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Don’t assume the need for practice privacy will go away the better you get. Consider what the great composer Igor Stravinsky wrote in his autobiography: My family and I were quartered in a hotel in which it was impossible for me to compose. I was anxious, therefore, to find a piano some place where I could work in peace. I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me. A music dealer...provided me with a sort of lumber room full of empty Chocolat Suchard packing cases, which opened on to a chicken run.2 That practice room wasn’t quite what Stravinsky was looking for, and he soon found another that suited him. Keep looking for a practice space that works for you. The benefit of a shed of your own is that you get to explore sound without annoying anybody or feeling self-conscious. No matter how good you get, the exploration of sound is endless. Aural privacy will help you explore sound more thoroughly, and will save others from having to participate in your explorations.

The Practice of Practice

Jonathan Harnum

There is a kind of Don Juan—like quality to reading manuscripts–the next one, or the one after, might be the love of one’s life—but editing them is a slow, painstaking effort to patch up and make presentable what has already been botched and fudged. It is possible to spend hours unraveling someone else’s prose or trying to decide what he or she was trying to say and finding some way to make the words express it without starting from scratch in one’s own words. In editing, time becomes meaningless. A single page can sometimes absorb hours, like the most infuriating kind of puzzle. For most editors, there is no time to edit in the office, where they are caught up dealing with the problems of real live authors, talking to agents, being called to meetings, or trying to explain to the marketing people or the business people or the publicity people just what this or that book is about and why it’s important to buy it or print fifty thousand copies of it or reject it. This in turn means that editors do most of their serious work at night and over the weekends and explains why so many of the better ones eventually become publishers,

Another Life

Michael Korda

Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.

Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

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