📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
The tools you work with | JPF Daily
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Hello Reader These are my hands, photographed eleven years ago for a series about heirlooms: At the time, I was especially fascinated that my own hands, which frequently held my daughter’s hands, had been held by my parents’ - as theirs had been held by theirs - and so on, through the generations. I was glad to have hands to write, draw and - well, just generally be human. (Many of the photos in that series, which was published in The Guardian, were tools used at work.)
I still have two hands. And I'm still glad. Since this photo was taken, smart phones have taken over virtually everything, including drawing and writing. In fact, I’m typing this post right now on my iPhone. But I still write by hand, on paper, for substantial periods every day. It just feels better. I think better. And there’s lots of evidence that handwriting helps create memories of the ideas it shapes - the dance of pen or pencil is loaded with muscle memory and emotional weight. I am sad to read research showing that many people do not write anything by hand, for several months at a time. I wish smart phones would disappear - he wrote, tapping on his iPhone. ​ This is the DAILY edition of my newsletter​ ​ ​ ​ |
John-Paul Flintoff
📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Take a close look at these women, Audrey Heath (standing) and Alice May Spinks. For several years, while the men have been away fighting in the trenches, in France, these two have been running the office in London. Both women started work as secretaries. The war gave them a precious opportunity to do more, but with the war’s end their position became precarious: the economy was unstable, and the men came back. They could have reverted to being secretaries, if the company generated sufficient...
Hello Reader Recently in the zooms about writing a book proposal, I told the story of a woman I worked with who printed a beautiful limited edition booklet of her work in progress. It wasn’t the whole work in progress, just a sample chapter that we agreed was in terrific shape. I don’t remember the exact number of copies she produced. Ten? Twenty? Not many, anyway. Each copy had a beautiful photograph on the front cover - a photo that had been supplied by one of her friends. - Having printed...
Hello Reader Sometimes, the best way to learn something – anything – is to do it all wrong first, on purpose. It’s a bit like a vaccine: having absorbed the wrongness, we become stronger. To show what I mean, I’ve taken some fairly recent nonfiction books that have been hugely successful, and attempted to write bad pitches for them. To be perfectly clear, I invented these bad pitches myself – they’re nothing to do with the real authors of these real bestsellers. Don’t worry if you haven’t...