October 2024

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October

October 31 A dramatic film is not comparable to a novel, nor a documentary to a nonfiction book; films have their structural analog in writing in the forms of the essay and the short story. And you can become a much better writer within those forms by studying cinema, especially screenwriting and editing (not so much directing). Studying film is among the most efficient ways to understand both story structure and essay structure.

At the root, here is the analogy to keep in mind as you watch any feature film, short film, or video essay: a shot is to a film as a paragraph is to a short story / essay (and each cut a paragraph break, not a period).

The best screenwriters and directors design shots that accomplish as much as possible with as little camera movement as possible, and the best film editors make every cut purposeful so that each shot accomplishes as much as possible (regardless of the pacing of the scene, the number of total cuts). The best films are elegant and economic, and the same is true for any great writer's paragraphs. They could be long or short, disorienting or starkly clear, but they are undoubtedly economic, and each paragraph break is utterly purposeful.

If you want to learn from great essayists and short story writers, study their paragraphs -– What is the form of their contents? How do they flow? Why are they captivating? When do they choose to break? And if you want to learn from great films, study their shots and cuts. As you read or watch, ask yourself what decisions led to what you see.

Ref: This clip from Every Frame a Painting's recent video on Billy Wilder's Sabrina perfectly exhibits the importance of thoughtful cuts and elegant/economic shots.

The invisible art that makes movies and books magical is the cut. In your normal, everyday awareness, there are no cuts. There are no vignettes or scenes or shifts in perspective. It's just a stream of information and sensations. But in a film or a book (or a dream), you are delivered a sequence of scenes, and (ideally) those scenes contain all you need to know about the story and deliver that information in the most compelling and engaging way possible.

Maybe part of the reason why I can't get excited about distribution is that I don't think my writing is good enough to warrant too many people's time and attention. It'd probably best if I could get that limiting belief out of my head. But, even if I don't, I think I'm finally reaching the level of skill and quality that I believe is worthy of others' time and attention. I don't think had reached that bar until the last two or three months.

Notes from David's Q&A, on Oct 30, 2024

• When you are deciding on an essay idea, consider it along these two dimensions and maximize for one: depth and distinctiveness. Either you're writing about something with a depth of knowledge, or you're reaching to write about something you're learning about and you need to make it interesting by doing that in a distinct way.
• David's 100/100 way to keep the ideas coming: (1) Reading, (2) talking to smart people, (3) moving my body.
• Don't let editing make an essay too orderly. If there's not enough chaos in a piece of writing, you have stripped it of its soul. Those two forces must be in harmony in a piece of writing.
• Text is the most malleable medium: small size, easily searchable, portable.
• Find writers who you just read for style and whose work you want to absorb, and it will seem into you through osmosis.

An exceptional editor doesn't just offer a better word; he intuits the word that the author intends but has yet to find.

"An aversion against" is inaccurate and redundant. The correct prepositional phrase is "an aversion to" (also not from).

As Stephen Pressfield has said (on How I Write), "the female carries the mystery" in a story. But that doesn't always mean a human, female character. Often, it is Nature -– the desert in Dune, the sea in Moby Dick -– and sometimes it is a character with a feminine energy (being the object of desire, elusive, powerful), like Bill in the Kill Bill movies. The feminine energy is mystery, and there must be a mystery in your story, which serves as the object of your character's ambition.

October 30 I just discovered Maggie Rogers's song "Resonant Body" via Spotify, and I couldn't believe I hadn't heard it yet. It's beautiful, but it's not on any of her main albums. It's on Notes from the Archive, which is a collection of her unreleased tracks. After listening to it twice, I understand why it didn't make the cut. The bridge ruins it. Everyone loves a good bridge, and often the bridge is the most memorable part of the song, for it being a pattern-break and usually the space for the most poignant lyrics of the song. The lyrics are great in the bridge of "Resonant Body," but the instrumentals and syncopation (syllables matching to the beat) are off.

The musical motif of the whole song, which is this call-and-answer, two-tone string plucking, cuts out entirely. And words come across loose and mismatched with the beat. It's disorienting, and it prevents the message of the lovely lyrics from coming across.

Two solutions that would make this an album-worthy song:

1. Cut the bridge entirely and take a stand, make a bet, on this being an alternative song, that I imagine as an interlude in an album. Without the bridge, it'd be 2:50. It's already repetitive and lacks a typical song structure. The forced bridge abandons the spirit of this song.
2. Rework the instrumentals in the bridge so that the lyrics don't come in like a multi-syllabic salad and clash with the rhythm. Represent the musical motif differently, maybe by changing the key, rather than cutting it completely.

Today is a perfect fall morning. I'm walking along the Hudson, headed to a coffee shop. Yesterday, I was longing for the mountains. This morning, I am filled with gratitude for being in this city.

October 29 I have a special appreciation for animated television and films that I can't quite articulate. Maybe it's because it seems so outside what I would ever be able to create, but certain animated shows and movies just blow my mind and stick at the top of my list of all-time media.

Part of my appreciation for this medium might also be my natural affinity for surrealism, which is inherent in cartoons and animation. It's all dream-like because the images are imagined and exaggerated and are drawn to evoke feelings, not to convey reality. To be more accurate, when they are not surrealist, they are impressionist.

Among my favorite animated shows and movies are:

• Batman: The Animated Series
• Batman Beyond (show and movie)
• Batman: Under the Red Hood
• Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Avatar: The Legend of Korra
• Bojack Horseman
• Arcane
• Ben 10
• Codename: Kinds Next Door
• The Simpsons
• The Midnight Gospel
• Justice League: The Animated Series
• The Incredibles, Toy Story, Inside Out (and almost any other movie by Pixar)

(This Reddit thread has a good list of recommendations, which users say are worthy of the label "masterpiece.")

I want to be so adept at conversation that I can reliably start up and round off a conversation within a three-floor ride on an elevator with a stranger.

October 28 Adventure is wired into our biology: the play of the masculine, ambition, and the feminine, mystery. These archetypes have their roots in our anatomy. The masculine ambition is to sow seed and to understand the mystery of death. The feminine ambition is to nurture the crops that are sown and to understand the mystery of life. So, the man's adventure is to get himself inside the woman, and the woman's adventure is to birth the thing that is latent inside her.

To feel at home abroad, you not only need to be at peace within yourself but to have a deep connection to something other than yourself.

Example of slide-show sentences (purposeless fragments, used for cheap emphasis):

It took her back right to that one day. That day she had so desperately wished to forget. That day had changed her life forever. And not in a good way… She had decided to forget about it. To just leave it behind and go on living her life like everything was fine. But now, this woman stepped into her plane. – Random news article, Happy in Shape

The fruition of introspection is not knowing thyself but knowing thine Self.

The kitchen counter is sacred, for it feeds us. The kitchen altar. Even though it's an attractive surface for clutter and filth, keep it clean so that it's always able to do its divine duty of meal-making.

Detaching in the present from all future outcomes is, paradoxically, the posture that brings about the best possible outcomes. And living in fear of the worst possible outcome is what will bring that outcome about.

The final act of creation is detachment, so that what you have created can become autonomous.

October 27 I'm writing a book about my summer in Iceland 2.5 years after it happened, because it took that long for me to become a good enough writer to do justice to these stories and ideas that I hold so dearly.

The worst kind of American? One entitled.

Naiveté is the belief that nothing bad is going to happen. Neuroticism is the belief that the worst possible thing is bound to happen. Both are errors equally illusory.

Naïveté is a false sense of security. Neuroticism is a false sense of insecurity.

It's a Sunday afternoon, and I'm trying out a new coffee shop. It's huge with a lot of seating, and it wasn't even full before noon. Yet for some stingy reason, they don't offer wifi on the weekends. Strike one: disincentivizing people to work here on the weekends. Also, they have about six of these nice, huge wooden tables, and they're at exactly the right hight relative to the seats of the chairs. But the chairs are all stools –- all of them have no backs; half of them are those colorful, tin-metal square ones with the cut-out handles in the middle that force you to sit at an awkward angle for more surface area; and the other half have circular seats that are smaller than any adult's bum. Strike two: uncomfy seating. I'm about to take the first sip of my jasmine green tea. It was specially made in a pour-over, loose-leaf contraption, and the barista really loaded it up with honey, so I am optimistic. But if it's not up to snuff, this will be my last visit to Kuppi: The Coffee Company. . . . A base hit. Kuppi gets to stay in the lineup. Maybe I'll come back and give it another try on a weekday.

Besides the tea and the ample seating, there's one other pro to this place, which is surprising: they don't play any music. It's refreshing. It means that I can work with just the white noise of the crowd or listen to music in my headphones without hearing the café's soundtrack in the silences.

When your writing feels a little unkept, loose, and meaning is too sparse, let these come to your AID:

• Action
• Imagery
• Detail.

All of these are solutions to the problem of buoyant, flimsy, porous writing. To pack more meaning into the same number of words, add action, imagery, and detail. And if you are struggling to communicate an idea altogether, try conveying it instead through metaphor.

There are two ways to make your writing more dense: either

1. Communicate more meaning in the same number of words
2. Or communicate the same meaning with fewer words.

AID helps you accomplish the former, and metaphor is the most effective way to accomplish the latter.

Often, writing feels like drinking from a waterfall in winter; words drip out slowly, and I can barely get a taste. But after sitting with it long enough, my fingers melt, and the river runs rapid. I begin to surprise and delight myself with words and wonder why I ever dreaded the work of writing.

October 26 The Halloween Moment in a story is when things get scary. It's the moment of greatest tension, right before the climax.

October 25 The thought I'm going to get robbed is just as inaccurate and misguided as There is no crime in Iceland. The reality is somewhere in the middle: I could get robbed, and I should take precautions against it.

Etymologically, naïveté means "native disposition." That's why it's associated with innocence and ignorance. It describes the hopeful and playful perspective that an infant has toward the world, which is both beautiful and dangerous if not balanced by pragmatic concerns about things like how to not die.

