miss playing the ukulele. When I was divorced and single, I made a life for myself by working, going to school, caring for my son and mom. I took weekly writing and music classes and I learned how to be completely independent. However, I missed being in a loving, close relationship to share life with. Dating became like a part time job, but eventually I found my...

I, too, dislike “craft”

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I just read this Alif Batuman piece in n+1 from a few years back in which I found a kinship reading of “craft.” So let me get something off my chest, counterproductive and humiliating as it may be: Craft is awful. I hate craft!Instead of standing out there in the hot sun polishing and polishing your doomed anachronistic prose beauty why not instead, today! unleash the wild craftless being within...

Working on the novel in Italy on Thanksgiving Day

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Hi. So here it is Day 3 of my 49-day project to finish this novel using the Finishing School method and talk about it as I do so. Today, what I am editing is a long solo performance by the main character in which she gives a rambling monologue that makes her sound faintly deranged, and then dumps the contents of two bags on stage, one an expensive Gucci bag and the other a cheap Safeway bag, and...

I’m an artist about to explode

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Cary’s classic column from Wednesday, Oct 26, 2011 Don’t get in my face! I’ve made enough compromises Dear Cary, I can’t do everything and I am pissed off that I can’t. I am also preemptively pissed off at your peanut gallery since they trend anti-artist and tend to take a sadistic glee in other people’s hard knocks.  I just wanted to give them the middle finger before I get on with my letter...

Will our words ever be heard again?

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We write and we write and we write on the Net, dispensing thoughts and advice. For what?  Cary’s classic column from  WEDNESDAY, FEB 4, 2009 Dear Cary, My problem is that we have a one-day cycle in our writing, in our lives. You read our problems; then people read our problems in your column. Then people read our responses, but then the sun comes up again, and all our writing goes down on the...

I’m an absent-minded engineer; my mind wanders and so does my wallet

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I fear I lack common sense in life, and this affects my performance. Cary’s classic column from THURSDAY, JUL 24, 2008 Dear Cary, How does one build common sense? I’m a 31-year-old who has been plagued for most of my adult life with this problem. I’m a software engineer by trade, but I really love the theoretical aspects more than the practical aspects: algorithms and design as opposed to...

Letter to a friend, with a poem at the end

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Dear … I thought of you just now. I am sitting in this renovated 13th-century Italian convent between Rome and Florence, a short walk up from the train station, and your face  drifted into view. There were a lot of people here for ten days but they all left on the train today. I suppose suddenly being alone was one reason I thought of you. There had been little time to really think. Now I am...

I’m a singer — but I drift from waitress job to waitress job

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 I don’t know how to settle down. But I’m almost 30 and don’t want to waste my life! Cary’s classic column from FRIDAY, OCT 3, 2008 Dear Cary, I’ve written to so many advice columnists and no one ever answers. I am plagued by problems — for years. In general, what the hell is the deal with me? I was so blithe and great and happy in childhood — but ever since I was, oh, 15, things have gone...

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