Good! I wasn't asked, but I write as those who write outside the bait ball write: for those outside the bait ball, but with an eye always on the bait ball. There is so much going on under the radar, to mix metaphors.
If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. Rather, work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think. This was Stendhal’s advice. Actually, he said: “If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.” […]
But I prefer my adaptation of his advice: If you want to be original, cultivate yourself, enrich your mind, develop your empathy, your understanding of other human beings, and then, when you come to write, say what you think and feel, what you are moved to say.
[…]
This is what I mean about your character and work: your nature, your character, your whole being will produce the kind of writing you do. (That is why we hate cliches so much : they don’t reflect your own, very individual person: they are borrowed ideas, in outworn language.)
"There is then creative reading as well as creative writing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I discovered Emerson late in life, but he sums up the writing process for me. Read actively and creatively and this will stir your mind enough to write.
Your section on writing books is "don't, because there would be few readers and you wouldn't make money", but in the very next section you say "it's often worth writing stuff down even if it'll garner no readers". Writing novels is the quintessential example of this! It's probably the most pleasurable thing I've ever done, and indeed most of my novels I just like, send to my wife and my mom and that's it. Even that - a story goes from residence in one mind to three - strikes me as a kind of miracle. Would I take 100 readers if they fell out the sky? Of course! But hard to even imagine such riches.
Yeah, the implied synthesis is of course 'if writing the novel would benefit you inherently then do it anyway.' It doesn't strike me as great, but I'm not a fiction writer and have never even done a good short story let alone a novel.
Yeah, I have no idea what it's like to "force it", but to me whether it's good, even, is of more secondary importance. I just think up the story and then, like, shucks. Gotta write that down. (More precisely, I usually dream up a climax and then am driven to find my way there.) The notion it could one day make me money is absurd! I'd much rather give the thing away for free, given readers.
I guess what I'm getting at is even the word "anyway" is strange to me there. Like there's a strong slant for you on writing blog posts as presumptively virtuous, and the readers don't centrally matter a lot of the time, but writing books is primarily a thing one does for money, and of course it'd be a strange, exceptional situation to do such a thing for its own sake. But that seems silly to me! I do both (and indeed, both for few readers), and they both strike me as more valuable for their own sakes than instrumentally.
Neat to get this small glimpse into The Zvi Process! Technique's different for everyone, but the sheer quantity of non-nonsense words you're able to regularly put out clearly shows there's some there here (there?).
*Outlining is stupid, and I think the formal schooling emphasis on this ideatic progression Goodharts people. When a meaningful chunk of the grade on a writing assignment is "have a good outline", that actively discourages Just Put Words To Paper, Learn By Doing. I spent so many frustrating years Doing The Thing and then pointlessly plausibly-backfilling the outline at the end. Kinda like learning to do math by heart but then also post hoc "showing your work" to legibly rationalize the answer process. As MY says, What Are We Doing Here?
*Babble and Prune are still some of my favourite LW essays on idea formation; too many people get insufficient reps in due to excessive fear of sounding ridiculous/unpolished.
*It's genuinely shocking to me how often really excellent, seemingly-smart coworkers of mine are, like...borderline illiterate, and definitely innumerate. Also vice versa, how booksmart (under)grads are really bad at rolling INT for practical day-to-day physical job skills. There's not *zero* skill overlap in either direction, just a lot less than I'd naively have expected before blueing my collar.
*Going tall rather than going wide is one of your comparative advantages! Not sure what the Pareto-optimal point is, but trying for wider comprehensability would, I think, paradoxically make your specific work less interesting. Many Such Cases among the rationalist and R-inspired crowd.
*EY overuses italics, although he uses them effectively; I really think bold, strikethrough, *emphasis*, (parentheticals), and indentation cover almost all relevant use cases. Save italics for loanwords, calques, other-language idioms, etc.
*I guess technically LLMs are the "readers of last resort" for most internet posts? Probably useful on the margin to seed the training data with Good Writing. Although I suspect part of why they stumble on DWATVs is due to constantly reinforcing "Compelling Fuckery" with All The Memes, which have...different associations. (Maybe that's also a plus though?)
