I saw someone tweet “I wish smart writing came to me as easily as dumb tweeting” — and so I am here to share my strategy for using the latter to precipitate the former.
The first rule of smart writing is you must recognise what smart writing is. Sounds simple enough but most people fail at this. Lots of smart writers get their good quotes ignored and their tepid quotes celebrated. This lowers everybody’s standards. Orwell warned about this.
If you want to write well, I think you may need to spend more time identifying good writing than actually writing. At least at the start, but IMO, *always*. You need to develop your aesthetic taste re: what good *is*. No one else can do this for you. [link to thread about Steve Jobs quotes]
Now – the next thing you need to know is that *trying* to make smart writing is often counter-productive. There’s probably a simple reason for this. Smart writing often happens by accident when you accidentally take clever shortcuts when you’re focused on getting from A to B. [list of examples]
Once you know what smart writing looks like, forget about it. Forget about trying to look or sound smart. It rarely happens when you want to. It happens peripherally when you’re trying very hard to communicate something else.
Which brings us to dumb tweeting! All you have to do is to follow your nose (which hopefully has been honed over time from evaluating everything that comes your way). There’s almost always something interesting about everything if you find the right angle on it.
The cool thing is, you don’t actually need to find the smart angle! Writing is cheap, basically free. Write all the angles. Whatever comes to mind, whatever tickles your fancy. Write stupid, edit smart. By using your own taste to retrospectively identify what’s good.
Crucially- your concept of smart is very much informed by everything you’ve already read. If you’re trying too hard to be smart, you will mostly just remix what you’ve already read. You have to leave the comfort of smart & enter the frontiers of dumb to create *new* smart things.
(I am deliberately using the words “smart” and “dumb” here slightly differently than in common parlance. “Dumb” as in “dumb question, but…”, and “smart” as implied by “prestigious”. See Paul Graham’s essay How To Do What You Love, which talks about prestige.)
- Ask dumb questions earnestly and chase down all the implications even if it feels stupid.
- Disregard the impulse to *appear* smart by writing in clichéd tropes that signal status and authority.
Everything we retroactively consider genius started out this way. (Richard Feynman had some thoughtful things to say about this.)
If subsequently you want to dress up your ideas in smart language, go ahead. Sometimes you need to use the king’s language to argue with the king. But beware falling into the trap of thinking that it’s the king’s language that makes him smart, or that he’s smart because he’s king.
If you’re moderately intelligent and have moderately decent taste, producing a stupidly large quantity of work and applying a modicum of taste when reviewing and editing it will precipitate smart writing. Because you are smarter than you know, or even dare to believe.
You can end up producing smart work *entirely* by accident, and still own it because you recognized it. It’s yours! That’s the gift that the creative process just gives you sometimes. You can then study and reverse-engineer this, and wow, you just got smarter as a result.
- Develop your taste
- Produce a large volume of work, non-judgementally, with the intent of having fun and pursuing your curiosity rather than trying to be smart
- Edit 2 based on 1
- Congrats, now people think you’re smart
- Don’t let 4 get to your head!! Repeat 1-2-3
The public is generally really bad at dealing with people who make good work. They pedestalize them, worship them, or demonize them – everything short of engaging thoughtfully with the work. Which brings us back to… the public is insufficiently educated on how to be a good public.
Don’t worship people. You’re doing them a disservice, and you’re insulting + hamstringing the process that makes good work. If you *have* to worship something, worship the process. [eg of good process]
When you worship your heroes, you distract them from the process that enables them to make great work. Encourage the process, participate in the process. They’re people too. Every creative mind is always yearning for more good minds to play with.
Let’s circle back and address some FAQs.
“How do I develop taste?”
Well it shouldn’t be something you force yourself to do. What do you already like? What are you already interested in? Explore that with a playful curiosity and ask yourself what’s good, what’s not good. Have fun!
“How do I produce a large body of work?”
A house is built one brick at a time. Make a brick. Then make another brick. Then another. The secret is that you forget worrying about the house and enjoy making bricks. It’s fun because you get to exercise and develop your taste.
“I want to produce work but something is stopping me.”
It’s usually some form of fear or perfectionism. Your technical skill is not yet good enough to gratify your taste. Let go of the expectation that you have to gratify your taste *today* (or *ever*). Make Crappy Stuff!!
“I’ve made a bunch of stuff but I still suck.”
This is a feature, not a bug. Welcome to the creative life! Everybody struggled with this. It’s what made them good. Keep making more stuff. When in doubt, make more stuff.
“My stuff has gotten predictable and formulaic and I hate it.”
Good! Discard it all! It’s all tracings in the sand anyway. Find a new game! Watch different movies, travel somewhere different. Find new things and make new things. You have my permission to start all over again.
“My friends laugh at me and insult my work.”
Fuck them. Find new friends. Life is too short to be around people who belittle you needlessly. You can find friends who will ofter thoughtful feedback instead.
“Nothing I do is original.”
Nothing is! Renaissance paintings are bible fanart. The bible itself was probably compiled and remixed from existing stories. Everything has predecessors, everything is a remix. You can’t make original things. But you can make interesting things. The iPhone was a remix of the Walkman and the Polaroid. Everything is a remix of other things. Creativity is connecting dots. Find interesting dots and play around with interesting connections.
“I’m afraid of being judged.”
Separate the creator-you from your personal identity. You are just the janitor, the custodian of the subconscious genie inside you. You deserve neither credit nor blame for the quality of the work. Your job is just to show up.
“This isn’t fun.”
Then ditch it! I feel like it bears repeating that at the heart of all of this is a sincere love for whatever you’re playing with. If you don’t love the work (movies, tweets, whatever) then everything downstream is going to seem off, and you might waste years trying to fix the wrong problem.
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So far I’ve talked about all of this at the individual level. It gets cooler: A lot of the fun of making stuff is playing with other people. A lot of my personal favorite tweets were written in response to friends mucking around.
Nobody gives a shit about my best tweets except me and a small handful of close friends. But that’s fine!! If I can only satisfy one person in the world with my work, it has to be me. Never be so busy trying to please other people that you forget to gratify yourself. You are the most important person to please with your own work. [Relevant Ray Bradbury quote]