Ethan Crane

What is a book? Of what is it comprised? The best book is, I think, the distilled essence of the author – the collection of all the influences and meaningful events of the author’s life. Not always directly – not everyone writes a straight autobiography – but still a book that reflects these meaningful events and influences.

And the existence of the internet allows us to collect and curate our influences and meaningful events in ways that we never could before. Before our frenzied online activity, reading/watching/taking in culture was an inefficient, piecemeal collecting of the works and events that had meaning to you – but now we can document them, collate them on a website, curate them. And turn them into a book. And because they can be documented so efficiently, this book can represent them more fully.

That is the purpose of a Book, of the Book that we always try to write. I feel this to be true because other writers’ Books of Me are the books I most want to read – the filtered, analysed summaries of a writer’s collection of the meaningful events of their life.

A lot of writers keep publishing what is essentially the same book with different titles. Malcolm Cowley

Recent links from around the web on careers, fulfilling work and writing:

• writer David Sedaris on why self-promotion shouldn’t be about asking
• Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s TED talk on Flow: the ultimate aim for all innovative activity
• essay writer John McPhee on the significance of first drafts
• blogger James Somers on using a good dictionary
• on editing, from Paul McVeigh’s blog: Get someone else to read your story to you
• Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot, with as as good a definition of the joy of innovation as I’ve heard
• Douglas W. Milliken on keeping himself out of the picture when writing
• Gary Klein on insight, and why it cannot happen in large organizations
• artist Young-ha Kim on the self-made career as his ideal
• games designer John Ratcliff on the career realities of working in the games industry