Everyday and anytime suffer from the same grammatical error. Writers use these adjective forms interchangeably with their adverb forms, which are phrasal: "every day" and "any time."

Reverse Outline for "Neuroticism & Naïveté"

A Story-Led Essay Hook: I got robbed in Iceland.

Promise: I'm going to go on to the Westfjords, even without my passport and without any money.

Claim: Peak naïveté is operating as if the worst possible outcome is impossible. Peak Neuroticism is acting as if the worst possible outcome is the most likely.

• I was naive: "There's no crime in Iceland."
• I was neurotic: The terns are going to puncture my skull with their beaks and rip my head off with their talons.

Takeaway: You need enough neuroticism to prepare for the worst possible outcome and enough naiveté to keep going once it happens.

• I can get robbed in Iceland, but even if that happens, it can all work out.
• The terns weren't going to kill me, but they might shit on me.

Payoff: I had extra cash stashed away, and I gave Monkey the money –– minutes before the ferry departed for the Westfjords.

Awareness is step 0 — not even step 1. Awareness creates the opportunity for change. But every step making the change requires action. Awareness is knowing what's wrong and what you need to do. Action is following through.

Cite this clip (23:00–25:00) from Robert Greene, on the Subtle Art Podcast on the value of introspection and the absence of it in our culture.

Slow down. Look up.

All fiction is fantasy, because the movement of realty does not neatly follow a three-act structure.

Courage is competence less comfort; it is the space between your competence-zone and your comfort-zone. That means a few things:

1. All courageous actions are inherently uncomfortable (otherwise, they wouldn't be courageous).
2. As your comfort zone grows, the number of courageous actions available to you decreases, unless your competence grows at the same or a greater rate.
3. To become more courageous overtime, your competence must always outpace your comfort.

Your competence-zone contains what you are capable of doing. Your comfort-zone contains what you are comfortable doing. And courage is doing something that you are capable of but uncomfortable doing. It is reckless to do something outside your competence-zone — reckless or risky but not always bad.

Consider these zones for a neurosurgeon. In residency, she rapidly develops her competence-zone and slowly develops her comfort-zone within her work. What she does requires courage and obligates her to constant discomfort, uncertainty, self-doubt: Do I know for sure that I'm capable of doing this?

Now imagine her 25 years into her career. Her competence for neurosurgery is nearly maxed out, and the comfort-zone has caught up. Every case she sees is similar to something she's done before, and she's not just capable but comfortable doing it again. Neurosurgery no longer requires her to be courageous.

There are a few risks to be aware of and to work against:

1. You never want to become deluded to the point where your comfort-zone exceeds your competence-zone. That would lead you to do reckless things nonchalantly, without proper planning or precaution.
2. You don't want to be so worried and have such self-doubt that you tamp down your comfort-zone and keep it artificially far from your competence-zone. That would be exhausting, because even the things you would naturally be comfortable with you have chosen to be sources of angst and uncertainty, requiring courage unnecessarily.
3. Finally, you never want your comfort-zone and your competence-zone to be the same, because that means you've stopped learning. You have done what you're capable of for so long, without acquiring new skills, that all those things have become comfortable and pose no challenge, cause no worry or self-doubt or growth. Too much comfort is a signal of stagnation.

Don't aim at something you can see; aim at something you can barely conceive, that lies ever beyond the horizon.

October 24 On the State of the Course call, we just had a conversation about how to help the lagging writers in the current Write of Passage cohort. The assumption is that they are struggling to write and aren't getting words on the page, or at least not words they're proud enough about to share with the community and ask for feedback.

I was outnumbered, being the only one of us four to argue that this is not our problem to solve. I wasn't particularly articulate about it and was a little too insensitive and dismissive on the call, which hurt the whole rhetorical appeal of my argument. But I wrote it out afterwards to clarify my position.

And I'm recording it here because it's (1) an interesting business-ethics case study about responsibility and obligation to customers/clients (and how to manage expectations), (2) a study in the relationship between marketing/positioning and product/experience delivery, and (3) an anecdote that illustrates some of my more deeply held values –– namely agency, autonomy, and self-reliance.

Here's my argument:

"Hey team, I thought a little more about this and just wanted to be clear on my position (in case you’re interested). I certainly care about the problems of our students, but I’m just also sensitive to the problems we’re designed and obligated to solve.

Our main problem is: “Help me become a better writer.” But the problem we were talking about is: “Help me overcome psychological and emotional obstacles to my writing.” Everyone expects us to solve the main problem, and we can deliver on that. We don’t want students expecting us to solve problems related to not writing, because we cannot deliver on that expectation (for everyone).

If I pay for a subscription to a month of workout classes and don’t show up once to do the workout, I can’t blame the gym for my dissatisfaction. And the gym makes no promises and offers me no support to get me out of bed and into the class in the morning. They are not responsible for that part of my experience.

We don’t (or we shouldn’t) guarantee satisfaction if you don’t write in the writing bootcamp.

