Writing

Case in point: My best LLM-assisted short story is a straight-up transposition of an H. P. Lovecraft story to a different key. This is basically like buying into the S&P 500 of 20th century fiction. It is also among my best stories, period. For me, beating the S&P 500 of fiction is going to be hard. Doing passive++ investing in it is going ... See more

Last week, in Protocolized, I published a story called The Signal Under Innsmouth.

This has been my best attempt at AI-assisted fiction writing to date, and also one of the easiest. I simply fed the original story (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a cult classic which Lovecraft wrote in 1937, so it’s in the public domain — not that I’d have hesitated if i... See more

I’ve begun experimenting with creating this ‘writers’ room’ in an app I’m building. The app does two things. First, it hierarchically summarizes large creative works so that the AI has context without being overwhelmed. This is equivalent to how you and I have a ‘picture’ of a novel in our head, and use that context to focus on how to re-write a gi... See more

1. Fragmentary style of writing for different purposes:

Pascal to underscore that total and complete knowledge is God’s alone.

Nietzsche to underscore human perspectivalism.

Others to emulate the ancients (or rather their surviving linguistic ruins.)

Kabballah to emphasize the task of the righteous to collect and reassemble these fragments of God.

2. Ma... See more

I never start a new project without "building blocks."

The first thing I do when I sit down to work is looking for what I already have that can help me complete my project. This might be research, meeting notes, a voice recording of a call, screenshots, templates, quotes...you get the point.

There's always something I can use.

So here's my challenge f... See more

Whenever I'm ready to write a new article, I open my phone and spend a few hours walking around town while capturing random ideas in my notes app until I have so many ideas that the first draft feels easy.

David Perell 12.20.2021

They focus less on consuming as much information as possible and more on cultivating the deepest possible understanding of the ideas that resonate with them most.

David Perell 5.2022

I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions. —Lucille Clifton