Energy in the gap

A zine about the creative tension between what is and what could be

Hey y’all,

Today’s letter is a handmade zine that you can print out and fold into a little booklet. (A link to a downloadable PDF is at the end.) I made it after doing a little more research into the idea of “creative tensions.”

More of that Ira Glass quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

It might be worth watching him explain it in this video about storytelling.

Abraham Lincoln said that books serve to show us that our “original thoughts… aren’t very new after all.” I thought of that quote when I came across Peter Singe’s book The Fifth Discipline in which he uses the term “creative tension”: