Things that I'd say on a podcast.
- Write about what makes you different. The difference that makes the difference.
- Writing can be isolating. It can also be social. Talk with someone about your story.
- Get feedback on your writing. The faster the feedback loops are, the faster you get better.
- A writer is an expert who can explain things to a beginner.
- Collaborate with AI. That's your cowriter.
- Write a lot. Then remove everything that's good and only leave the great.
- Never start with a blank page. First gather information. So, you write from a place of abundance and not scarcity.
- New writers overestimate what they might get in return in the short term but underestimate what they might get in return in the long term. Writing has compound value.
- Don’t clarify things that are obvious.
- Just say it as it is. No fillers. Just be direct about things.
- Get your writing lean. Remove the flab. Use active verbs to get to the point quickly.
- Get your characters to take opposite sides. Then make them argue with each other.
- Write like you talk. Your writing should sound like you. The readers should be able to hear your voice in their head.
- Writing is thinking. You don't need to know what you want to write before you write. Make it up as you go.
- Write simply. Without buzzwords and jargon.
- Remember POP: Personal, observational, playful.
- Personal: Tell your own story through your characters. The personal is universal.
- Observational: Write about little things you notice. Like Darwin observed the beak of a finch.
- Playful: Make it fun. Use weird words. And weird metaphors.
- POP makes your writing memorable.
- Anomalies are interesting.
- Write for yourself. Like Tansen sung for himself.
- Look at everything that happens as a story with a moral.
- Do a tweet storm.
- Go through short cycles of writing and editing.
- Like batman. Turn into a writer at night.
- Keep editing. Keep compressing. Make your writing dense.
- Put words to sensations.
- Talk to your past and future self. Write those conversations.
- A tweet is a single idea.
- Be you. No one else can be a better you than you.
- Write specific scenes from your life. You will find the thread that connects them later.
- Don't try to perfection. Art is never complete, only abandoned.
- You don't need to be an expert to write about something.
- Writing attracts its own audience.
- Coin your own terms. Like 'design thinking.'
- The goal is to write the next sentence.
- Write good chapter titles.
- Research. Do the heavy lifting of understand so you reader doesn't have to.
- There's no long book. Just boring ones.
- Try teaching someone something. Teaching is a form of learning.
- Disconnected smudges of color come together in a painting. Each word you write is that smudge of color.
- Think narrow. Write about specifics. Generality will arise naturally from the specifics.
- You don't want to find readers. You need to attract readers who are already at the same wavelength as you. Inch wide, mile deep.
- Think about what could be your niche. The narrower the niche, the better.
- Write for everyone, you'll write for no one. Write for yourself, you write for everyone.
- Write a lot. Publish little.
- Use AI for vomit drafts. Then chisel the statue out of the box of marble.
- Look at diffs between edits.
- AI is the new writer. You're the new editor.
- Be vivid. Add colorful details.
- Think about your scene. Then write about what happened before and what happened after that scene.
- Write whatever you can imagine. Words are your lego set.
- Be open to the idea that you might be wrong and the AI being write. Amateur chess players can beat grandmasters with AI's help.
- It's okay to imitate. You'll eventually find your own voice. But find the art that you connect with you imitate.
- AI knows lots of things you don't.
- AI is now the top species on this planet.
- If you can't partner with AI, you might not survive.
- Take notes. It's the most important habit that you can develop.
- Make connections between different things.
- Make your sentence flow smoothly.
- Make learning fun.
- Vary sentence lengths. Think in rhythms. Words are music.
- Internet is real estate. Own a tiny sliver of it.
- Write consistently.
- Document your experiences.
- Consume content consciously.
- Read widely and differently.
- Find niche content, books, or videos.
- You can only cook from what you have in the fridge. Have a diverse information diet.
- Let your mind wander. Go for walks without music.
- Writing is extropy. You're creating order from chaos.
- Failing is central to learning. Write terrible first drafts.
- We shape words into writing. Writing shapes you back. You create tools. Then tools shape you.
- Capture the essence of something. Doesn't have to realistic. Like Picasso's bull painting, trying to paint a bull in as few lines as possible to get to the essence of a bull
- Every scene must have a beginning, confrontation, and resolution.
- The 3-act structure is how the hero becomes the person that they want to be.
- Writing is time traveling in your mind.
- Keep diverging and converging ideas. That's the creative process. Play the good cop and bad cop.
