Writing
The first draft is a conversation with yourself
Nobody writes a good first sentence first. You write a bad one, argue with it, and eventually find out what you meant all along.
Elena Moreau6 min read
A small journal
Notes from the slow end of the workshop
Short essays on writing, craft and paying attention, published whenever there is something worth saying.
Latest
All notes
Everything published so far, newest first.
Writing
The first draft is a conversation with yourself
Nobody writes a good first sentence first. You write a bad one, argue with it, and eventually find out what you meant all along.
Elena Moreau6 min read
Practice
Why I still take notes by hand
A notebook is slower than a keyboard, and that is the entire point. Speed is not what I need from the first pass.
Elena Moreau4 min read
Craft
Small tools, kept sharp
A workshop with four good tools beats one with forty dull ones, and the same is true of almost every other kind of work.
Theo Brandt7 min read
Craft
In praise of the unfinished shelf
It has held two hundred books for three years without a coat of oil on it. I have stopped calling that a failure.
Theo Brandt5 min read
Looking
How to read a building
Every facade is an argument about how people should live. Once you notice the argument, you cannot stop reading them.
Elena Moreau8 min read
Who writes here
Elena Moreau
Writer and typographer
Elena writes about the slow parts of creative work from a small studio in Lisbon. She has spent fifteen years setting type for books that nobody was in a hurry to publish.
Theo Brandt
Furniture maker
Theo builds chairs and cabinets by hand in a converted dairy outside Utrecht, and writes about what the workshop teaches him on the days he stops arguing with it.