Things that I'd say on a podcast.
Why to write?
- 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.
- Think about what could be your niche. The narrower the niche, the better. Inch wide, mile deep.
- Write for everyone, you'll write for no one. Write for yourself, you write for everyone.
- Writing is extropy. You're creating order from chaos.
- We shape words into writing. Writing shapes you back.
- Writing is less about writing. It's more about researching and organizing.
- Writing helps you imagine. Imagination is as real as reality.
- Refine your raw thoughts by writing. Research is discovery. Writing is refinement.
- Quantity in writing leads to quality.
- Writing feels like channeling. It happens through you. You become the vessel.
- Writing sharpens your five senses. Helps you develop a sizth sense.
- Writing helps you let go of things. It's easier to move on from feelings you have written about.
- Helps you be more empathetic. You should be able to write from a perspective of a bat, a wolf, an ant.
- Stories are powerful. If you fight a story with a statistic, you will always lose.
- Writing builds bridges between what you think and what you say. Like an API, a gateway to your thoughts.
- We can make stories about the past and future. That's our superpower.
- 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.
- Writing builds patience and perseverance.
- Write for you. For your satisfaction. Sure, you want to be heard, but know that you don’t need to be accepted.
- A good writing session isn’t how many words you write, but how much you surprised yourself, that’s the real measure.
- Writing at its best makes you feel surprised, like woah, that's amazing.
- There’s a joy of finding things out.
- All writing is journaling.
- Writing and storytelling are different. You can get good at both.
- Sci-fi writing is writing the first draft of the future.
- Writing gets you to clarity in thought.
- It's not like you had a book idea, let me now write a book. It's more like I am at the point in my life where I need to write a book.
- Writing helps sequence your thoughts.
- Writing helps you see details. Look at a 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.
- Your writing will turn out smarter than you are.
- Writing can feel like vacuuming your thoughts.
- Truth is right at the edge of language can say.
- If you’re really satisfied in the moment, no craving for anything, food, sex, love, entertainment, then what would you do? If you would write, then you should write.
- Writing changes your internal state.
- 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.
- Writing makes you miserable, but if you didn’t write, you would be more miserable, so it’s less misery.
- 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.
- You can get yourself so bored that there’s nothing else to do than write. Neil Gaiman.
What to write?
- Write about what makes you different. The difference that makes the difference.
- You'll figure out what you want to write from writing.
- Understanding how you are feeling in that moment and knowing how to convey that feeling in words, that’s what writing is.
- Start with something random. Just like a neural network is initialized with random numbers.
- Never start with a blank page. First gather information. So, you write from a place of abundance and not scarcity.
- Writing is thinking. You don't need to know what you want to write before you write. Make it up as you go.
- Write for yourself. Like Tansen sung for himself.
- Write about anomalies. Make connections between disparate things.
- Look at everything that happens as a story with a moral.
- Put words to sensations.
- Talk to your past and future self. Write those conversations.
- Write like 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.
- The goal is to write the next sentence.
- Research. Do the heavy lifting to understand so you reader doesn't have to.
- 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.
- It's okay to imitate writing styles that you connect with. You'll eventually find your own voice. Originality is undetected plagiarism.
- Imitating lets you learn how other mind's work. To come up with an original idea, you have to reinvent the whole universe.
- Take notes. It's the most important habit that you can develop.
- A great story is not stuck to any period. It keeps repeating. There's always a Ram and Ravan. It's a story of universal characters.
- You have to write what you like to read. People who share your taste will like what you write.
- Writer's block is when you feel your writing won't flow again. It will. Serendipity happens again and again.
- You will get to your writing style unconsciously.
- What turns out on the page needs to be better than the thoughts in your head.
- Just focus on being truthful. Be uncommonly honest.
- Channel your wounds into your writing.
- Pick your North Star in your story. Be be tethered to that.
- Trying telling your story to kids. See if you can capture their attention span.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Read graphic novels, cookbooks, political philosophy, neuroscience, film theory, read everything that you get your hands on, be an intellectual nomad.
- Be out of the driver’s seat and get into the passenger seat, let the story drive itself. It’s like I’m the dog and the book is taking me for the ride and not the other way around.
- One way to write a book, is to write a series of short stories, 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.
How to write?
- Writing can be isolating. It can also be social. Talk with someone about your story.
- Write like you talk. Your writing should sound like you.
- 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.
- Coin your own terms. Like 'design thinking.'
- Think narrow. Write about specifics. Generality will arise naturally from the specifics.
- Write consistently.
- Read widely and differently. Find niche content, books, or videos.
- Let your mind wander. Go for walks without music.
- It's okay to write terrible first drafts.
- Capture the essence of something. Like Picasso's bull painting, trying to paint a bull in as few lines as possible.
- Keep diverging and converging ideas. Play the good cop and bad cop with ideas.
- Imagine you're in a lucid dream while writing.
- Try writing your internal monologues.
