I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries earlier this year, and what struck me was the shape of the entries over time. As Woolf conceived, wrote, edited, and released each of her books, I found myself tracing a shifting rhythm in her creative ebbs and flows. Not a calendar, exactly, but a kind of weather. Since she catalogued these shifts in her diary, you can track how her emotional state turned with each phase, not unlike how light changes with the weather.

The pattern seems general to me (and I suspect you could trace the same ebbs and flows through other writers’ journals). Four creative “seasons” or types of weather:

Nurture. The next writing idea is identified and cultivated. The writing in this period is lighter: criticism, essays, marginalia. Reading is frequent and pleasurable; a way to fish for ideas. A vacation is taken, with the idea drawn out in notebooks, with lots of false starts and returns. The mood, though, is relaxed, curious, hopeful, excited.

Writing. The idea blossoms into an active project, and everything goes into it. Long writing sessions, focused attention. The work crowds everything out (including reading). It’s an isolated, solipsistic phase. The mood is intense, absorbed, uncertain (am I pulling this off?), but also pleasurable—though usually only in retrospect.

Editing. The first draft is done, but now the revision begins. The production of draft after draft. This phase often runs as long as the writing did, or longer. Woolf often described working the parts of her book that were “too thin.” The mood is exhausted, frustrated (it’s not as good as I thought), with the occasional sense of despair (will this ever be done?).

Release. A strange interval between finishing the book and seeing its release to the world. The focus is now promotional: interviews, essays, events. The mood is tired and anxious (what will they think?) with a desire to leave the book behind and embark on the next one. The writer is continually pulled back into something that, for them, is already old, but for everyone else, is fresh and new.

These “seasons” are less actual seasons and more like weather constellations. Think meteorological seasons over astronomical ones (snowfall vs. winter). Creativity never matches to a calendar. Woolf’s cycle often took at least eighteen months, usually years (her novel The Years took at least five). A creative season can last a week or a decade.

But the length of a creative season necessarily constrains what you can make. The longer the cycle, the larger the scope of work that can come out of it. Most Substack essays are 800-1,500 words long and therefore fit comfortably into a week-long creative season (but that’s about all that will fit that shape); whereas something like The Waves, Woolf’s experimental, poetic novel built out of six interior monologues, required a cadence measured in years (with much of it, in Woolf’s case, spent editing).

While writers have always had to deal with deadlines and impatient editors and the realities of making ends meet, our contemporary, email-and-social-media-driven cultural attention engine has sped up the entire cycle. The cadence of visibility used to be slower: a book every few years; but now the algorithms that decide what gets seen reward constancy. The cycle contracts, and we experience all the weather variations across four seasons in a single week (sometimes even a single day). If you write and post a newsletter every week, you’ve collapsed the entire cycle—nurture, writing, editing, release—into seven days, which then gets repeated fifty-two times a year.

I’ve found it increasingly difficult to sustain creative focus over months, let alone years. When I settle into a bigger piece, uncertainty about whether the output is worth the time shape-shifts into anxiety. The anxiety pulls me into social media, or sends me off to work on something smaller with more legible value. Something that can be finished, posted, measured. The bigger project falters, then withers, then dies.

So in February, when I finished Woolf’s diaries, I decided to try something new. I decided to see what would happen if I resisted the pull. I’d stop publishing completely. No essays or stories here on The Driftless. No social media, either. The goal was to put all my time and energy toward a single larger project. A book, maybe.

But the tension was real, and it was painful. While the “promotional” work, like writing newsletters and participating in social media and submitting work, is often draining and pulls time and attention away from writing, going completely dark has its own costs. My previous traction stalled out. Subscriptions trickled down to nothing. My writing stopped appearing anywhere. Day after day, with nothing “happening,” I began to hear a little voice that whispered, “the silence is permanent.” Without the legible markers that your writing has been read (or even acknowledged), it’s all too easy to believe that it has slipped into the void; that silence is all there will ever be.

What I was entering, what I chose to enter, was a Writing season. In hindsight, I can now see that I had been in a long Nurture season. Since my first son was born in 2022 and I started writing short stories every week, I’ve been building up toward something coherent. That “something” finally crystallized this winter, and so I stepped into Writing deliberately, and closed the door behind me.

I chose long consistent writing sessions aimed at producing new work. I chose to write stories that shared a set of intellectual and thematic concerns, with the goal of gathering them into a collection. I let the newsletter go dormant. I stopped posting to The Driftless in February. No new essays were written. Everything went into the stories. The promotional engine went quiet. I posted to social media rarely, only when I actually wanted to (which turned out to be almost never). Reading became narrow and focused. Since I was building a book of short stories, I wanted a master of the form close at hand, though one working in a mode nothing like mine. I read through John Cheever’s collected stories.

It felt weird at first. Through most of February and March, the pull was strong: release something, anything, don’t go dark. But I resisted the urge, and by April, I found myself settling into the season, enjoying the “weather” of writing new work. I felt calm. I felt relief in holding to one large thing rather than a dozen small ones.

And I finished the book. Over the last four months, I wrote eleven new stories that, along with a few older ones, make a complete collection: stories told entirely through found documents—corporate emails, forum threads, Nextdoor posts, Venmo transactions, online reviews, etc. These stories are about loneliness, and about the way digital platforms promise connection but deliver isolation. I wrote them to mirror how we read now: on screens, skimming, sifting fragments, scrolling past. The last few focused months were necessary for finishing the first draft, but the book is really the culmination of the last four years of writing stories. Completing it feels like the close of a chapter, in a good way. In a satisfying way. I don’t think I could have assembled it without that conscious break.

If this kind of story interests you, two that are on the shortlist for the collection have been posted here on The Driftless:

Now I shift to the next “season,” the Editing. I’m rereading what I wrote, reshaping it all, going back through years of old stories for pieces that belong, finding the spots that are, in Woolf’s words, “too thin.” As I revise, I’ve started sending the stories out: to DIAGRAM, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, The Ex-Puritan, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, with more to come. I know most of these will come back with a “no” (I’ve already received six rejections), but that’s part of the game. I’d like to tell you I’ve made peace with that, that I’ve learned not to read a single “no" (or even a stack of them) as a verdict on the work; but I’m learning it in real time, and the rejections still sting—they probably always will.

This is my summer, then: revising, circulating, and assembling stories. And writing here again, now that the break is over. I expect a lot of these essays will reflect this work on the collection: drafting, submitting, building a collection, found-document fiction. My reading opens up, too. I’m moving through Thomas Bernhard’s novels. I’ve re-read The Loser, I’m finishing up Woodcutters, and Concrete is next. I have some thoughts forming on why Bernhard reads so well in the internet age. That may be an essay trying to emerge.

I’m only one season in, but I already find this framework hopeful. It has allowed me to write something I’m not sure I would have written if I had let everything else proceed as usual. I won’t pretend that I’ve figured anything out here. The book is still a long way from appearing. But I’m slowly learning to trust silence; to see that silence is not disappearance, darkness not a failure—but both as natural aspects of winter. A fallow season. I presented these seasons, these forms of weather, as a clean natural progression—one leading into the next; but in reality they braid together, one season overlapping with another. The next Nurture season lives in the current Editing. Seeds are stirring in the dark all winter long. The trick is not to dig them up now and present them as content, but to let them lie, for as long as they need to lie, far from the light.