And to be clear, it would be nice to help students in any way we can (hence Discussion Gyms). But if we use Live Session time to support students psychologically/emotionally, they’ll start to expect it as a guarantee of the experience. And then, if they don’t write and are not satisfied with their experience, they could rightfully blame us because we promised (implicitly) that they would get words on the page."

The watch doesn't make the watch-maker. Mr. Paley, you may be conflating empirical evidence with a pleasant, lyrical analogy. Your thought experiment is not evidence for God but evidence of your faith in God, the fact that you see Him in the watch and not merely man.

(Ref: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on teleological arguments)

Professionals pull their titles from some salient part of the body, whether it's a great essay, a great book, or a great album, or a great film. If the title appears somewhere in the work, it won't be part of the hook or conclusion. (If it's an album, it won't be one of the song titles.)

Examples

• Of Monsters and Men: My Head Is an Animal (from the chorus of the first track)
• Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (from the chorus of the first track)
• Anne Lamont: Bird By Bird (from a less-than-one-paragraph anecdote from her second chapter)

This has the effect of giving credit to your reader. You don't need to sell me anything with the title. You've already sold me for the quality of your words and your work. The title won't make sense until you read the book, watch the film, listen to the album. The title doesn't have to be so concrete and sale-y. And if you can avoid doing that, the title can be this little breadcrumb that incites a satisfying payoff partway through.

Even Kant's entire ouvre on ethics has a Shiny Dime: The Categorical Imperative.

The bookends of any piece of writing are principally important. With your intro, you need to capture your reader's attention. And with your conclusion, you need to reward their attention.

Oct 23, 2024

I just worked a 13-hour day. That was coming off of two ~10-hour days. It was my "final exam" for my role as Curriculum Director at Write of Passage: creating the net-new "Make It Flow" session, my main contribution to the curricular legacy of the best writing course in the Internet. We nailed it, a square 90 minutes packed with content and exercises and breakouts and high-energy engagement. For a v1 of a session, it was dangerously close to our standard of quality.

Two years ago, I was sitting in Bwé doing a LinkedIn Learning course on Keynote trying to figure out how to design an instructional session on writing. And today marks the fruition of my evolution. (I still have poor visual design chops, compared to my colleagues', but that has gotten better.) I just created an entirely new session for the main cannon of the Write of Passage curriculum. It was clear and helpful and solved the problem are students are currently facing, asking "How do I bring it all together?"

Right as the session wrapped, I yelled and did a flip onto our bed and danced and slapped the wall above the doorframe like a championship athlete. And this is the first time I've felt that energy since about two years ago, when I got hired to Write of Passage via Zoom and promptly stripped to my underwear to run a lap around the Overbrook house to commemorate my achievement and the first snow of the season.

October 23 David played "Hells Bells" to start Live Session 4 of Cohort 13. We were hyped about the session and chatting in the back channel. I drafted a message: "Hades can't hold us." Then, I deleted it –– a bit too corny, especially for a company group chat. But it's too phonetically perfect for it not to live somewhere.

Disney World's Splash Mountain perfectly follows a three-act story structure, and it's worth studying. It is "rising action" incarnate, as well as exhibiting a textbook Promise-Payoff pair (the big drop at the climax), and a satisfying resolution ("Zippity Doo Dah").

There is no star brighter than the one we make together, my love.

October 22 "Earn your food" isn't toxic; it's simply biology. So maybe the best way to live in harmony with my biology is, each day, to not eat until I have done something of note with my body: either "hunted" or "gathered".

In any story, you must fulfill the promise(s) you've made to your reader/viewer, but it must happen in way they could not have predicted: surprising in the moment and inevitable in retrospect. You must fulfill promise(s) while subverting expectations.

During my first few weeks in Iceland, I finished a 13,000-word short story intended to serve as an allegory for the inevitability of suffering and man's agency over it. The only people who have read it are my parents, my favorite professor, and this young woman I sat next to for 15 minutes on the bus between Selfoss and Hveragerdi. She offered me some candy –– a gummy bear, I think –– and I emailed "Thropo" to her because in that short time, she learned I was writing a short story inspired by Camus, and I learned that she wrote absurdist poetry. She asked to read my draft, which I had finished the day before, and I shared it with her before I sent it to my dad, who is my most eager and responsive reader. I never heard from her again.

She the kind of girl who says "harder said than done" when she means the opposite and who will say, in place of an expletive, "Go suck a toe."

October 21 Spiritual parody of Sinatra's "New York, New York":

If I can be still here, There's stillness everywhere. It's up to you. Slow down. Slow down.

Ironically, I am dictating this while driving down the road along the Hudson River.

Headphones are augmented reality devices.

What is the culture of a company besides the caliber of its people?

October 20 I have only love for you.

I think I am anti-pragmatism. Pragmatism is interested in discovering the beliefs about reality that are most useful to you and for humanity. I am interested in discovering what is most true to me and for humanity, regardless of whether that belief is useful. Truth and pragmatism are opposed, because the truth is very often uncomfortable and inconvenient and difficult: in other words, not pragmatic.

