My Observations on Writing from Doing it

With greater frequency of creative writing¹, I have learned that “trying to write” is easier than “trying to write with wit”. With regular effort, the idea of “trying to write” has become trivial but when I falter, I tend to forget that all I must do is “pick up a darn pen and start writing again”! Especially in such scenarios, the fountain pen is important as it makes the act of writing itself feel more pleasurable, lending a solemn air to what is mundane. I find the mechanical pencil to also be enjoyable but more useful in idea-sketching.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Armed with a pen, writing then becomes merely the act of making a sentence—no lofty ambitions of being funny or meaningful or anything of that sort. After one sentence, make one more. And then another. And if a sentence seems to converse with another over the span of a few minutes, I seem to be able to go on for a while longer. The hope is that, at some point, such a routine might permit a point to emerge. And, heck, who knows, maybe it’ll even turn out funny!

If it so happens that a point emerges—and I feel it has in some of my writing, albeit sometimes it’s only clear to me—it’s because there is a personal value that is taking voice from within the writer’s heart, where desire lives, which can manifest as words and other creations. Writing in public can lead to admonition or admiration but betwixt these live more personal emotions of fear and fulfilment—being concerned, affected or driven by any of these has been counterproductive to my writingOr any action, really. .

Recently, I have been able to observe desire in its various forms and distinguish the variant that spurs writing within me—perhaps all of these desires can be channeled towards writing but I think it might be healthy to maintain distinctions. I try now to harness such observations of writing desire and follow up with acts of writing, immediately and with urgency. I do so because I suspect that a writer who has experienced enough raw unfiltered sentences notices better when others have done soIt’s very important to read. and is more likely to see a point emerge earlier in their writing. And every time a point manifests, it gets clearly reinforced that it’s not the mind generating sentences, but the heart—the home, as I said, of desire and, more generally, of feeling.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant, but a terrible master”. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water

The mind has two roles in writing: it’s a container for words you personally know, like a personalised dictionary, but it can also edit bunches of words to create structure from them; obviously the latter requires there be a minimal density of content to massage into some organised form. Increasingly, I see how LLMs are useful as editors for an intermediate writer focused on capturing as many thoughts as possible—much like a child running in the rain with a bowl to catch as many raindrops as possible. With enough thought-drops, the mind can choose when to relegate aspects of pattern finding to these tools or augment LLMs into a workflow of dialectically thinking through a piece via Socratic dialogue. In this way, I think LLMs will lead us towards newer and potentially experimental forms of exposition, leveraging multimedia in ways authors have only loosely imagined. However, humour has not organically emerged in my writing as yet². Such taste-related objectives, I think, provide personality to elevate writing above standard LLM garbleA less technical term for AI slop. in the wild because it is something few humans are effective at.

But the heart’s role is less easy—maybe even impossible—to mechanize, much like a dog’s impulse to collect snowflakes on its tongue. So the persistent challenge then, for me, is to stay attentive; to observe the heart sufficiently and from it the world, to notice when a storm of thoughts is brewing. The most intense writing desires hit me whilst reading, an activity I seem to commit most of my attention and time towards these days, or watching a movie³.

Artificial Intelligence is currently an excellent servant, but a terrible master—like the mind has been.

Me?

In a sense, I don’t see writing too differently from long-form meditation as both can train the mind to surrender control to another region of the body, allowing it to lead observations of reality. For example, during Vipassana meditationIf this is an incorrect interpretation of instructions, that‘s on me. , my mind learned to cede control to the skin—specifically, by observing the region around the nose in the early days followed by other parts during scanning—and progressing towards observing something far broader while simultaneously deeper. And through this I feel like, sometimes, I reached a more fundamental kernel of understanding of reality as it is- an insight or point that isn’t always guaranteed. And it’s fine if it’s not because process matters, not just achievements. Achievements don’t lead to process but process leads to achievements.

The parallel between such meditation and writing, then, lies in observing the sensations of one’s heart and ceding control to it, in that moment. Sometimes, a fundamental point might be reached but writing must happen without this expectation. I continue to write with pen on paper—even if it is for just half a page—as I find it easier to let go of pursuing a point and, instead, enjoy seeing ink flow onto paper.

TBC