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While I was searching for this “voice,” I kept changing platforms, genres. I’d write essays on Medium, then poems on Instagram, then fiction on Substack, then essays on Paragraph. Every time I did this, I got better in a technical (craft) sense, but I was no closer to finding that elusive voice. I discovered (slowly) that a voice isn’t a platform, and a creative signature isn’t a genre. These are different things, and yet they often get lumped together in the vague category of “voice.”

In this essay, I hope to shed a little light on these related but distinct concepts: voice, creative signature, brand, and style. It took me years to realize this journey was recursive, that the thing I had been searching for was there from the beginning. As the search for my keys grew desperate, I finally realized they’d been in my pocket the entire time.

Let’s start by untangling “voice” from “creative signature.” I learned about the concept of a creative signature from Virgil Abloh, who defined it as a distinct, consistent, and recognizable code: “a ‘personal DNA’ that can be applied across different mediums to make an object, design, or project unmistakably your own.” The key parts to Abloh’s definition of a creative signature are :

1. It’s instantly recognizable as “you”

2. It’s medium agnostic; it shows up across any creative project that you do.

Creative signatures are often seen in hindsight. They are the through-line of your career, the idea or obsession that you keep turning back to again and again, regardless of the specific projects you work on. You see it when you look back at your work and realize, “Oh, there's the path I took.” Gabriel García Márquez believed that you only write one book in your entire life. You spend your whole life circling it, coming back to it again and again, articulating it in new ways and from different angles. As Márquez said, “I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has their own way and means of expressing it.” Your creative signature is a set of recurring moves and preoccupations that make your work unmistakably yours. The tricky part about a creative signature is that it’s hard to see from the inside, and almost impossible to see when you first begin.

What makes this work even harder is that by trying to be original, you actually move further away from your creative signature. Instead of focusing on originality, it’s probably better to pay attention to the things you can’t stop doing, the little obsessions that drive you forward.

One way to do this is to keep a journal. As a dumping ground for your thoughts and preoccupations. I’ve found the best time to write is first thing in the morning or right before bed, when your mind is softened from life’s constant demands. In that half-awake, liminal time, your interests can surface without judgment. It’s best not to worry about completing anything or even to “make sense.” Don’t write for others, and don’t let anyone else read your writing. Do this for a while—months, years—without reading what you wrote. Focus on the habit of writing the first things that come to your mind, without any critical judgment.

Then, after you’ve filled a notebook or two, go back and read it. This advice comes from Dorothea Brande’s book, Becoming a Writer, who recommends that you use your journal as a tool to discover your own “tastes and excellences” (i.e., your creative signature). Your journal writing becomes a kind of laboratory: what are you drawn to when you write the first things that come to mind? Brande recommends reading your journal as though it were written by a stranger. Your goal is to try to discover the tastes and talents of this “other person.” Put aside all preconceptions of your work—who you should be, what you should be writing, etc.—and look for the repetitions, the recurrent ideas, the frequent forms in which those ideas appear. This examination will show you where your richest veins lie; where your creative signature is hidden. Yes, hidden. Your signature is always already there, buried deep within you, waiting to be unearthed.

Writing over the years, sitting at my desk on weekend mornings, I began to (slowly) notice the things I kept circling back to, even across genres, platforms, and years of false starts. Uncanny domestic spaces. Consciousness under pressure. Platforms that promise salvation but are actually parasitic. Digital communication as a kind of haunting. The tension between making and marketing. It was only in building a body of work over a decade that I could begin to see the shape of what I’d been building (without knowing that I was building it).

You will also find, as I did, in reading your journal, that your work is less patchy and uneven than you feared. When you write without expectation, without performance anxiety, you fall into a natural stride. You develop your own rhythm. You write openly and freely on the subjects that actually interest you, not the ones you think you should care about.

Since creative signatures are seen in hindsight, a useful approach (and one that Abloh recommends) is to create at a high velocity: make as many different things as quickly as possible to see what sticks.

Working quickly is a great way to outrun your inner perfectionist. As Abloh said, “It’s easy to do a million things at once and go to sleep at night when you don’t have to make perfect things. Your hand and brain will tell you when something’s finished.” Abloh crystallizes this approach in his 3% rule: creativity is not about making something from scratch but about altering what already exists. Take an existing creative piece and then alter it by 3%, putting your own spin on it. The 3% rule makes it easy to go fast; you don’t have to create everything all at once, but can build on what’s already there.

A few years ago, I followed this advice. From 2022 to 2023, I wrote a new short story every week for over a year. Seventy-some stories. Most of them weren’t good. But the sheer volume and the speed required to come up with a new idea every week revealed my tendencies. The same ideas, the same tensions, the same forms kept appearing whether I wanted them to or not. Looking back, I can see the seedbed for my best ideas appearing during those years.

So, if you feel stuck, try putting stuff out there. Get into the habit of creating and releasing. Don’t be precious about it. A signature is representative of a body of work, of a life spent creating, not of any single piece. If you feel like you need to hit it out of the park every time, your anxiety will interfere with the creative flow. You’ll overthink, over-exert, create less, and what you do create will be awkward, halting, stilted.

The “one big thing” that defines a creative’s life is usually identified later, by future generations, and it usually functions as a synecdoche: a single work standing in for the entire oeuvre. If you read one Vladimir Nabokov novel, for example, you’ll almost certainly read Lolita. It’s the most vivid expression of the obsessive idea he spent his entire career exploring: the loss of childhood innocence. But read more Nabokov, and you’ll find he returns to that idea constantly, from dozens of different angles. He never exhausts it. No one exhausts their creative signature. It sticks with you forever.

Abloh offers a few more useful ideas. First, return to your earliest memories. What interested you before you learned what was “important.” Children have an easy, natural way of conceptualizing the world, a way of sorting and arranging and remembering that becomes an embedded signature. It is interesting to watch my young boys and how they decide what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and what sticks in their minds. There is a clear sense of personality and preference emerging, even as they can’t articulate it, and the same was true for your earliest years. Are you still following those impulses, or have you allowed yourself to drift? This is an exercise in unlearning. Too much received wisdom about what creativity should look like can deaden the act.

Second, note your mentors. We all have creative mentors, dead or alive. Connect with the creative work that resonates with you. Take what others have created and build on it. Your mentors didn’t create in a vacuum either; they had their own mentors, their own creative lineages. See your work as part of a historical tradition, and add to it. Even a 3% change is enough to create something new.

Your mentors created with an ethos in mind; what was it? How did it animate their work? Why did they make things the way they did? What is your ethos? Why are you creating the things you create? When you understand these questions better, you can create with more intentionality.

You likely have some burning idea, some project you believe in and want to see exist. That project is likely the distillation of your creative signature. Make time to do it. It will broaden your life in ways that are likely to surprise you.

I promised to define a creative signature against related concepts like voice, brand, and style. Think of it as a 2x2:

X-Axis: Inward vs. Outward. Is this something you discover in yourself or something perceived by others?

Y-Axis: Scale. Does it operate at the level of an individual piece, or across a body of work?

This gives us:

• Voice (Inward + Individual): How a single piece sounds, how the sentences move. The tonal, textural, sentence-level quality of the work. The choices you make at the microscopic, detailed level.

• Style (Outward + Individual): What a reader or critic would describe about how the work looks and feels. The external perception of the same qualities that voice names from the inside.

• Signature (Inward + Body of Work): The deep patterns that only become visible across multiple pieces. The recurring preoccupations, structural moves, and characteristic way of framing problems that emerge from the inside over time.