What I'm going for with Feeling Fire and Ice: essays disguised as a memoir

Here's another artist whose energy I ought to channel: Stephen Soderbergh, five-time Oscar-winning director of the Ocean's franchise. I need to watch his "Butcher's Cut" of one of his favorite movies, Heaven's Gate. He shaved it down from 3.5 hours to under two hours. That's exactly the same intention and spirit I'm taking to my edit of DFW's "Authority & American Usage."

Also, there's a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho from 1998, starring Vince Vaughn. Soderbergh cut together that reportedly atrocious move (4.6 on IMDB) and Hitchcock's original into one black and white film, which he called Psychos and casually posted on his blog.

This man is my kind of craftsman.

Finally, his website is beautiful and a place I want to hang out.

In a way, doesn't "virtue" mean "having a good reason for doing whatever you do, and doing it all with attention and care"? Virtue is not what you do but how you act.

Inspired by this excerpt from Simon Sarris's post:

One belief I have is that if you wish to be virtuous you will learn to eat cereal virtuously.The novice of virtue is tempted by dreams of heroic acts, just as the novice sculptor daydreams of palatial monuments, or other grand work. But the master sculptor is extraordinary not because he has been commissioned for monumental bronzes (which may never happen), but because he labors over every small detail.Virtue should not be thought of as a handmaid of heroism, but instead as an undercurrent of everything one does. Day-to-day matters are more important than theoretical great acts, and failure to give them proper attention is its own cowardice. Let every small thing you do be as careful and good as it can. The virtuous person should live so well that they leave breadcrumbs of virtue everywhere.

Theory: Its harder to have lucid dreams as an adult because fewer things appear as dream-signs. And that's because you have more experiences, more memories. Your dreams are filled with people you know and places you've been. As a young kid, most of your dream-content comes from your imagination — creatures and people and places you've never seen. And it's easier to recognize those sorts of dreams as dreams, to become lucid.

October 19 Neuroticism is an acute case of negativity bias, and negativity bias is an entire chunk of code in our biological software, in part responsible for the survival of our species thus far.

For some reason, ignoring messages helps keep me sane. A hundred little obligations are so much more overwhelming to me than to have one that requires 100x more of my time.

In a very real and serious way, a writer's voice and style emerge from the myriad decisions they make about grammar, mechanics, and usage. A writer has a voice and style once they have derived a set of principles upon which they rest every decision about grammar, mechanics, and usage.

You only want your reader to struggle for the challenge of the terrain, not for the poor quality of your trail.

All editing and no writing makes Jack a dull boy.

Naiveté is the illusion of security. Neuroticism is the illusion that you are unsafe.

October 18 Speak your insecurities. That's how you dissolve them and move into a posture of faith: everything will work out. Let other people hear how you're feeling. Their empathy and the weight of the wind will carry wipe those illusions away.

"I got robbed." "I can't pay you right now." "I have shit on my face." "I have no idea how I'm going to get to Isafjordur."

You can speak insecurities into extinction.

Personal Style Guide Rule: Don't use "I would argue," to introduce a claim, because you are presently arguing. Use a verb in the present tense (or in the past perfect tense –– "I have argued" –– if you're referencing your prior work), but definitely don't use the subjunctive. Would is inaccurate, because you are presently arguing.

DFW often says things like "I submit" or "I opine," which are in the present tense, and I find those very pleasant and accurate.

October 17 In Iceland, the most vicious and dangerous wildlife you'll encounter is a bleating sheep.

Random memory: When I was probably 12 or 13, my friends and I were trying our hands at freestyle rapping (and doing a very poor job). At one point, I came up with a line that rhymed romper with "thromp her." I was proud enough about it that for some reason, I shared it with my mom, and the look she gave me made me feel immediate remorse. In a moment, she saw me in the future treating women like objects and only valuing them for what they would put out. It was a look of disgust from my mother, and a few stern words, among them the question, "And why is that funny?" She set me straight immediately, and I still regret uttering those words. Maybe I had to tell her because I had to know if it was acceptable or despicable.

Please don't banish the semicolon; we need to preserve it, that versatile mark.

This is my personal rule: I only use the semicolon to join two independent clauses (that are related causally or conceptually), and I only use the em dash to attach or include a dependent clause.

Instead of writing a comma splice -- like, "I left my wallet at home, I can't pay for dinner" -- use a semicolon. Em dashes set apart supplemental information and are much more like parentheses than they are like the semicolon.

Here's a great use of a semicolon, featured on the tab of a tea bag:

"The unknown is where all outcomes are possible; enter it with grace."

October 16 A little, lifetime-level goal of mind: Contribute a new myth to American culture, through a work of philosophical fiction (narrative philosophy).

A common misuse of an idiom: "Can't see the forest through the trees." Through here is wrong, even though it seems interchangeable. I most recently heard it in the currently popular song "Lose Control." The correct idiom is "can't see the forest for the trees," which means that your perspective is limited to the scale of trees, whereas through suggests that you're trying to see the forest but that the trees are in your way.

Endling (noun): The last remaining member of a species (learned watching VSauce)

Read Richard Powers's The Overstory and his latest, The Playground.

