#460: Maria Popova on Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds (Repost)

So much of the cultural crap that is out there—not just on the Internet [but] in general—comes from people who fail to understand that they should be making the kind of stuff they want to exist. So, if you're a writer, write the things you want to read; if you're an artist, paint the things you want to see painted.

Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that bespeaks work ethic or toughness or whatever it is, but really it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect, and I try to enact that in my own life by being very disciplined about my sleep.

I'm a huge proponent of sleep ... When I try to think, what I do is essentially make associations between seemingly unrelated ideas and concepts, and in order for that to happen, those associative chains need to be firing, and when I am sleep-deprived, I feel like I don't have full access to my own brain ... I'm certainly not unique in any way. There's research showing that our reflexes are severely hindered by a lack of sleep. We're almost drunk if we sleep less than half the amount of time [we need to function normally].

I still write for an audience of one, and that's myself ... It's a record of my thought process. [It's] my way of just trying to navigate my way through the world and understand my place in it, understand how we relate to one another, how different pieces of the world relate to each other, and create a pattern of meaning out of seemingly unrelated meaningless information.