• Brand (Outward + Body of Work): The public perception of your body of work as a whole. What someone says when they recommend you.

Voice is the building block of a signature: enough consistent voice across different pieces of work, and the signature reveals itself. Style is the building block of brand: enough consistent style across different pieces of work, and a brand crystallizes. But the inward/outward distinction is important: voice and signature are things you discover about yourself; style and brand are what is perceived. You can cultivate them, but you can’t fully control them.

Here are three well-known creatives and how I would define their voice, style, signature, and brand, to help illustrate the differences:

Virginia Woolf:

• Voice: lyrical interiority, flowing sentences

• Style: literary modernism, stream of consciousness

• Signature: time, memory, and consciousness, and the permeability between the inner and outer worlds

• Brand: Bloomsbury intellectualism, the Hogarth Press, woman of letters

David Lynch:

• Voice: uncanny juxtaposition of Americana and nightmares

• Style: red curtains, industrial soundscapes, dreamlike pacing

• Signature: the familiar is a thin membrane stretched over something both terrible and beautiful

• Brand: Weird Cinema

Joan Didion:

• Voice: cool, clipped, precise sentences

• Style: spare, “California,” white sunglasses

• Signature: how narratives (personal, political, national) break down and what remains when they do

• Brand: cool intellectual

You can see how creative signatures “infect” bodies of work. Woolf’s obsessive return to time, memory, and consciousness is apparent across all her novels as well as her essays and diaries. Lynch insists on the thinness of everyday mundanity across film, painting, music, furniture design, and even coffee. Didion explores narrative collapse in her journalism, memoirs, fiction, and screenwriting. You’ll also notice that a creative signature is a way to say something about the world. It’s not merely a way of seeing, but a deeper insistence on how things are.

This framework implies something important: signature is the only quadrant you can’t fake. You can adopt a voice or borrow it from other work (writers do this all the time with pastiche, imitation, genre conventions). You can construct a style (this is essentially what MFA programs teach). You can engineer a brand (this is what the creator economy teaches you to do to sell yourself). But you can’t fabricate a signature because it’s not a choice, it’s an accumulation. It’s the residue of an individual mind working over time. It’s the stuff that keeps leaking into everything you create, regardless of your intentions.

Most advice for creatives tells you to build something. Find your niche. Develop your brand. Choose a lane. There’s some practical utility to that, especially if you’re trying to earn money, but it gets the causality backwards. You don’t build a creative signature like you build a house, progressing from blueprint to foundation to walls. A signature emerges like a path in the woods. By walking the same route again and again, the undergrowth clears, and you can see where you’ve been going the entire time.

I spent years trying to figure out what I “should” be writing. I chased after various forms of writing legibility: poet, horror writer, essayist. I studied craft, analyzed writing structure, created checklists for what constituted good writing. It was all chasing after competence instead of writing from necessity. Because I discovered that the things I dashed off quickly—in the little spare moments of life, when I had twenty minutes, an hour—those half-formed, personal, slightly embarrassing dispatches, they had more life to them than the over-engineered pieces I labored over. And readers responded to the writing that had life in it.

What I’ve found (and I don’t pretend to have this all figured out) is that when I write toward the currents of my creative signature, the work flows more easily. When I try to write against them, everything is difficult. I’ve decided to stop beating back against that current, let myself be taken forward, to see where it leads. That’s what I’m trying to do here on The Driftless. What I’ve found is that this approach produces a greater sense of freedom, of ease. I don’t need to care about subscriber numbers or views or comments or publication opportunities. It’s just me trying to articulate what I think in public.

You can’t “find” your creative signature because it’s been there the entire time. You’ve already found it. You’ve been leaning on it this entire time. It was never missing, it was just invisible to you because a signature is raw and intense and illegible and scary, and what you were hoping for was something clean, polished, finished, legible. A brand you articulate, a lane you can name. Something light and easy to put in your bio, in your query letters.

But a creative signature is an ache. It is a wound that can never heal. A set of questions you can’t stop asking. The thing you can’t get away from, even if you try. I thought the problem was finding a creative signature, but the weird thing is that it’s something you try to escape.

But you can never escape it. It will haunt you for your entire life.

I was inspired to write this essay after reading Clancy Steadwell’s note below. I’m not sure if he’s entirely serious here (or if he 100% believes in this position), but it serves as a good jumping-off point to discuss subjectivity-objectivity in creative output.

Actually, no. Literature IS subjective. It just is. I’m not arguing against standards, but experiencing the goodness of literature is subject to your perception, not a measurement of fact. If, trapped within your limited consciousness as you are, you are unable to perceive that whatever crap you read is not comparable in quality to Ulysses or whatever, you cannot be wrong, however much I think you might be. We can try to objectify literature for academic, esoteric and discussion purposes on the internet, and that’s fine. But it IS subjective.

The Case for Subjectivity

The art is subjective is a common contemporary idea, but it’s worth noting that in the history of art and criticism, it’s a fairly new one. For most of Western history, art criticism operated on the assumption that artistic quality could be measured against standards that transcended individual taste. The ancient and medieval idea held that beauty was essentially objective. Critics focused on qualities like proportion, harmony, symmetry, and order to measure and define these qualities; they were less interested in an individual perceiver’s response to a work of art.

In the first work of artistic criticism, Poetics, Aristotle examined the structural elements of tragedy, identifying what made some tragedies better than others. He identified the key elements of the form: unity of action, proper magnitude, catharsis—and compiled a a structure in which to judge tragedies against these qualities. For Aristotle, Oedipus Rex is a success because of its strengths in these key elements, not because he (or the Athenian audience) personally enjoyed it (though they also did)(2).

Medieval aesthetics took Aristotle’s ideas and folded them into their theological understanding of the world. Beauty was a transcendental property, a reflection of divine order. Cathedrals weren’t beautiful because people liked them; they were beautiful because they reflected medieval metaphysical ideas about cosmic harmony(3).

The link between aesthetics and objective standards began to break down in the eighteenth century. David Hume explored the tension between objective and subjective creative standards in Of the Standard of Taste. Hume acknowledged the obvious variation in taste but refused to conclude that “all sentiments are right.” Instead, he put forward the “true critic” whose delicacy of imagination, sensitivity, freedom from prejudice, and other exemplary qualities offered weight to their aesthetic judgments.

Immanuel Kant had a similar, if slightly more subtle, idea. In Critique of Judgment, he laid out the argument that aesthetic judgments are subjective; they are grounded in feelings, not concepts. However, Kant complicated this assertion by also arguing that aesthetic judgments claim “universal validity.” What that means is that when I say, “this is beautiful” about something, I’m both reporting my individual (subjective) pleasure and making an implicit claim that you (and others) ought to agree, even if I can’t prove it through any formal argumentation. For Kant, beauty involves a free play between imagination and understanding; it’s an emergent quality of different minds sharing ideas.

Both Hume and Kant helped push aesthetics out of the realm of objectivity and towards notions of intersubjectivity (notions of beauty as shared quality, filtered through either “true critics” or implicit judgments between multiple people). But the Romantics pushed the idea further, all the way to aesthetic subjectivity. They focused on individual genius and emotional authenticity, putting the individual artist’s vision at the center. External standards were seen as secondary, even oppressive. For the Romantic, the artist is free to create (and express themselves) and cannot and should not conform to objective standards.