Right your heading toward your bearing. Do not lose your bearing for your current, misguided heading.

Read Ken Wilber's The Integral Vision.

October 15 Trust your talents and hold fast to a faith that everything works out, even in the midst of what would otherwise be debilitating insecurity.

To achieve the utmost understanding in your reader, express your point both explicitly and implicitly, both concretely and conceptually, both literally and figuratively. Before or after they eat the cake, teach them the recipe.

October 14 Minimalism: Communicating information with literal language

Maximalism: Creating a Feeling with figurative language

You need both in everything you write.

I could lean into the "A Day Is a Life" metaphor as an aid for structuring my days. What is the arc of a life? Do you start work when you're an infant, or when you're an adolescent? Then, maybe the mornings should be for play. Do you work until the day you die, or do you retire some time earlier? If you do work at the end of your life, it is only on the sort of work that fuels your soul.

Here's an example of a day that maps to the general contents of a life (assuming a 100-year lifespan and a day with 16 waking hours –– hours listed as time since waking up):

Child-Hours: 0–2 hours:

• Exercise, walking
• Play
• Reading, journaling
• Reflection, meditation

Adolescent-Hour: 2–3 hours:

• Learning
• Light work (non-flow)
• Context-shifting, flux
• Correspondance
• Planning/projection

Adult-Hours: 3–10 hours:

• Focused, deep work (flow)
• Problem-solving, management, execution
• Decision-making
• Accomplishing

Elder-Hours: 10–15 hours:

• Soul-work
• Spending time with loved ones
• Learning
• Movement
• Conversation

Falling Hour: 15–16 hours:

• Stillness, gratitude
• Reflection
• Devotional practice

For me, these intervals would roughly be:

• Child-Hours: 7 am – 9 am
• Adolescent-Hour: 9 am – 10 am
• Adult-Hours: 10 am – 5 pm
• Elder-Hours: 5 pm – 10 pm
• Falling Hour: 10 pm – 11 pm

And that feels about right. This might actually be a helpful framework for managing my energy and directing my effort.

Book recommendations on writing from this Substack post: "Writing advice is a lie.."

For that, you are better off reading books like the various grammar guides, Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Fowler’s Modern English, Forsyth’s Elements of Eloquence, or any other primer of rhetoric. Read as many of these as you need to so that you can practice the techniques you find there.

October 12 Reverence, never deference.

Negative 60°: the same shameful gaze-angle that men assume when masturbating, seated on the toilet.

In the past month, I have spent more time shopping in bookstores than I have spent reading books. That is no bueno.

Bocce ball is radial shuffle board.

You are the Arbiter of Truth and Justice. Moral laws come from somewhere within you, as the images of a dream spring up from your unconscious. You cannot be absolved, and you cannot be condemned. Your moral standing is the sum of your actions and utterances. The only means of expiation is to do better by your own will into the future, until you die. There is no one to save you, curse you, forgive you, or deliver other than yourself.

What would a sheep do if it didn't have to graze to survive? Would it not choose to stay still, maybe to sleep all day –– effectively to die?

We are animated by our mortality; the awareness of death colors and engenders life, for making us desire, thirst, and strive. The immortal are inanimate.

Ascetics deny themselves pleasure; hedonists permit all pleasure but delude themselves to the consequences.

October 11 I want to be an editor's writer and wow publishers and publications. I want to have traditional success as an essayist and be paid to have cool experiences, meet cool people, and write about it. And I want all that to fuel my book-writing and my exploration of philosophy, and my speaking and editing and writing coaching.

Playlist name idea: "To Be a Rock 'n' to Roll"

A rule to fix an almost inconsequential but very common usage error:

"Not only" always needs "but also."

Incorrect

Not only is she kind, but smart.

Correct

Not only is she kind but also smart.

October 10 Even though I accomplished nothing while I was there, maybe going to Iceland was the most ambitious thing I could have done after graduation. It's what I was moved to do; it's what I knew I had to do to walk closer to the ideal version of myself. It requires a type of ambition to graduate college and start work in one of the jobs that suits your major and maximize your starting salary. But how ambitious is it if it's what everyone else in your cohort is doing? Is there any risk or adventure in it? More importantly: is it what you actually want to do, or is it just the most quantifiably "good" option available to you.

Intention + Obstacle = Conflict

Conflict as in "All stories need conflict." (H/t to Aaron Sorkin's "I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.)

Maybe Eden was a place fit for our inhuman ancestors to exist, before sin. But now that we have the divine knowledge of good and evil, Eden would be another kind of Hell. In Eden, Adam and Eve were free, but they had no moral agency. They had no will to exercise in the world, no capacity for good or evil. They were meant to merely subsist (and, I guess, to "be fruitful and multiply"). That sort of stasis is not fit for man. We are meant to move and change and strive and die, not to merely persist in perfect obedience.

There is truth to Original Sin, and there is a painful lie deeply embedded in Western culture. The truth: we are mortal beings with the divine moral knowledge. The lie: mortality is a punishment, and we are meant to be otherwise, immortal.

