the art of writing

Read to collect the dots, write to connect them

Writing online gives you access to near infinite leverage. But writing also forces you to find stillness and face your own inner world. It teaches you to accept that you are but one voice in the world’s choir. It teaches acceptance and equanimity in the face of temporary defeat.

It’s a nice fact that LLMs are pretty smart and useful now but suck at writing good prose. Suggests writing well really is very hard.

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be... See more