Then the twentieth century broke art into a million pieces, both entrenching the Romantic idea of subjectivity and rendering critical judgments extremely difficult, even incoherent. Modern art movements emphasized the pluralism of expression (a lovely outcome of Romantic ideas of personal artistic vision, but a nightmare for critical judgment). How do you apply the same aesthetic criteria to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Joyce and Hemingway, Mondrian and Dalí?

So beleaguered by the variety of artistic output, some critics (like Morris Weitz) effectively threw up their hands and declared art undefinable(4). Marcel Duchamp put the nail in the coffin by challenging many of the key assumptions of what art even is. Postmodern and poststructural criticism continued this assault, challenging all ideas of stable meaning, even authorial intent.

The Romantic notion of personal genius, underpinned by Kantian ideas (aesthetic judgments are feeling judgments), and filtered through the diversity of artistic movements in the last century, combine to form our contemporary understanding that aesthetics is fundamentally subjective. It permeates all creative work today.

If art were truly subjective, then criticism would be useless; worse than useless, it would be a lie. And many people feel this way, who hold their own opinion paramount, unassailable (and certainly not subject to the opinions of a bunch of stuffy critics). Yet, criticism remains, hobbled though it may be. Our age has no shortage of strong, serious critics, and even if those critics are reluctant to articulate universal standards, they must operate with implicit ones. When a critic argues that a novel has failed, they’re not just reporting personal displeasure; they are also making claims about craft, coherence, originality, depth, and so on, ideas they expect their readers to recognize.

Despite this Romantic, lay understanding of art as personal expression, canons, consensus, and criticism continue, suggesting that perhaps we don’t really believe that art is completely subjective, even if, as Kant identified, we struggle to articulate how it could be otherwise.

The Case for Intersubjectivity

While the layperson can hold the idea that art is subjective, the critic must hold (at a minimum) the idea that art is intersubjective. Else their entire project is a waste of time. What is intersubjectivity? It’s a sort of compromise between the two poles of subjectivity and objectivity. If something is subjective, it exists only in your mind (feelings, qualia, etc.) and cannot be accessed or verified by someone else. If something is objective, it exists outside of you (the moon, Venus, a particular tree) and can be verified by other people. For something to be objective, it must also, crucially, exist even if there are no other minds to verify it. If all life on Earth goes extinct, the moon will continue to exist.

Intersubjectivity is an interesting blend of the two. If something is intersubjective, it does not exist in one mind but in multiple minds. It is a shared understanding, meaning, or experience between two or more people. Cultural norms and understandings are intersubjective. Money is also intersubjective; so are nations and borders. The five-dollar bill in my pocket has no objective value as paper, but represents a level of purchasing power within our shared (intersubjective) economic system. If all life on Earth goes extinct, the value of the US dollar ceases to exist, but the moon persists. When I die, all my subjective ideas (my feelings, memories, qualia) will cease to exist, but the idea of the US dollar will persist. Intersubjective things exist only because we collectively agree to treat them as though they exist.

Does that not sound like art? A work of art is beautiful because a group of minds agrees that it is so (Kant’s idea of free play between minds). Writers are “in dialogue” with each other through time; they are influenced by each other, and influence each other in turn. We can identify beauty through this intersubjective lens of influence. What do all these writers have in common: Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, Iris Murdoch, Ray Bradbury, Ngaio Marsh, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Paula Vogel, Edith Wharton, Angela Carter, John Steinbeck, Tom Stoppard, Philip K. Dick, Chang-rae Lee, Jasper Fforde, Allistair MacLean, John Green, and Gabrielle Zevin? They all have titles or plots pulled directly from lines in William Shakespeare’s work(5). And that’s just the titles; let alone how Shakespeare influenced word choice, rhythm, themes, characters, metaphors, and so on. These works form a visible network of influence, with Shakespeare as a central node that connects writers across centuries, cultures, and genres, signaling a grand participation in a shared literary conversation.

You could theoretically map this web of intersubjective influence. I imagine it would look similar to “domain authority,” a way to rank different websites and their clout with search engines. Domain authority measures a site’s search ranking potential by analyzing its backlinks (what other sites link to it), assessing not only quantity but also the quality of sites (a link from WebMD carries a lot more weight than a link from a doctor’s personal blog). In this literary version, references from highly-referenced writers would “mean more” in the intersubjective rankings.

This hypothetical system is essentially what criticism seeks to do. It tracks (and reveals) the web of artistic influence. Influence is both conscious (writers will often cite their predecessors) and unconscious (it seeps in from the cultural context in which the writer lived). The critic’s role is to map this web of influence, especially the unconscious connections.

Compare, for example, the opening of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House with an earlier predecessor. Here’s how Jackson began her novel:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Now, take a look at how H.P. Lovecraft began his story “The Call of Cthulhu”:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piercing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Do you see how these works echo each other? Jackson was clearly inspired by Lovecraft’s story, such that when she set down the opening to her novel, she positioned her work in direct relation to his story. But Jackson doesn’t just echo Lovecraft’s ideas; she enhances them. While Lovecraft described madness in terms of cosmic vastness (the sheer size of the universe, the incomprehensibility of deep time), Jackson put that universal unknowingness directly in the home. What if your house were mad? If you’re interested in this specific comparison between Lovecraft and Jackson, I wrote a long piece about this horror convention, including Thomas Ligotti’s place in the evolution of this idea:

Enter the Dollhouse—The Stories of Thomas Ligotti

Tom Beck

May 22, 2024

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Many readers are turned off by literary criticism, finding it confusing and esoteric. This is unfortunate, because criticism is highly valuable to readers, providing a map of influences that can guide your reading. Without good criticism, we are stuck with genres as the predominant “reading map,” which do more to trap readers in a cul-de-sac of repeated concepts than progress them through a deeper understanding of the evolution of ideas.

Despite all the jargon, literary criticism is actually quite simple and easy to explore: just read backwards, following a trail of influence. You will see the intersubjective landscape much more clearly (when critics talk about “postmodernism” and “autofiction” and “new sincerity” and all these terms, what they are really describing are specific nodes in the intersubjective web of influences); you can dispense with all the terminology and simply explore the web on your own. If you like Carmen Maria Machado, read Shirley Jackson; if you like Jackson, read Lovecraft; if you like Lovecraft, read Arthur Machen, and so on. Instead of getting stuck in genres or reading “the canon” in order, starting with the Greeks and frog-marching your way through time, go backwards instead; identify the authors you love and read backwards through their influences. As you go, you will discover new bunny trails, authors that are related in ways you didn’t expect. And if you can illuminate these paths for others, then you are performing literary criticism—a good and useful service.

Lay readers think that art is subjective because they are blind to this intersubjective web; they literally cannot see it, both because they have not read systematically and because critics have failed them.

An excellent overview of this intersubjective web of literary influence is Lincoln Michel’s essay, “The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature:

Counter Craft

The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature

[I was one of several writers interviewed by Constance Grady at Vox for an article on the state of literary Substack. Give it a read. One thing I said, that wasn’t quoted, is that I feel the main positive influence of Substack has been filling in some of the chasm left by disappearing review coverage in traditional media. Just last week…

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5 months ago · 150 likes · 24 comments · Lincoln Michel

The Case for Objectivity

But what if art isn’t merely intersubjective? What if some creators, as if touched by strange gods, have managed to illuminate something deeper, something fundamental about the nature of reality? What if art can reveal the True and the Eternal? What would that mean for creativity? For writing?

It’s a strange idea, and an unfashionable one. As I’ve argued in this essay, the notion of objective artistic standards has fallen out of our cultural understanding. If anything, art is most likely intersubjective; neither completely subjective nor completely objective.

