Noodle Soup — A Newsletter for Creative Writers
Find unusual connections. Do better work.
Finding connections is a compulsion for all of us who do creative work.
We are voracious about reaching out beyond our own experiences and knowledge. There’s always something new to learn, the drive to perfect the use of creative tools, and the yearning to understand the underlying complexity of seemingly simple things.
For me, curated links with commentary from interesting people is a way to switch perspectives and see things through different lenses.
It is a simple act to open an email, scan through it and click on links that seem interesting. But this textual kaleidoscope of world views stirs up new ways of drawing from humanity’s collective experience. And most of the time, I come away with ideas and thoughts that light up a dark, cobwebby corner of my mind.
It’s a wonderful thing. That’s why I decided to create Noodle Soup:
Five interesting links, once a week, on creativity, communications and the human condition for writers.
I call it Noodle Soup because it’s a stew of everything that feeds the mind. Like Farnam Street puts it, it’s ‘brain food’.
Noodle Soup is Curated
(Ugh, what does that even mean?)
The term ‘curation’ used to apply to things like:
- Putting together Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo series on Inner Silence that was taken over a lifetime.
- Collecting valuable books and documents and making them available in libraries and archives. The Great Library of Alexandria is a grand example.
- The making of insightful documentaries like Samsara that span distance and time.
- Curating art, like Hans Ulrich Obrist does.
These are epic efforts of humankind — the ultimate feeding grounds for creativity. In comparison, a newsletter seems insignificant and unremarkable.
It also doesn’t help that a lot of so-called curated content is just dressed-up brand paraphernalia churned out by content machines.
In the strict sense, Noodle Soup is a collection of hand-picked articles that relate to a specific area of interest. And these articles are thoroughly read, held up to high standards, and only then sent to people who have opted in.
I call it curation because we should let greatness be a model for our own work, and not let it intimidate us into inactivity. Noodle Soup is just a pint-sized attempt to filter out the noise of commercialized, digital content in an age when we truly need it.
Why Subscribe?
You don’t need more clutter in your inbox.
There are a lot of amazing things on the internet if you only know where to look. This newsletter began as a way for me to stay motivated and take the effort to search for high quality content every day.
I always assumed that I would run out of interesting things to share at some point or that I’d get bored with it. But strangely, the more I share, the better things I find. And that way, we both win.
Noodle Soup is for you if you want to:
- Write for a digital medium
- Grow your repertoire of recreative ideas and stories, so you can draw from them later for your line of work
- Find a stash of creative resources and tools to spread the word about your writing
- Discover wisdom in unlikely places.
It’s a work in progress. So it isn’t perfect, but it will become better with each email. And I have great examples to look up to like Brain Pickings, Farnam Street, Strands of Genius and more.
If I recommend a product or website, it’s because I’ve found it useful myself. I don’t self-promote. And no spam. Or clutter. Ever.
TL;DR: Subscribe to Noodle Soup!
Posts go out every Thursday. I hope you’ll like it. :)
This sounds interesting. Can I make my own?
Yes, you can! Newsletter Making & You explains the easiest way to create a newsletter without learning to design or code.
Thanks for reading!
