the art of writing

Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.

There’s a quote I like from Theodor Adorno, who said, “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes place to live." While I’ve never been a refugee, I still feel that quote really strongly, as someone who’s never quite felt fully at home in most of my ordinary life– always a bit of an alien, always an outsider, always a minority, always... See more

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more

The only thing that matters, to me, is to arrange the writing in such a way that I repeatedly return to ideas again and again . I want to reread and make comments and rearrange my notes, not just type it and move on. The reason for that: I’m not particularly interesting or insightful at any point in time, but if I let five or ten Henriks layer... See more

Current AI writing tools are a great way to mass produce writing that is intensely mid, and makes you feel dead inside. Can we use AI to help the best writers do better work? I don't know. But let's think about the bottlenecks for good writing.