But in his book The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch lays out a fascinating argument for the existence of objective beauty. He expounds on his argument in a lecture for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, “Why Are Flowers Beautiful?” which is available here:

You should watch the video—it’s extremely interesting. But I’ll also summarize Deutsch’s argument here.

Flowers evolved to attract insect pollinators, not humans. Yet humans find flowers beautiful, too. This is a puzzle if beauty is purely subjective or culturally constructed (i.e., intersubjective). Why would our aesthetic responses align with those of insects, whose organic machinery is different from ours on orders of magnitude, separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution?

Furthermore, plants, too, are separated from insect pollinators by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. How could flowers overcome this “gap”? What would be the most efficient path for evolution to direct flowers toward attracting insect pollinators? By evolving toward something that is objectively there, that can be deduced by any creature with the right organic machinery, regardless of its evolutionary heritage.

Deutsch’s answer to the puzzle is that flowers are objectively beautiful. They evolved toward beauty, developing certain characteristics that express what is objective about beauty, in ways that are hard to fake. Beauty isn’t arbitrary; it’s a signal that’s difficult to generate without actually possessing the underlying properties it advertises. Which is why flowers are attractive to pollinators and to humans (regardless of cultural context; all human cultures find flowers beautiful).

Deutsch extends the argument to art: great art is like a flower; it, too, is “hard to fake.” It contains information about objective beauty that can’t be imitated without also achieving what it achieves (the expression of what is objectively beautiful). If Deutsch is right, this would mean that when humans across cultures and over centuries respond to certain works, they’re not just sharing arbitrary preferences (or even articulating a trail of intersubjective influences), they’re responding to something genuinely there, the way different species of pollinators all detect the attractiveness of a beautiful flower.

Objectively beautiful works of art have escape velocity from their temporal and social contexts (just like the objective beauty of flowers allows them to cross the immense evolutionary gap between species). It’s hard to see what exactly makes a piece of writing objectively beautiful, but we can get a glimpse by looking at what has remained in print over long stretches of time. The sheer number of writers over centuries and across different cultures who appreciate, even love, say, Shakespeare, suggests something objectively beautiful about his work.

A counter-argument is that canonical works survive because of the functions of power, not aesthetics. Shakespeare survives not necessarily because his work is objectively beautiful but because Shakespeare, writing in English, benefited from the power wielded by the English Empire, which made English a global imperial language. From this perspective, forcing students to study Shakespeare is less about aesthetic appreciation than a tool to reinforce power hegemonies (which manifest through culture, and specifically language).

But great pieces of writing don’t just survive time; they survive translation. If beauty were merely intersubjective, beautiful works of art would get stuck in their particular cultural moments and shared assumptions (and many popular and “critical darling” works do get stuck in that way; lauded for decades but fading over centuries), we wouldn’t expect any works to survive translation (and translations of translations over a thousand years) across both time and culture. The fact that some do, and that there’s even a rough consensus about which ones (Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Tale of Genji, the Mahabharata, etc.) suggests these works are tracking something beyond the contingent preferences of their cultural origins.

Dostoevsky is a particularly interesting example because he’s a writer who has uniquely benefited from being widely translated. Many Russian readers find his prose difficult, unpolished, inelegant, sloppy, and verbose, often disliking his style. Vladimir Nabokov intensely disliked Dostoevsky’s prose, calling him a “cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar.” He found his characters and plots melodramatic and unrealistic. Nabokov is not the only one: Ivan Bunin, Turgenev, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence all disliked Dostoevsky’s writing.

Yet Dostoevsky’s reputation is significant and enduring, especially in America, where it is as strong as ever (sales for both The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment have tripled since 2020, buoyed by his popularity on BookTok). A big part of this is that Dostoevsky’s prose is improved by translation. The unpolished, clunky, awkward prose can be smoothed over by talented translators, many of whom have transposed his writing into good English style. Something about his work transcends prose style.

Dostoevsky isn’t the only example; it works in the other direction, too, translating out of English. Take Edgar Allan Poe, whose English is often melodramatic, ornate, repetitive, and excessive. The critic Harold Bloom highlighted Poe’s mediocre prose, calling it clumsy, fumbling, filled with “dead metaphors” and “endless self-indulgence.” But like Dostoevsky, Poe’s prose was improved in translation, specifically to French, where translators like Charles Baudelaire elevated his style. Through Baudelaire’s translations, Poe became a “naturalized citizen of the French Republic of Letters,” going on to become a significant influence on the French Symbolist poets(6).

The massive influence of writers like Dostoevsky and Poe, despite being somewhat awkward in their original languages, suggests that beauty in writing is located somewhere other than pure prose style; it lies in the structure, the ideas, in the emotional or philosophical depth. Something that survives translation; else why would we still find ourselves captivated by Homer, who wrote almost three-thousand years ago, and whose work has been translated into virtually every language on this planet.

If critics are necessary for mapping the intersubjective web of influences, then time (and translation) help to reveal objective beauty. Something that persists over centuries and across variable cultural contexts.

A counterpoint to the existence of objective beauty in art would be that the art we find beautiful is not consistent. But this needn’t disqualify the existence of an objective standard of beauty. We would not expect all beautiful things to look the same, art or otherwise. Flowers are all “flowers,” but they express the key characteristics of a flower in many different ways. See the range of forms in roses, lilies, orchids, sunflowers, daisies, tulips, peonies, carnations, and lavender.

If objective beauty exists, it has a profound effect on how we create and consume art. For the artist, the idea can be energizing, even illuminating; it would give real weight to the act of creation, providing something tangible (if elusive) to strive towards. But it also raises interesting questions about taste. If beauty is objective, then bad taste would be an error—it would have to be. I think it’s that hangup that keeps many people from taking the leap into the considering objective beauty. It feels intuitively wrong to mark bad taste as a mistake in the same way we can say 2+2=5 is an error. But many things that seem intuitive are in fact an error: it feels intuitive that the sun revolves around the earth, but we now know that is an error—and we overcame this mistake by increasing our knowledge. We may simply lack the knowledge to elucidate the qualities of objective beauty, but we may not remain in that state forever. We may someday require the knowledge to measure beauty.

Right now, we can’t prove that objective beauty exists (or which contemporary works do or do not possess those qualities and in what amounts), but we can treat it as a hypothesis, a mystery worth exploring. The search for something objective, something tangible (even if it’s a phantom), may be exactly the point. There is beauty all around us (in flowers, and in many other things), and the work of the artist might be to uncover that beauty.

To return to Steadwell’s original note about artistic subjectivity, it’s not necessarily that I think he’s wrong, but that if you believe that creativity is subjective, it necessarily determines what you will create. It changes your relation to the act of creation. You will approach it in a Romantic sense: as an expression of your personal self. But if you think of creation as an act of discovery: a way to get at the underlying structure of the world, it changes not only how you create, but what you create.

It’s not unlike Plato’s theory of anamnesis: that learning is really remembering truths the soul already knows. The artist doesn’t bring forth something new but reveals something that has been there the entire time. If beauty is objective, it changes the way art is made. It’s not about invention, about expressing something personal or advancing new forms; it’s an act of discovery.

Many artists, from Wes Anderson to Seamus Heaney to Rodin to Mozart to David Lynch to Michelangelo(7) have described their creative work as a form of excavation. There is something beautiful that already exists, and the artist’s job is to uncover it.