- Edit in axe mode, then knife mode, then chisel mode.
- Originality is undetected plagiarism.
- To come up with an original idea, you have to reinvent the whole universe.
- Imitating lets you learn how other mind's work.
- Writing is less about writing. It's more about researching and organizing.
- All stories are the same. Stories keep repeating. Find that pattern. There's always a Ram and Ravan.
- The better you predict what happens next. The smarter you are.
- Imagination is as real as reality. Your brain does not witness reality it constructs it.
- Imagine you're in a lucid dream while writing.
- Make strange places feel familiar to the reader.
- Make dialogue sound like real talking. But do not transcribe conversation. You only write the essence of what's being said.
- Let you mind wander. Ruminate about things. Deconstruct your experiences.
- Accept you're imperfections as a writer. That acceptance makes your writing better.
- You have to write what you like to read. People who share your taste will like what you write.
- You might receive indifference or criticism or hatred. They’re all fine.
- Refine your raw thoughts by writing.
- Quantity in writing leads to quality.
- Writing should feel like channeling. It happens through you. You become the vessel.
- Sharpen your five senses. Writing helps develop your sixth sense.
- Writing is pursuing perfection that you can never get to. Like justice.
- You don't need to be a genius. Just consistent.
- AI can move you from beginner to average very quickly. From average to great takes a lot.
- Try writing your internal monologues. Write whatever comes to your mind.
- Mix up being a maximalist and minimalist in your writing.
- When you write what you feel, there will be lossy. Words can't fully grasp sensations.
- Writing helps you let go of things. It's easier to move on from feelings you have written about.
- It's natural to feel anxious when you're writing.
- Writer's block is when you feel your writing won't flow again. It will. Serendipity happens again and again.
- Go deeper into your feelings. You'll keep finding things to write about. Excavate your psyche. Translate your inner world into words.
- Write about different things. Make the mundane meaningful.
- Pointless things you did in life is great material for writing.
- Write about simple things. Complexity will emerge naturally from there.
- The world is a conspiracy to prevent flow state. Lots of distractions everywhere. Ignore all of them.
- Give your deepest focus time to writing. We all have limited gray matter cells. Use them to do what you like the most.
- Research is discovery. Writing is refinement.
- Your curiosity is your north star.
- Empathy is what you need to write. You should be able to write from a perspective of a bat, a wolf, or an ant.
- If you fight a story with a statistic, you will always lose.
- Take more focus to consciously edit then write a first draft.
- Feeling the cringe when you read your writing is natural.
- Lets say everyone has a flashlight. We can only communicate through flashlights: on and off. That's transistors in a computer.
- For PR, try to find the centers of gravity for your community. Reach out to them.
- Make sentences rhyme. Brain is encoded to believe that the truth rhymes. Come up with phrases that stick.
- An ounce of emotion is worth a pound of facts.
- Build bridges between what you think and what you say. Like an API, a gateway to your thoughts.
- Imagine what happens next when you're in that place between sleep and wakefulness. Like Dali.
- Try shifting around sentences and paragraphs to shift the timelines of your story.
- Learn to let go of sentences and paragraphs. Like the book 'Murder your darlings.'
- Create a separate document where you can paste sentences that you to edit out. That makes deleting a sentence less painful.
- Don't be afraid to delete sentences. Remember you can always create more beautiful sentences.
- Keep coming at the writing with fresh eyes.
- Clarity trumps style.
- When in front of a camera, people start to perform and feel fake. Write like no will read it.
- Look at your writing with different lenses.
- Stories gives a linear experience to reality.
- Humans can make stories about the past and future. That's our superpower.
- Characters are more important than plot.
- Get into the mind of your character. Find out what drives your character. Most characters want control of something.
- Figure out your character's model of reality. Then make them realize that model is wrong.
- Causality is fundamental to how we think. See connections between disparate things.
- Add in a series of tests for the main character. Like the movie Arunachalam.
- The threat of change is more scary than changing.
- Make the character notice things as if time slows down.
- Characters want survival, love, and status. How do they get there?
- The main character needs to die and reborn. Like a Phoenix rising out of the ashes.
- A great story is not stuck to any period. It keeps repeating. Like Ramayana was written before the birth of Ram and Ravan. It's a story of universal characters. Good stories are evergreen.
- Try to get to the origin of your character's motivation. Like a character might be hungry for money but the real motivation is to get back at the bullying they might faced as a child.