On the big question of Cui Bono and bringing home the Kevin Bacon: a lot of the trouble is that the marginal value of further subscriptions etc. once one already has a strong "content core" drops off quite fast. Only so many hours in the day, and I do prefer a decent chunk of them un-"mediated" in any way. Good ideas take time to digest and appreciate! Some mediums like podcasts, TV, music are easier to generate value from, since one can fairly-mindlessly-passively consume the content and still get something from it. Reading though...if it's something actually worth paying for (vs the firehose of free stuff, baseline quality of which is constantly improving), then that actively funges against skimming. Doubly true for writing that tries to stay timely, the "speed premium" as you call it. Less information value the later one gets around to reading it, quite possibly going negative via future major developments. Ultimately, I agree there have to be enough patron-type supporters who are willing to throw money at artistic endeavors like writing without actually expecting to ever consume most of it themselves. But that's a hard intuition to go against in the modern economy. ("How dare you make me pay a trivial monthly fee for a collectively improved experience on a platform I constantly use for free", etc.)
Man, locking all comments to subscriber-only would greatly raise the commentariat sanity waterline...even just a tiny amount of trivially inconvenient friction should reap good dividends. Stronger effect with an actual monetary price, although iirc Substack doesn't allow cheaper options than like $5/mo or something, yet it's likely similar to the job-application dilemma where a mere $1/yr sub would capture most of the value.
I was so hyped for this even as I watched the Twitch stream I tried reading it live as Zvi wrote it 🤪 (my reverse tip on how not to read, ever... unless you want to go insane).
I personally would like to get to the point where writing is a form of meditative practice, while also generating good content. I bought a book about that (Writing down the bones by Natalie Goldberg) but haven't read it yet. (another tip on how not to read 😅)
Anyway, thanks Zvi, your writing is inspiring my own.
It's my conversation about refining a writing curriculum. I even used one of my precious Deep Research credits on it, for a part of the task that I expect may have benefited from it greatly. The part about writing as an embodied vitalist practice, part of the extended phenotype of man, a pulsing forth of his vitality...
Good! I wasn't asked, but I write as those who write outside the bait ball write: for those outside the bait ball, but with an eye always on the bait ball. There is so much going on under the radar, to mix metaphors.
I feel like I'm pretty clueless about how people will react.
Lydia Davis has excellent writing advice. Most of it applies to fiction, but still worth reading.
https://lithub.com/lydia-davis-ten-of-my-recommendations-for-good-writing-habits/
My favourite passage (from the full essay):
If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. Rather, work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think. This was Stendhal’s advice. Actually, he said: “If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.” […]
But I prefer my adaptation of his advice: If you want to be original, cultivate yourself, enrich your mind, develop your empathy, your understanding of other human beings, and then, when you come to write, say what you think and feel, what you are moved to say.
[…]
This is what I mean about your character and work: your nature, your character, your whole being will produce the kind of writing you do. (That is why we hate cliches so much : they don’t reflect your own, very individual person: they are borrowed ideas, in outworn language.)
"There is then creative reading as well as creative writing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I discovered Emerson late in life, but he sums up the writing process for me. Read actively and creatively and this will stir your mind enough to write.
Also good, having enigmatic AI voices reading your writing out loud!
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/on-writing-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
The Tolkein thread link is dead, alas!
Threadreader to the rescue! https://threadreaderapp.com/user/mytholder
Your section on writing books is "don't, because there would be few readers and you wouldn't make money", but in the very next section you say "it's often worth writing stuff down even if it'll garner no readers". Writing novels is the quintessential example of this! It's probably the most pleasurable thing I've ever done, and indeed most of my novels I just like, send to my wife and my mom and that's it. Even that - a story goes from residence in one mind to three - strikes me as a kind of miracle. Would I take 100 readers if they fell out the sky? Of course! But hard to even imagine such riches.
Yeah, the implied synthesis is of course 'if writing the novel would benefit you inherently then do it anyway.' It doesn't strike me as great, but I'm not a fiction writer and have never even done a good short story let alone a novel.
Yeah, I have no idea what it's like to "force it", but to me whether it's good, even, is of more secondary importance. I just think up the story and then, like, shucks. Gotta write that down. (More precisely, I usually dream up a climax and then am driven to find my way there.) The notion it could one day make me money is absurd! I'd much rather give the thing away for free, given readers.