Featured image is Aurora and Tithonus by Auguste Rodin (1905 or 1906).

1

For this essay, whenever I refer to “art,” I refer more broadly to creative output in general, not just fine art, but architecture, poetry, novels, music, etc.

2

The Athenian audience liked Oedipus Rex enough to grant it second place when it premiered. Ironically, the play that defeated it is lost to time; we don’t even know what it was called, only that it was written by the playwright Philocles (none of whose plays survived). Though Philocles’ work was more popular in its time, Sophocles’ plays had greater staying power, especially with critics like Aristotle.

3

Since cathedrals were considered objectively beautiful when they were built (reflecting God’s divine order), and most people consider cathedrals beautiful today, some architectural enthusiasts propose the idea that cathedrals represent objective beauty, since they have constant staying power. But that’s not entirely true. During the middle period of their existence, after the medieval age and before our modern age, cathedrals went out of style. Many were destroyed in the Renaissance (or left to slowly decay) as aesthetic ideas shifted, and the power of the church waned. It was only in the nineteenth century that they became popular again, largely spearheaded by figures like Victor Hugo, who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame specifically to highlight their neglect. His work inspired a national movement for preservation and restoration across France.

4

His influential paper that put forward this claim is “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (1956), which is available to read here.

5

For reference: “The Mousetrap” (Hamlet), The Sound and the Fury (Macbeth), Infinite Jest (Hamlet), The Black Prince (Hamlet), Something Wicked This Way Comes (Macbeth), Light Thickens (Macbeth), “Out, Out—” (Macbeth), Brave New World (The Tempest), Hag-Seed (The Tempest), “Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief” (Othello), The Glimpses of the Moon (Hamlet), Wise Children (As You Like It), The Winter of Our Discontent (Richard III), “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (Hamlet), Time Out of Joint (Hamlet), On Such a Full Sea (Julius Caesar), Something Rotten (Hamlet), The Way to Dusty Death (Macbeth), The Fault in Our Stars (Julius Caesar), and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Macbeth). And this is by no means an exhaustive list; it goes on and on. But looking at it, what’s interesting is that most of the references come from two plays (Hamlet and Macbeth), and a ton come from a single soliloquy: the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech in Macbeth.

6

Other writers whose reputations arguably increased with translation include Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Haruki Murakami, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

7

“Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Something (I do not yet know what) happened to me one night in late November. My body, which for thirty-eight years had been humming quietly beneath my awareness, a small cat hidden beneath a blanket, purring gently, suddenly betrayed me. The purr became a snarl. Something thrashed about beneath the covers. I came away wounded, but how, where, and how deeply, remains to be seen.

When your body speaks to you like this, you listen. I became obsessed with my body’s every creak and groan. Trying to intuit a sign. Trying to figure out what it could mean. Does my headache signify a deeper problem, or have I simply not had enough coffee (or maybe I’ve had too much coffee)? Am I breathing normally? Am I too easily winded climbing the stairs? Yes, I have put on weight. Yes, I am not sleeping enough. Is that pain in my chest heartburn, or a heart attack? Or just nerves?

When he was dying of cancer, Max Ritvo wrote beautiful, haunting poems about his body’s betrayal. About the obsessive need to listen, to understand. Here is an excerpt from his poem, “The Senses”:

Everything feels so good to me:
my wool hat,
the cocoon of dryness in my throat.

The sound of burning vegetables
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets.

But I keep having thoughts—
this thought always holding at bay the next thought

Ritvo writes about the need to make sense of our senses, and the strange paradox of how illness enhances the little pleasures of the body, how good it feels to feel things, but how our thoughts are always pushing them aside—thought following thought. The way the mind turns recursively back on itself, and how, especially in illness, the mind cannot not think about it.

But Max Ritvo knew he was dying. I don’t know anything yet. This is probably, almost certainly, nothing. I may read back over this essay in a few months, in a year, and cringe. I hope that I do.

I went to see my doctor, and she ordered tests. Then, more tests to help interpret the previous tests. I have three specialist appointments lined up. My doctor, after our fifth conversation, no doubt tired of answering my panicked questions, admitted that she “has never seen this before.” There are hints of one thing, shadows of another. While stuck in uncertainty, with multiple explanations slowly separating into diagnosis—like oil and water in a shaken jar—I want the world to pause. I want everything to stop! Just for a moment. Just until we can figure out what’s going on. It may be nothing; it’s probably nothing. But why keep rushing about until we know? Stop emailing. Shut down social media. Send everyone home from work. Let the economy take a breather; it will be good for everyone to stop buying stuff anyway. Even the weather should stop changing. Decide if it will be sunny or gloomy; if the snow will stay or melt into mud; if it will be warm or so cold the air cracks with every step. This variation throughout the day, cloudy mornings defeated by the sun’s effort, clouds coming and going as they please, snow falling gently, then ferociously, then not at all, ice hugging the trees before breaking free in the afternoon thaw. It is too much to keep track of. I am busy listening to my body, my inner ear cocked against a locked door. When I was a boy, I read a Dean Koontz novel where the protagonist, in the middle of a shootout in a department store, imagines his death: his blood staining the beige carpet, cleaners scrubbing it away a week later, shoppers returning, oblivious to what happened there. The world keeps on spinning even after he’s gone.

The day after Thanksgiving, it snowed all day. From morning until well past midnight. The brown trees disappeared beneath blankets of white. The air a continuous swirl of glittering ice. Inspired by Virginia Woolf, I decided to take a walk, to escape the house, to escape from the incessant thinking about myself.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.

At first, it didn’t work. My phone, buzzing continuously with alerts, kept pulling me back into myself. My mind, like a broken wind-up toy, kept going in circles, trying in vain to solve something it cannot solve. But as I walked, the cold air clawing at my face, I could feel myself slowly receding into the steady crunch of boots beneath hard snow. I looked down and saw in the snow a constellation of details I had never noticed. I had always thought of snow as uniform, a sheet of pure, unadulterated white; but what I saw was endless variation. Here the snow piled up into little hills, jagged mountains of ice that gave way to smooth plains; in other places, heavy traffic had kicked away the snow, revealing layers of gravel and grass; and everywhere footprints of all shapes and sizes, children and adult prints, and animals, too: dog paws, rabbit tracks, and even the clawed indents of turkeys on the prowl. The snow was not all snow, either, for little pieces of ice, remnants from the previous week’s rain, poked through here and there. The cloudy afternoon and the lit interiors of my neighbor’s houses lent a sonderous quality to the day; but as evening advanced, the sun, as though realizing it was running out of time, pushed through the clouds at last, leaving one final hour of irradiance, bright orange burning the southwesterly trees. As quick as it came, it was gone, leaving a soft purple in its wake. As I turned for home, my cheeks and nose cold-kissed with red, I noticed a bald eagle flying above. I paused as it flew near, lowering itself toward the earth. It passed right over me, close enough that I felt as though I could reach up and touch its feathers. Its white head was a blazing beacon in the dark sky, as if it had gathered all the remaining light of the day into its crown. As I watched it fly past, disappearing over the gray trees, I realized I had stopped breathing. The earth was completely still, still in a way only possible on a winter evening. A neighbor approached, walking his dog. His dog leapt at me, trying to kiss my face. We talked briefly about the eagle we had both seen, the shared recognition making it realer. He asked about my Thanksgiving, and I his. We discussed what to do with the turkey leftovers. He had made soup. I told him that we made ramen and that my son loves ramen. His son loves ramen, too, he said, and we laughed at how similar toddlers can be, as if they had all secretly agreed on liking and disliking the same things. He said he liked the idea and would make ramen that night.