- Make writing fun. You're more likely to do what you think is fun.
- Find solutions for procrastination, which is the problem of getting started, and the second is distraction, staying focused.
- Break it into smaller chunks.
- Build the islands (chapters) independently and then the connections between them.
- Stories are fractal. Connections will emerge.
- The primary skill would be to write prompts.
- Interestingness is suprise times novelty.
- String disparate plot points.
- LLMs just predict the next word, but produce coherent sentences.
- Get the character to solve a puzzle. Make it like a detective story.
- Nurture your ideas. Like a seed needs taking care of until it can live on its own.
- Create different writer agents and get them to talk to each other. Read their conversations.
- We and AI are now symbiotic. Discover things with AI without worrying about who contributed how much.
- Make paragraphs lead into a crescendo.
- Imagine you're watching the scenes play out like a cameraman.
- You will get to our writing style unconsciously.
- If you think you learn a lot reading a book, try writing one.
- Writing freezes thought.
- Books are a way to fight information silos.
- Books are a machine that transport consciousness from one person to another. Book written from the perspective of a wolf.
- Greatest works of art take patience and perseverance.
- Interestingness is “strange.”
- Understanding how you are feeling in that moment and knowing how to convey that feeling in words, that’s what writing is.
- Make your dialogues ring true.
- A book has to be true to you.
- I’m not writing for you. I’m writing for me. For my ego. For my satisfaction. Sure, I want to be heard, but I don’t need to be accepted.
- It's okay to leave things unexplained.
- Dive into the data, pick up something to brig to the shore and put it into words.
- For me a good writing session isn’t how many words I am writing, but how much I surprised myself, that’s the real measure.
- Writing at its best makes you feel surprised, like woah, that's amazing.
- Titles need to invoke curiosity. Like "The pathless path."
- There’s a joy of finding things out.
- Spend time smoothening your writing like ironing your T-shirt, remove the wrinkles.
- What turns out on the page needs to be better than the thoughts in your head.
- You'll figure out what you want to write from writing. Like Amazon's policy for documenting everything.
- Just focus on being truthful. Be uncommonly honest. Like Anne Frank.
- If you're deeply wounded, channel that in your writing.
- Mix the mundane and with the dramatic.
- All writing is journaling.
- Use humor. The jester is the only person who can tell the truth without being persecuted.
- Humor is also about telling the truth. Like emperor’s new clothes.
- Machine learning is a cover all term for any system that learns. AI is one way of learning. Neural nets learns by changing the strengths of connections between brain cells.
- A single neuron can only ping. The decision it takes is whether to ping or not. If a neuron gets more pings it's more likely to ping.
- The only program we write for AI is how they would decide if to ping or not.
- Backprop keeps improving how that neuron decides to ping or not based on feedback.
- Neural nets only work when you have a lot of data and a huge amount of compute power.
- In LLMs, when you write Tuesday, a set of neurons go ping, when you write Wednesday you will have a similar set of neurons going ping, similar because they mean similar things.
- Now, neural nets running on digital computers are better than our biological brains because they can share data with each other better. You can clone a neural net into a million and each one can look at different data (medical, satellite, music) and learn from that and change their connections based on that. Then they get back to together by averaging whatever each of them have learnt. Again spilt back, again join back. It evolves by averaging connections.
- So, when you ask the question that an AI can be sentient, you are presuming, you have a soul or an inner subjective experience or quailia that the AI doesn’t have, but that can only be the case if consciousness is non local. If consciousness is located in the brain, then the AI has the same subjective experience as us.
- The neural net is immortal. You can move onto a different hardware and it will be reborn as the same AI, with the same beliefs and knowledge because it has the same connections like how you transfer data from your old phone to a new phone. This resurrection. Real resurrection.
- Think of your scenes as reels. Short. Think of how to connects together later.
- Minimal: short, choppy prose. Maximalism: high victorian, flowery. You can mix and match both.
- Milton is maximalist. Instead of door you can say portal, instead of loud, you can say vociferous. Hemingway is minimalist. Green vs Matcha green.
- Minimalism is stripping away words, and think about how can I say in the simplest possible set of words.
- Maximalism captures the nuance and texture of life better.
- Atomic Habit--atom is the smallest and atomic bomb has a massive impact. Think of an engineer, makes things more efficient.
