I negotiate freelance gigs by e-mail, and if I need background materials for a project, my clients send them to me digitally.
For those unfamiliar with the startup, Airtable's app makes it easy to handle the non-calculation tasks people sometimes jam into Excel — organizing lists of participants in an event, links to relevant materials for a project, or a list of restaurants in your area you think would be nice to try, organized by price or style.
Burney toured France and Italy collecting materials for a projected history of music in 1770, where he met and formed a lasting friendship with Padre Martini, a fellow music historian; this was followed by a visit to the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria in 1772, where he consulted with the famed librettist Pietro Metastasio.
So far he has filled the equivalent of two dozen coffee cans, raw material for a future project.
To approach a desirable girl, he signs on for a video class and, in the course of shooting material for a class project, he accidentally films beautiful blond twins dying after taking cocaine cut with rat poison.
A sculptor may visit a stone quarry in order to select the material for a large project and to have it cut into blocks of the right size and shape.
Saying he was collecting material for an art project, the 31-year-old visual artist sneaked into a vault at a notorious private, run-for-profit university and quietly removed tuition contracts.
They'd set out that Veteran's Day morning to gather the materials for a class project.
Her story - which I have no reason to doubt - was that she and her daughter had been walking the streets of my suburb all morning trying to gather materials for a school project and the girl, who'd been wearing brand new snow boots, was now suffering from bleeding feet.
To help, here are some basic writing exercises that can help jog your creative juices and provide a material for your project: Go somewhere busy, preferably a place with lots of people.