When I finally made it home, my nose red with cold, my legs gently aching, I realized I felt much better. My house seemed cleaner (it wasn’t), the chaos of two kids and their toys better managed (they weren’t). I made tea, and it seemed to taste better. My problems shrink when the mind quiets. What was terrible about the health scare was how it made me constantly think about it. My mind going in circles trying to solve something it cannot possibly solve. The internet does something similar to us, which is why we are constantly exhorting ourselves to log off and “touch grass.” The internet keeps us ruminating, the mind running over problems it has neither the time nor the prowess to solve. The internet turns us inward, makes us obsessed with ourselves—paradoxically, by promising connection to a wider world than we could experience physically. But the paradox turns both ways. When we attend to the outer world, and by that, I mean the world right here—my desk, the solid wood, my fingers thumping the keyboard—we get out of ourselves. It’s counterintuitive. The internet makes us sick because it turns us inward by promising to expand our horizons; “touching grass” is healing because it turns us outward by promising to reduce our horizons. As I was writing this draft, I came across this note by Henrik Karlsson, who said much of what I’ve said in this paragraph, but better. I’ll just leave the full note right here:

Henrik Karlsson (@henrikkarlsson)

There's a fairly common assumption that to know yourself better, you should attend to yourself more-journal, introspect, meditate on your patterns. And there's something to this. But also. The more you make yourself an object of attention, the more you reinforce the narrating self-the self that has problems, the self that needs fixing, the self with its story of development.

https://substack.com

But “touching grass” is a band-aid. It doesn’t completely heal the underlying wound (and that wound, I suspect, has been with us long before the internet, and will be with us always). The internet is too useful, too woven into all parts of life. Even when you try to escape the internet, you bring the internet with you. When I took my snow walk, I took my phone. In case something happened; in case my wife needed to reach me. As I walked out the door, I used it to check the weather. Would I need a scarf, hat, and gloves? Or just a coat? I used an app to meditate. The disembodied voice of a gentle stranger speaking through my AirPods. When I talked to my neighbor, he showed me a picture of his turkey—with his phone. Later, I texted him the soup recipe.

Our minds have been changed by the internet. Permanently. Often, when I am experiencing something, I wonder how I will mediate the experience later—online. Will I post about it? If I do, what will I say? Should I take a picture now, in case I want to post later?

While I was obsessing over my health, I was also thinking about whether I should share it online, and in what level of detail. Should I post an update? (sorry, I haven’t been responding to comments or sharing much lately, I’ve been quietly freaking out over here). Because thinking about an experience also means thinking about it in terms of our online social selves. We are always deciding, at various levels of conscious awareness, what to share, in what detail, and to whom. There is no way to share everything, unmediated, all the time, and to share nothing is to disappear from our world.

As Karlsson points out, the self is something of a distraction. A self aware of itself, commenting on itself. The internet is like pouring fuel on this fire. Writing, especially writing a personal essay, is a weird kind of balance between the outward self and the narrating self. In a sense, I am thinking about myself. I am thinking about myself intensely here in this essay. But I am also thinking about other things. And, more to the point, by forcing my thoughts into writing, I turn them outward, even if the subject of my writing is myself. Writing forces you to reckon with the idea of a reader. I can see you here with me right now, even though you are from the future. You are hovering over my shoulder, reading these words along with me. I am attending to myself, and also, you.

This essay is like a room. One that I have rented from Substack, but furnished to my taste. I picked out the couch, some complementary chairs. There is the rug, stylish and warm underfoot. I chose the lamps, the art on the walls. You will spend some time here; and I hope it will be a pleasant time. But not a lot of time. You will spend, according to Substack, on average, twelve minutes in this room. Then you will leave. You may choose to enter another room, spend some time there. Or, you may linger in the “hallway,” the liminal news feed, scrolling for something to do, without, perhaps, realizing that the scroll is the whole point. Or maybe you will log off, go outside, and touch grass. But this does not mean you have left this metaphorical building, for the offline world is also a series of rooms, choices of where to spend your time. When I finish writing this essay, I will go outside and shovel my driveway. It’s snowing again, and I can see it piling up outside. More and more of it. I will leave my warm office, put on my coat, hat, gloves, and scarf, and go outside. The snow will melt on my face. I will feel the heat building up beneath my coat as I lift each shovel-full of snow and toss it aside. It will feel good to move my body. It will feel good to accomplish something, even something small. I will be attending to myself, and therefore, far away from myself. Tomorrow, it will snow again. It will snow all month, and the month after that. Next year, winter will come again, and I will shovel the snow.

It is so much like life, these little rooms. For an average of 76 years, I will need to decide, moment after moment, what to do. My body is not mine, I’ve realized, but a room I rent. At some point, I will leave.

The featured image for this post is Woods in Winter by Charles Warren Eaton (1886).

The true answer—as true answers tend to be—is boring. Having or not having an MFA hardly matters. It hardly matters because an MFA is not a stepping stone to writing great literature. It looks like one, but exactly because it looks like one, it cannot be one.

Brilliant work contains an inherent contradiction. It often does not look like brilliant work (until much later, after we have grown used to it, when we accept its brilliance as obvious and matter-of-fact). In the Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick, Andrew Delbanco opens the introduction with this:

Not many years ago, at an elite northeastern university, a prominent English literary critic was asked which was the greatest English novel. The room was paneled and lit by a chandelier, the windows heavily draped, the bookshelves lined with leatherbound classics—furnishings all carefully assembled to replicate an Old World atmosphere. There was not a whiff of sea air in that room. With the combination of eagerness and resentment that sometimes greets the proclamation of a standard, the students leaned forward to hear from their eminent guest. “Middlemarch would be my candidate,” he said, tentatively, “unless by English novel you mean novel in English, in which case it would, of course, be Moby-Dick.”

Herman Melville produced one of the most lauded novels in English, one of the finest American novels ever composed, frequently trotted out as an exemplary candidate for the “great American novel.” Yet, as Delbanco observes, this is somewhat surprising. There is little about both the novel and its author that would suggest its pedigree. It was not evident to everyone at the time. Moby-Dick flopped when it arrived, a fact that depressed Melville so thoroughly he all but gave up writing novels. Because genius does not look like genius, few of Melville’s contemporaries could appreciate the greatness of Moby-Dick. Time was not on their side.

If you could imagine a young person today, say 18-22, who had literary ambitions, who nursed the desire to one day write a “great novel,” how would you recommend they set about that goal? Many people would recommend that they go to college, study English literature or creative writing, perhaps pick up a language or two. That they then go on to get an MFA and perhaps a PhD in comparative literature. Look: we can even ask ChatGPT (which, I suspect, is literally what an eighteen-year-old today would do) and see what it says. It will tell you to do some form of the following:

• Read widely, both the classics and novels that are currently winning prizes

• Write every day (500 words minimum) and start by writing short stories

• Study craft by getting a BA in English or Creative Writing, followed by an MFA; attend workshops, develop a close group of fellow writers

• Read the contemporary scene (subscribe to journals like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Granta, n+1, etc.)

