Writing

In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods. Something, in other words, a bit like the war and its aftermath.

It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time.

Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more.

If I had another year on Earth, what would I want to achieve? I’d want to keep writing. My guess is I’d write more about the things I think are most important. I’d spend more time talking about the big picture on important topics, less on frivolous culture war issues.

The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. It’s most interesting when Pavese tries to write his way out, simultaneously, of literary and life problems, which he carefully interweaves. “That one must live tragically, and not voluptuously, is proved by all I have suffered,” he wrote in April 1936, the day after Tina’s wedding. “The fault lies in daydreaming, the distant enemy of good art, and in my need to avoid responsibility, to feel without paying the price.” The “lesson,” he concludes, is to “build in art and life, banish voluptuousness from both, and exist tragically.”

Throughout much of Mallarmé’s adult life, he yearned quixotically to create a magnum opus that could encompass the entire world and render it into words. He wanted to collapse the gap between representation and what is represented.

Good writing is focused. It orbits around a single point. Once you find your shiny dime, you can instantly reject every idea that doesn’t relate to it. Just as every verse in a song should relate back to the chorus, every idea in an essay should relate back to the shiny dime.

At the beginning of a book project, all the ideas get pasted in from Asana, in no particular order. Eventually, though, that Doc will get to be pretty long—right now, I think it’s up to 600 pages or so! But long before it gets that long, I’ll carve out an afternoon to go through everything in there and start grouping ideas that are related. The whole book starts to take shape like that.

I talk with people all the time who have done these quite challenging, impressive technical projects or AI projects which would be a meaningful, valuable contribution if they would just turn what they just told me in the chat into a blog post, and yet they don’t.[2] And so no one else ever knows about it. There’s many such cases.

If you don’t have an idea for something good to write, well just do an experiment on yourself and it’s easy to pick a unique experiment that no one has ever done before and boom, now you have something to write about and analyze.

I feel like that was in part, I got much better at the skill of noticing things and thinking harder about predicting things. Also, there is just a thing where after a while every idea feeds on itself and builds on itself, you like to pick up a whole collection of useful ideas which you can apply to everything. I love… Gian-Carlo Rota has a good quote for how he does research where he said like, “Everyone has two mental tools that they apply to every problem, and a great mathematician will have 3.”

Beleaguered professors, who are largely poorly paid adjunct instructors at this point, will now have to not just contend with essay mills and good old-fashioned cut-and-paste plagiarism, but also the undetectable autograph of the robotic hand.

Think yourself into the moment. Touch, smell and listen to the thing you are writing about. Turn yourself into it. Then you will have it. That, for Hughes, was the essence of poetry.

I am going to teach you that painting is not storytelling. If you want to tell stories, become either an illustrator or a writer. If you want to be a painter, you will learn to use line and color and shape and texture to create paintings, not stories.

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb.

[I painted for] a truth I did not know how to put into words. For a truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.

“Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him [Asher] wanting to get out in a special way.” “Or a laugh,” she said. “Picasso laughs, too.” “Or a laugh,” he said.