Some very helpful prompts on relationships from Katie Love's newsletter:

"With each of our relationships, we can ask the questions:

• 'Why is this person in my life?'
• 'How does my relationship with this person support each of us?'
• 'How does our relationship serve the world outside of us?'"

October 9 My Five Sketches for Write of Passage Cohort 13: "Feeling Fire & Ice, Escaping Mimesis, and Gratitude for Original Sin"

I'm writing a book of essays about the 81 days I spent trekking through Iceland. My first three Sketches are the chapters I plan to write next, but I have other ideas that I may work on too.

1. Faith & Insecurity: What I learned from getting robbed in Iceland

Faith is the illusion of security. Insecurity is the illusion that you lack faith.

There's a difference between feeling unsafe and feeling insecure. It's the difference between getting mugged and getting robbed. One is physical and the other psychological. You can affect and guarantee and protect your physical safety, but security — whether familial, financial, professional, residential — is an illusion. Nothing is secured, tied down; everything is always in flux. Or, if it is secure, it's like a tether-ball hanging from a pole, just waiting for someone to come along and smack it into the stratosphere, out of its comfortable equilibrium. For my first 25 days in Iceland, I felt safe and secure. On day 26, someone stole my passport and cash from my pack. I didn't feel unsafe, but I did feel insecure. There was only one thing to do: lean on my faith that everything would work out.

2. Solitude & Company: The dark side of self-reliance

How do you feel standing above a thousand-foot drop? If you can’t see the bottom, are you more likely to jump? Maybe the blanket of fog will slow you down, and you’ll splash safely into the water. On the edge of a cliff, do you fear falling, or do you stand still and sturdy and daydream of the feeling of free fall? How do you respond when you hear the call of the void?

3. Stillness & Ambition: Learning to be a bird with a nest

The fruition of your ambition requires stillness.

A bird wants to be flying, and it wants to be nesting. It cannot resign to one or the other. If it stays in the nest, it will starve, and if it stays away, in flight, it won't ever bring food home. That is the duality; the bird must do both. All birds must leave the nest, and all flights from the nest must lead the bird back to it.

4. What Does Monkey Do When He Sees Himself?: How to escape mimesis

• The Deferential Human: Monkey hear, "Thou shalt..."; monkey do.
• The Contrarian Human: Monkey hear "Thou shalt..."; monkey don't do.
• The Mimetic Human: Monkey want; monkey do what he think other monkeys have done to get what he want.
• The Autonomous Human: Monkey look into himself; monkey do what he want to do with his time before he die, regardless of the outcome.

5. Eden Is Hell Too: Thank God for Eve, the Mother of Man

There is truth to Original Sin, and there is a painful lie in it that is deeply embedded in Western culture. The truth: we are mortal beings with the divine moral knowledge. The lie: mortality is a punishment, and we are meant to be otherwise, immortal.

A verse from the version of Genesis that exists in my head:

Then the eyes of both of them opened, and each seeing the beauty in the other's naked body, the two were moved to make love. Beneath the trees in the center of the garden, God's creatures conceived of twins: the first mortal man and woman, both burdened and liberated by the knowledge of good and evil.

A great aphorism from Thomas Aquinas:

"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” – Thomas Aquinas

It scared me how comfortable I felt being alone in Iceland. At one point in the summer, I told a close friend that I felt like I could live the rest of my life on the Moon and die perfectly happy. But I later learned why that was so misguided and blind. I never felt lonely in Iceland because I had people awaiting my return, people who were checking in on me, and people who visited me. It wasn't easy because I'm so self-reliant; it was easy because I'm so well supported by a community. Yes, I'm happy with my own company, but if that was all I had, I wouldn't die happy.

October 8 I need to write an article about all the times I have corrected ChatGPT on matters of grammar, mechanics, and usage. It's only a helpful sparring partner if you're talking to it about something where you have enough knowledge and expertise to call out bullshit. And for most English-speaking people, that is not true on matters of grammar, mechanics, and usage. ChatGPT is useless as an editor, and the same goes for Grammarly.

Here is just the most recent example, where ChatGPT fails to distinguish between a hyphen and an en dash for a compound, phrasal adjective.

What Does Monkey Do When He See Himself? How to escape mimesis

The Mimetic Monkey: Monkey see; monkey do

The Mimetic Human: Monkey want; monkey do what he think other monkeys have done to get what he want

The Authoritarian Human: Monkey see something monkey don't want; monkey say, "Don't do!"

The Contrarian Human: Monkey see; monkey don't do

The Autonomous Human: Monkey look into himself; monkey do what he want to do with his time before he die, regardless of the outcome

• Use the anecdote of the statue of the monkey looking into a mirror
• The monkey doesn't know he's going to die. If the monkey knew he was going to die, he wouldn't do everything he sees.
• Introspection is the route to autonomy. And autonomy = self-sufficient and self-directed.

