reidtandy's cast | Paragraph

Nov 6, 2025

This is an excellent post on writing. I've been thinking about how my relationship to writing & reading has changed as we move deeper into an LLM world. One notion I'm gravitating toward: writing continues to be a valuable way to clarify your thoughts, opinions, desires, frustrations, etc. In that light, I think writing will continue to be a meaningful craft, albeit maybe one that's more selfishly important, maybe more inward vs. writing to be read by others. Anywho, check out @tombeck.eth's wonderful post below: https://paragraph.com/@driftless/the-daemon-in-the-machine

The Daemon in the Machine

This is not the essay I meant to write. A few weeks ago, after promising to write more essays, I immediately started on the next one: a summary of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book, Becoming a Writer. I thought this might be useful to people (I found the book energizing when I read it in 2022 shortly after the birth of my first son). I wrote 6,000 words summarizing Brande’s argument—that genius in writing is explicable and, therefore, teachable. Three years ago, I believed it. Now I’m not so sure. ...