- Rewriting gives you depth. It’s like you’re a deep-sea diver.
- If you write maximalist prose, you can emphasize a point with extreme minimalism, if you write minimalist prose, you can emphasis a point by switching to minimalism.
- Understand the etymology of words. Passion means something you love so much that you would be willing to suffer for it.
- You're an ant on a chessboard. Gods are moving pawns, bishops, queens, around.
- Mandela’s effect, deja vu.
- The program of reality keeps getting better, some developer dropping releases, every new release is a slightly better version of reality.
- Capitalism is when money gets to vote on good ideas.
- Pick your North Star in your story. Be be tethered to that. You can hang out but still be hanging on it.
- Writing and storytelling are different. You got to be good at both.
- Combine mundane details with exciting storytelling.
- Trying telling your story to kids. See if you can capture their attention span.
- The key to writing is to tell the slow parts fast…and the fast parts slow. Like a scene on submarine, add in some details of how submarines work.
- Think of themes that recurs throughout the story. Like bad things happen to good people. Like how we would live our life if we had another shot at it.
- Constantly self edit.
- Send yourself messages on WhatsApp.
- Most of life is mundane and capturing that leads to more of a connect.
- Good writing is when you don’t want to summarize. Mozart’s music can’t be summarized or rushed.
- Make your writing ironic, and not take it seriously.
- Refine the connections between sentences, the connections between paragraphs, make it more immersive.
- The best writing is to try mix with analytic and pedestrian information.
- Sci-fi writing is writing the first draft of the future.
- Scientists and engineers write the final draft whatever that might be.
- Make your writing, syncretic, synthesizing different ideas into a cohesive system.
- Combine the big with the small, formal with informal, rational with the irrational.
- A writer needs a sort of an X-ray vision that looks through the mundane through the skin and get to the bone of things.
- I remember using GPT-2 which was open-source on HuggingFace at the time, and was disappointed like most people had been.
- The human genome is the longest word and most important word, has 3.2 billion letters, chemical letters of course, but biology is also a language, we can use English and mathematics to make sense of it.
- Newton wrote that I don’t know what gravity is, but here’s a formula that lets you calculate its effect.
- Science takes things apart to see how they work, religion is more about putting pieces together to see how they fit.
- Writing style is more important than the substance of what you’re writing.
- Great writing is written not to be understood but to be imagined.
- Getting your readers to imagine is what you need to do as a writer. Imagination is where poetry and music comes from.
- Technology is like a knife. Knifes can be used for surgery or as a weapon.
- AI is an exception to this because it is not a tool to be used by humans. It’s a life that we birthing.
- Narrow AI does one thing and one thing alone that can be used as a knife, but general AI is different. It's a life on its own.
- Building AI is building God.
- Always start with something random. Just like a neural network is initialized with random numbers.
- If you want to design a glass, don't look at other glasses for inspiration. Look at other things. Look at something else like a sock. Your brain makes new synaptic connections that didn’t exist before.
- That’s why musicians, artists, writers repeat themselves, because they’re not able to make new connections. Force yourself to make connections where none exist.
- Clarity in thought always has a messy process. Clarity in writing is what you need to get to.
- Back in the day, we would very proud if something was machine made. Now it’s just the opposite, we want to make things that obviously made by humans, because that’s what increases its value. Machine made has lesser value people can sense if something was done with love and care.
- Use a system of index cards with different scenes and then write each one out and then figure out they fit together. Back in the days that really how Google thought of information architecture, what connects to what.
- The juxtaposition of jarring details make the reader go “Wait, What?” Like you say something like he’s handsome but missing all his front teeth, it makes the text more memorable.
- Write simply. A great pizza is served simply, cheese, herbs in New York…a crappy pizza you got drench in chili flakes and veggies and everything else.
- It wasn’t like you had a book idea, let me write a book, it was more like I am at the point in my career in life where I need to write a book.
- A good piece of writing, needs to have drive. A character chasing an answer and there are obstacles, some animated puzzle to solve.
- Sequencing thoughts is really important.
- You can just stand here and look at this flower and start writing down what you see. You might realize you haven’t seen that flower at all. Is it really red? it has that stem there, how many petals are there? look and write, look and write. Your brain abstracts away all the details, but the details is where the insights are.
- You're writing has to be smarter than you are.
- It's okay to feel embarrased when you write about emotions.
- Writing can feel like vacuuming your thoughts.