October 7 Imagine that a dad buys a brand new car, parks it in the driveway, and sets the keys in the middle of the kitchen counter. And then he says to his kids, "You can get around town any way you'd like — walking, running, biking — but don't drive that car. If you drive it, you will surely die." What are the kids going to do? If they have any will at all, they'll seek the freedom that is available to them, and they will naturally understand that driving the car is not what will not kill them, even though driving means risking death. The kids will take the keys and drive the car and feel the intensity of their autonomy and agency. And if the kids' father is anything like the Judeo-Christian God, He will fulfill His promise by killing His own children as a punishment for their disobedience.

The people who have the most sex are either among the most insecure people or among the most secure people. Either, you have a need for sex to medicate self-hatred, -doubt, or low self-esteem; or you want to have sex because you love yourself and want to share that love with other people. Look to either tail of the bell-curve of self-acceptance, and you will find people who are getting it on.

You don't want your reader to stumble because of the trail you've written. They should be able to follow it with ease, without any missteps. Your reader should never struggle for the quality of your trail, only for the challenge of the terrain.

October 4 I just read my first piece ever by Annie Dillard, and I am hooked: "Living Like Weasels." It's from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, and I need to read more of her writing. It's so lyrical and embodied-philosophical. Also, this particular essay is perfectly structured. Her writing is squarely up my alley.

This is also certainly prose-poetry, which I am keen to learn. And boy, do I have a lot to learn from her.

Notes on "Nimic" by Yorgos Lanthimos

• I'm not sure I love short films. They're usually too limited in scope or too obscure. It's hard for them to say much, and too many of them seem to merely evoke a mood. That makes it entertaining. Of course, the ones you see are well-told stories, but they aren't like written short-fiction, or at least the stuff that I like.
• This film asserts an absurd reality, where you may accidentally put someone in a trance, like waking a sleeper agent with a trigger phrase ("Excuse me. Do you have the time?"), and they'll start to follow you and mimic your every move. No one questions this reality, so much so that the main character's family cannot distinguish him from his mimic.
• I guess this suggests things about how much people know us by what we do, not even how well we do it or the style or care we give to the things. It's as if this husband was just a fixture in his family's life, as if they only knew him as a person who eats a hard-boiled egg in the corner of the kitchen for breakfast, and the person who spoons the kids' mother and interlocks their feet.
• Toward the end, you realize that the mimic has supplanted the husband in his home and in his profession, even though she eats the egg all wrong and cannot play the cello at all.
• If there is a commentary at all here or a question being asked, I guess it's "Do you know the people in your life beyond the things they do? Do you truly know who they are?" Or maybe: "How would your life change if someone you love was replaced by someone who acted exactly as he does? Are others fixtures in your life, or are they agents in the world?

October 3 All ideas need their time to mature, and they all have different incubation periods. There's no way to know how long it will take before you're ready to write about an idea, but you can speed up the whole process by starting early. Sometimes you have only the seed of an idea or only the egg. It feels like you have an idea, but you haven't actually conceived it. When you have a seed or an egg, have urgency! You need to find the egg before the seed dies; you need to find a seed before the egg drops out of your head. When you have an idea, you must fully conceive it, because only then can it start to mature. Let it incubate until you're ready to give birth.

I have a fetish for Snæfellsjökul.

Where do ideas come from? They come from the other part of you, the part you can't see. The Muse does not peek through your window, cross her elbows on the sill, and whisper to you while you're cooking. The Muse resides within you.

October 2 What I should do when I don't have the energy to do what I should be doing: walk, exercise, journal, meditate, read, cook, call a friend or family member.

Halloween, originally called "All Hallows' Eve" has a rich etymological meaning. A hallow is a saint, and "All Hallows' Eve" is the day before All Saints Day. It's the scary Dark Night of the Soul before resurrection upon the visitation of divine beings, or becoming a saint yourself. Eve not only means evening but also "the moment right before any event." Halloween is foreboding and hopeful, the anticipation and appreciation of something grand on the horizon.

You must combine literal and figurative language in your writing. To give your piece a consistent tone and style, one of these should take the lead, but use the other for emphasis. If you're telling a straight-forward story or writing an information-heavy article, throw in an illustrious metaphor or a lyrical description. If you're telling a fantastical story or writing a poetic essay, make sure you have some concrete, concise, declarative statements that ground your reader and give them a clear sense of the theme/message/lesson.

If you have faith, there is within your belief some doubt, because you are choosing to believe something you cannot verify or guarantee. That's why insecurity is inherent in faith. Faith requires some doubt, and insecurity holds room for hope.

October 1 Rhythm is a great thing to add to your writing — whether it's prose or poetry, whether it's a paragraph or a sentence. Rhythm is great, but it's not enough; you also need variety. You might see a bunch of four-chord pop songs on the top charts with no key changes and no changes to the tempo. Some of them might even be missing a bridge. But in your writing, you need to have rhythm and to vary the rhythm — just how heart-rate variability is a measure of health. You're going to take your reader on a ride, so you might as well make it a roller-coaster rather than a merry-go-round.

One to watch: Amelia McLean, a singer I discovered through her cover of "I'll Follow You Into the Dark" with Stories.

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