Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes

discuss about phone number list
Post Reply
Jannat12
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Aug 06, 2022 10:54 am

Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes

Post by Jannat12 »

Here’s How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes Most serious writers and online publishers are relentlessly on the prowl for fresh inspiration to fuel both their creativity and productivity. If you aren’t familiar with the writing of Maria Popova, prolific author of the “discovery engine for interestingness” known as Brain Pickings, you’ve been missing out on some of the most fascinating and heady publishing on the web. Ms. Popova is a wellspring of knowledge and she daily cross-pollinates a wide variety of disciplines, all in the spirit of creativity and discovery. She has contributed to Wired, The Atlantic, is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, and was named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business (among many other accolades).

Although she began her professional Phone Number List career in advertising, she found the DIY integrity of publishing her own website far more rewarding, and her indie work ethic has contributed to a growing legion of fans (including quite a few celebrities). Join me as we examine the file of Maria Popova, writer … Maria religiously publishes three posts a day for her more than 350,000 Twitter and 590,000 Google+ followers — as well as 150,000 plus email subscribers — and in a recent interview she talked about the organic growth of her creative brainchild: My philosophy, and the one thing I’ve been strategic and deliberate about from the beginning, is reader first … Maria admits to putting in some exhaustive hours to get where she is today, and we are honored that she took the time to stop by The Writer Files. In this installment of our Q&A, Maria Popova shares her thoughts on a lifetime of “research,” the power of ritual, the toxicity of approval, and much, much more. About the writer … Who are you and what do you do? A reader who writes. What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher? I’m not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, “An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because ‘he knows.’” Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn – the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense.

Image


That said, one thing I’ve honed over the years – in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it’s how my brain is wired – is drawing connections between things, often things not immediately or obviously related, spanning different disciplines and time periods. I wouldn’t call that “expertise” so much as obsession – it’s something that gives me enormous joy and stimulation, so I do it a great deal, but I don’t know if that constitutes expertise. Where can we find your writing? BrainPickings.org The writer’s productivity … How much time, per day, do you spend reading or doing research? Practically (pathetically?) every waking moment, with the exception of the time I spend writing and a couple of hours in the evening allotted for some semblance of a personal life. I do most of my long-form reading at the gym (pen and Post-Its and all), skim the news while eating (a questionable health habit, no doubt), and listen to philosophy, science, or design podcasts while commuting on my bike (hazardous and probably illegal). Facetiousness aside, however, I have no complaints – as the great Annie Dillard put it, “a life spent reading – that is a good life.” Because Brain Pickings is simply a record of my own curiosity, of my personal journey into what matters in the world and why, it’s hard to quantify how much of my life is “research” – in fact, I feel like all of it is. I just had tea with someone – a writer whose book I’d written about and who reached out and wanted to connect – and that hour-long conversation gave me a dozen ideas to think about, to learn about, and thus to write about (including two books I already ordered based on our chat). Is that “research” in the sense that one deliberately sets out to find something already of interest? No. Is it “research” in terms of the unguided curiosity that lets one discover something previously unknown and succumb to the intellectual restlessness of wanting to learn everything about it? Absolutely.
Post Reply