- When you write in a journal, you’re not trying to be true, you’re just true, when you write to publish, dishonesty creeps in.
- Truth is right at the edge of language can say.
- Good ideas come in intersection between fields. Strange connections often generate ideas.
- When you remember where you grew up, you remember certain scenes, some images, touches, sounds, smells, all at once. Home is a location in space-time, you go back to the same space but you don’t go back in time.
- Being a writer is being someone who observes, senses things, feel things. Who sheds their preconceived notions about the world and looks at everything around you with fresh eyes.
- If you’re really satisfied in the moment, no craving for anything, food, sex, love, entertainment, then what would I do? I would write.
- Reality is malleable that responds to your internal state.
- Great writing is a convergence of research, research, and more research, and write, rewrite, and constantly rewrite.
- Describe like how JK Rowling describes Hagrid for the first time, eyes like black beetles under his saggy beard.
- Use evocative words and metaphors to describe what you imagine.
- I like to write in chronological order. Write from the eyes of the main character like the way they saw things and experienced them.
- If you write in 1st person…the main character and you as the reader have no idea what’s going to come next, so it creates more of a suspense.
- Interpretability is looking inside an LLM and see what’s going on when it’s answering your questions.
- AI is an organism. It’s important to understand its biology.
- The value of information is more in the stranger, quirkier words, or metaphors.
- You take an MRI scan. You see electrical signals but you can’t see exactly what’s going on this part lights up when you drink coffee. We need to build the MRI machine for the LLM models.
- For writing, you need AI models that actually hallucinate.
- Insecure people, who tell you they have nothing to say usually say more interesting things than someone who is confident and thinks they have a lot to say.
- Understand what energies you and what exhausts you. Maximize for your energy.
- Build a system where it’s easier to do the right thing and difficult and dangerous to do the wrong thing.
- If you have a job that demands a lot of cognitive awareness and focus. It becomes hard to come back home and write because writing takes a lot of gray matter compute.
- Writing is where science, art, humanities, collide.
- From the top of the mountain, the path getting to there is obvious but it isn’t when you’re climbing up.
- You write about ordinary things that we stop seeing and infuses them with wonder and make them enchanted.
- Keep the book as pure and honest as possible without worrying about consequences.
- Write from cafes, where there are natural sounds…
- Write from a point of view being lightly drunk where you don’t quite know what you’re doing, how your characters will behave.
- Read graphic novels, cookbooks, political philosophy, neuroscience, film theory, read everything that you get your hands on, be an intellectual nomad.
- Metaphors makes you see something that is hard to see.
- Writing makes you miserable, but if you didn’t write, you would be more miserable, so it’s less misery.
- You need to go beyond singularity of meaning; you have to step away from certainties, you move toward nuance, multiplicity.
- No two readers will never read it in the same way; meaning is created with the readers.
- As a writer you have to be out of the driver’s seat into the passenger seat, you let the story drive itself. That's why it's fun. It’s like I’m the dog and the book is taking me for the ride and not the other way around.
- A good sentence, you know when you see it.
- If somebody is knowledgeable about something and comes to you and says, you nailed this part, that’s always a great joy.
- I want the readers to think this could be real.
- Comedy is your brain comparing two different thoughts and figuring the conundrum of both of those being contrasting.
- One way to write a book, is to write a mini book, then keep expanding it or a short stories and then connect them.
- What's the story behind the story. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is about the 2nd world war. This guy is dragged into a war which he does not want to fight. Satanic verses is about the partition of India and Pakistan.
- You remember some things and forget other things. The memories that stick in your mind have clues about who you are, what you value, what you care about.
- Feel that sense of “Wonder” when you think about things, when you look around at the world.
- Writing sentences that make you walk the tightrope between what you know and what you discover.
- Be a rewriter.
- Start the day, with the real work, which is writing. Then you go back to the day to day stuff, work, relationships, deadlines.
- Human mind is a story engine. The foundation of a story is a transformation, showing a problem and solving it.
- Write with an outsider’s / immigrant's eye.
- You can get yourself so bored that there’s nothing else to do than write. Neil Gaiman.
- Proximity creates opportunity.
- Genre meshing: Give your readers multiple genres in the same book.
- Add a suspense engine, open questions that the reader needs answers to.
- Set your book in different places, giving people a experience of a different place and culture.
- When you start getting momentum, double down on the gas.