- When you write what you feel, there will be lossy. Words can't fully grasp sensations.
- Go deeper into yourself. Excavate your psyche. You'll keep finding things to write about. Translate your inner world into words.
- Pointless things you did in life is great material for writing.
- Write about simple things. Complexity will emerge naturally from there.
- Imagine what happens next when you're in that place between sleep and wakefulness. Like Dali.
- Think of your scenes as reels. Short. Think of how to connects together later.
- 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.
- Feel that sense of “Wonder” when you think about things, when you look around at the world.
How to make your writing better?
- Get feedback on your writing. The faster the feedback loops are, the faster you get better.
- Write a lot. Then remove everything that's good and only leave the great.
- Don’t clarify things that are obvious.
- Just say it as it is. No fillers. Just be direct about things.
- 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.
- Go through short cycles of writing and editing.
- Don't try for perfection. Art is never complete, only abandoned.
- There's no long book. Just boring ones.
- Be vivid. Add colorful details.
- Think about your scene. Then write about what happened before and after that scene.
- Make your sentence flow smoothly.
- Vary sentence lengths. Think in rhythms. Words are music.
- Edit in axe mode, then knife mode, then chisel mode.
- Make dialogue sound like real talking. But do not transcribe conversation. You only write the essence of what's being said.
- Accept you're imperfections as a writer. That acceptance makes your writing better.
- 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.
- Feeling the cringe when you read your writing is natural.
- Make sentences rhyme. Brain is encoded to believe that the truth rhymes.
- 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.
- Clarity trumps style.
- When in front of a camera, people start to perform and feel fake. Write like no will read it.
- Make the character notice things as if time slows down.
- Make paragraphs lead into a crescendo.
- It's okay to leave things unexplained.
- Make your titles invoke curiosity. Like "The pathless path." Atomic Habit--atom is the smallest and atomic bomb has a massive impact.
- Mix the mundane and with the dramatic.
- Use humor. The jester is the only person who can tell the truth without being persecuted.
- Minimal: short, choppy prose. Maximalism: high victorian, flowery. You can mix and match both.
- Milton is maximalist. Instead of door you can say portal. Hemingway is minimalist. Think about how can I say in the simplest possible set of words.
- 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.
- Rewriting gives your writing depth.
- Understand the etymology of words. Passion means something you love so much that you would be willing to suffer for it.
- Mix with analytic and pedestrian information.
- Make your writing, syncretic, synthesizing different ideas into a cohesive system.
- Writing style is more important than the substance of what you’re writing.
- Write simply. A great pizza is served simply. A crappy pizza you got drench in chili flakes and veggies and everything else.
- 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.
- A good sentence, you know when you see it.
- Write with an immigrant's eye.
- Genre meshing: Give your readers multiple genres in the same book.
- Add a suspense engine, open questions that the reader needs answers to.
- Make writing fun. You're more likely to do what you think is fun.
How to write characters?
- 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.
- Add in a series of tests for the main character.
- Characters want survival, love, and status. How do they get there?
- The main character needs to die and be reborn. Like a Phoenix rising out of the ashes.
- 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.
- Build the characters independently and then the connections between them.
- Interestingness is surprise times novelty.
- Get the character to solve a puzzle. Make it like a detective story.
- Make dialogues ring true.
- Tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow. Like a scene on submarine, add in some details of how submarines work.
- Make your characters sound ironic.
- Great characters are written not to be understood but to be imagined.
- Describe characters like how JK Rowling describes Hagrid for the first time, eyes like black beetles under his saggy beard.
- Write from the eyes of the main character like the way they saw things and experienced them. It creates more of a suspense.
- Write from where you don’t quite know what the character is doing, how they will behave.
- Make your characters feel real.
- Set your book in different places. Let your characters experience different places and culture.
How to write with AI?
- A writer is an expert who can explain things to a beginner.
- Collaborate with AI. That's your cowriter.
- Keep using an AI to edit. To compress. To make your writing dense.
- 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 open to the idea that you might be wrong and the AI is write.
- Amateur chess players can beat grandmasters with AI's help.
- AI knows lots of things you don't.
- AI can move you from beginner to average very easily. From average to great though takes effort.
- The primary skill of writing will be to write prompts.
- LLMs just predict the next word, but produce coherent sentences.
- 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.
- AI dives into the data, picks up something to brig to the shore and puts it into words.
- Use AI to smoothening your writing. It's good at ironing your writing.
- 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.
- Good writing is when AI can’t summarize without losing what you're trying to say. Mozart’s music can’t be summarized.
- Use AI to refine the connections between sentences, the connections between paragraphs, make it more immersive.
- 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.
- Interpretability is looking inside an LLM and see what’s going on when it’s answering your questions.
- Use AI to get metaphors. The value of information is more in the stranger, quirkier words, or metaphors.
- For writing, you need AI models that actually hallucinate. Metaphors makes you see something that is hard to see.