I guess what I'm getting at is even the word "anyway" is strange to me there. Like there's a strong slant for you on writing blog posts as presumptively virtuous, and the readers don't centrally matter a lot of the time, but writing books is primarily a thing one does for money, and of course it'd be a strange, exceptional situation to do such a thing for its own sake. But that seems silly to me! I do both (and indeed, both for few readers), and they both strike me as more valuable for their own sakes than instrumentally.
"I could try to change this, but I mostly choose not to." Thank you.
Neat to get this small glimpse into The Zvi Process! Technique's different for everyone, but the sheer quantity of non-nonsense words you're able to regularly put out clearly shows there's some there here (there?).
*Outlining is stupid, and I think the formal schooling emphasis on this ideatic progression Goodharts people. When a meaningful chunk of the grade on a writing assignment is "have a good outline", that actively discourages Just Put Words To Paper, Learn By Doing. I spent so many frustrating years Doing The Thing and then pointlessly plausibly-backfilling the outline at the end. Kinda like learning to do math by heart but then also post hoc "showing your work" to legibly rationalize the answer process. As MY says, What Are We Doing Here?
*Babble and Prune are still some of my favourite LW essays on idea formation; too many people get insufficient reps in due to excessive fear of sounding ridiculous/unpolished.
*It's genuinely shocking to me how often really excellent, seemingly-smart coworkers of mine are, like...borderline illiterate, and definitely innumerate. Also vice versa, how booksmart (under)grads are really bad at rolling INT for practical day-to-day physical job skills. There's not *zero* skill overlap in either direction, just a lot less than I'd naively have expected before blueing my collar.
*Going tall rather than going wide is one of your comparative advantages! Not sure what the Pareto-optimal point is, but trying for wider comprehensability would, I think, paradoxically make your specific work less interesting. Many Such Cases among the rationalist and R-inspired crowd.
*EY overuses italics, although he uses them effectively; I really think bold, strikethrough, *emphasis*, (parentheticals), and indentation cover almost all relevant use cases. Save italics for loanwords, calques, other-language idioms, etc.
*I guess technically LLMs are the "readers of last resort" for most internet posts? Probably useful on the margin to seed the training data with Good Writing. Although I suspect part of why they stumble on DWATVs is due to constantly reinforcing "Compelling Fuckery" with All The Memes, which have...different associations. (Maybe that's also a plus though?)
On the big question of Cui Bono and bringing home the Kevin Bacon: a lot of the trouble is that the marginal value of further subscriptions etc. once one already has a strong "content core" drops off quite fast. Only so many hours in the day, and I do prefer a decent chunk of them un-"mediated" in any way. Good ideas take time to digest and appreciate! Some mediums like podcasts, TV, music are easier to generate value from, since one can fairly-mindlessly-passively consume the content and still get something from it. Reading though...if it's something actually worth paying for (vs the firehose of free stuff, baseline quality of which is constantly improving), then that actively funges against skimming. Doubly true for writing that tries to stay timely, the "speed premium" as you call it. Less information value the later one gets around to reading it, quite possibly going negative via future major developments. Ultimately, I agree there have to be enough patron-type supporters who are willing to throw money at artistic endeavors like writing without actually expecting to ever consume most of it themselves. But that's a hard intuition to go against in the modern economy. ("How dare you make me pay a trivial monthly fee for a collectively improved experience on a platform I constantly use for free", etc.)
Man, locking all comments to subscriber-only would greatly raise the commentariat sanity waterline...even just a tiny amount of trivially inconvenient friction should reap good dividends. Stronger effect with an actual monetary price, although iirc Substack doesn't allow cheaper options than like $5/mo or something, yet it's likely similar to the job-application dilemma where a mere $1/yr sub would capture most of the value.
I was so hyped for this even as I watched the Twitch stream I tried reading it live as Zvi wrote it 🤪 (my reverse tip on how not to read, ever... unless you want to go insane).
I personally would like to get to the point where writing is a form of meditative practice, while also generating good content. I bought a book about that (Writing down the bones by Natalie Goldberg) but haven't read it yet. (another tip on how not to read 😅)
Anyway, thanks Zvi, your writing is inspiring my own.
You may find this of interest: https://chatgpt.com/share/67c84405-be2c-8002-9c43-d6575abe60eb
It's my conversation about refining a writing curriculum. I even used one of my precious Deep Research credits on it, for a part of the task that I expect may have benefited from it greatly. The part about writing as an embodied vitalist practice, part of the extended phenotype of man, a pulsing forth of his vitality...