the nature of creativity
In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.
Distinctive features are not universal... See more
Distinctive features are not universal... See more
Nix • the delight of specificity
When you learn something about a writer, say, that Rousseau abandoned all of his children, it inflects the way you understand their writing. But even that isn’t quite the right example—it’s not about filling in the biographical details, it’s about realizing that the thing you’re reading comes from somewhere. Good writing is thick with that coming-f... See more
28 slightly rude notes on writing
I wonder if AI will lead to the rise of neologisms as a mark of the human touch—comingfromness, finchness
This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.
Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giv... See more
Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giv... See more
28 slightly rude notes on writing
Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations
To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.
You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.
Small is more rewarding than big - V
Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.
(William Wordsworth referred to this as “wide... See more
(William Wordsworth referred to this as “wide... See more
28 slightly rude notes on writing
All writing about despair is ultimately insincere. Putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is secretly an act of hope, however faint—hope that someone will read your words, hope that someone will understand. Someone who truly feelsdespair wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it because they wouldn’t expect it to do anything. All text produced in de... See more
28 slightly rude notes on writing
In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.
Distinctive features are not universal... See more
Distinctive features are not universal... See more