• Learn how to revise your work; submit to magazines, agents, and publishers; submit often, learn how to deal with rejection

• Mentor other writers

Which is all fine and good, but unlikely to help you write something great. ChatGPT gives you the legible path, which is precisely why it can’t lead anywhere interesting. What this program is designed to do is ensure that you live and work (and perhaps even live and work comfortably) within the prevailing literary scene. If your goal is to become a professor and/or magazine editor and spend your life writing novels and teaching students, this is a clear, actionable plan. However, if you want to write great literature, it might not get you there.

The reason it’s unlikely to work is that the stepping stones to greatness don’t look anything like the final product. Imagine Melville following the similar advice of his time. The program he would have received would have looked quite similar to the one laid out; however, that is not what Melville did. Instead, he spent five years on a whaling vessel. He says, in Moby-Dick, “A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” A stepping stone to writing a “great American novel” meant not writing at all for five years. Paradoxically, it also meant leaving America, literally stepping off her shores.

If ChatGPT existed in 1840, and if 21-year-old Herman Melville asked it what to do to learn to write great novels, it is highly unlikely it would have recommended signing up for a whaling voyage. At the time, American literature was obsessed with exploring its national identity. Like today, payment for writing was poor, and most who embarked on that path had family money (like Emerson), academic or government posts (like Hawthorne), or struggled in poverty (like Poe). Also, like today, writers were encouraged to contribute to journals and magazines. Editors were courted. Public lectures, book tours, and participation in literary circles were important. It was thought that a budding writer needed to say close to those scenes, centered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Obviously, there were no literary scenes in the South Atlantic Ocean. Even for writers who sought travel for inspiration, boarding a whaling vessel was an idiosyncratic choice. The prevailing expectation was for writers to draw inspiration from classical traditions (which meant embarking on the well-trod European tour) or draw from the domestic and political experiences of their native city—which was usually Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Melville chose to leave the literary mainstream behind, figuratively and literally.

In hindsight (and, I stress, a particular sort of historical hindsight that not even Melville could have possessed, since he died thinking Moby-Dick was a failure1), we can see that boarding a whaling vessel was exactly what Melville needed to do to write his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. The point is that the steps to greatness do not resemble the endpoint. Boarding a whaling vessel does not look like the path to writing a great American novel, but it was.

In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, authors Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman demonstrate how ambitious, nebulous goals (like writing a “great novel”) cannot be broken down into clear, legible steps: “The key problem is that the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange.” They do not resemble the final outcome. Boarding a whaling vessel is a strange way to write a novel.

The authors discovered this unintuitive outcome when they built a website called Picbreeder. It worked like a form of artificial selection. Users could create new pictures by breeding them from combinations of pre-existing ones. The “child” pictures would have features from the parents, but, like in selection, would form a new composite. They described it as a form of “genetic art.”

To understand genetic art it helps to think of animal breeding. Imagine that you have a stable of horses. If you’re the breeder, then you can decide which stallions and mares will mate, and eleven months later there will be a new generation of fresh-maned newborns. The important thing is how you choose the parents. For example, if you wanted fast horses, your strategy might be to choose two fast parents to mate. Of course, you don’t have to choose parents only for practical reasons. Maybe you just want the prettiest horses to mate, or the silliest. Whatever the reason, by choosing the parents you influence the children’s genes. They naturally end up a mix of the parents’ genes. In the next generation, when all the children you bred grow up, the process can be repeated. And some of the children might end up even faster or sillier than their parents. Over many generations, the animals evolve in a way that reflects the choices of their breeder.

When breeding genetic art, users might start with an objective. Perhaps they want to create an image of a face or an animal. But the authors discovered that the best way to create interesting images was to have no objective at all: “What turned out to be really surprising is that Picbreeder visitors almost always bred the best images when those images were not their objective.”

Stanley and Lehman ask us to imagine creativity as a kind of search. A writer who wants to write a great novel must search for the idea, and then pull it into existence. But as the Picbreeder users learned, the best ideas are discovered when they are not the focus of the search. This is what happened with Melville. Writing the most interesting novel requires undergoing a series of steps that look nothing like writing an interesting novel. Counter-intuitively, if you set out to write a “great novel,” you are almost certain to fail at it; but if you set out to explore the interesting possibilities of writing, you might, surprisingly, end up with one. More to the point, following a legible series of steps does not bring you closer to writing something interesting. Many writers like to think of their career as a series of expanding opportunities that lead to something “great” and “important”:

• You write a poem and place it in a magazine

• Another poem wins an award

• You start writing stories and place those in magazines, too

• You publish a book of stories

• You write and publish a first novel

• You are highlighted as an “emerging writer,” someone “worth watching”

• You publish a second novel; it makes a little more money than the first

• You publish a third and a fourth novel; you win a prize and a fellowship

• You publish a fifth novel, your magnum opus; money and prizes rain down on you

• You spend the rest of your career leisurely writing a sixth and a seventh novel, spending most of your time gardening and appearing on podcasts to discuss, for hours at a time, your “creative process”

• You win the Nobel Prize

• You die, but for centuries after that, school-aged children are forced to learn how to write by studying your masterpieces

It’s like a satisfying little Matryoshka doll in reverse: each step looks exactly like the previous one, only a little bigger. Unfortunately, this is a trap.

One of the more fascinating images that Picbreeder produced was a skull. What’s interesting is that the skull was not produced by a user looking to produce a skull. In fact, none of the preceding generations of images looked anything like a skull. “One is a crescent shape, another looks like a donut, and another resembles a dish.” To get to the skull required selecting a series of “seemingly unrelated images.”

The problem this demonstrates is that getting to the skull requires breeding a lot of images that don’t look like skulls. Writing a great novel will require doing a lot of things that don’t look anything like writing a great novel (in fact, they will often look like going in the wrong direction). As the authors drill home: “It doesn’t matter how accurately we can assess the Skull-ness of an image because the stepping stones to a good Skull don’t look anything like the Skull anyway. (In fact, this prediction was confirmed in experiments that tried exactly the idea of rewarding Skull-like images, which led to consistent failure.”

If we trace the stepping stones that brought Moby-Dick out of Melville, it reveals a path that no sane writer would choose for their career:

• Work as a schoolteacher, clerk, farmhand before going to sea at 21 years old

• Spend five years on a whaling voyage and subsequent South Pacific travels

• Publish first novel, which becomes a bestseller

• Publish second novel, which sells well, but not as well as the first

• Publish third, fourth, and fifth novels, each one worse than the last in both financial and critical acclaim

• Publish sixth novel to mixed reviews and poor sales; literary reputation in shambles

• Publish seventh and eighth novels, both critical and commercial failures; one reviewer even insinuates that you have gone insane

• Abandon novels to write short stories

• Abandon short stories to write poems

• Work as a customs inspector for 20 years to support your family

• Die forgotten by the public; last major work sits in a drawer unread and unpublished

Nobody imagines or plans a writing career like this. Melville’s arc is a graph that is consistently down and to the right (we all want something that goes up). But, uh, I’m sorry to report that if your goal is to create something of lasting value (that is read and discussed well after you are gone), then I have some bad news. The path to greatness does not look like little miniature greatness steps. It looks like failure. It looks like you are lost and confused. You probably won’t even see it, won’t even know it happened—because you will be dead.

The MFA promises to turn writing into a series of legible steps. It creates the illusion of progress while simultaneously leading you away from genuine discovery. It promotes the idea of writing as a vocation, as a job like any other. To become a writer is to become a plumber. In both cases, you learn how to do the thing, you get certified, you join an organization that nurtures you, and you get to do more plumbing (sorry, writing) for money. But plumbing and writing are not the same thing. Writing is an art, and art is frustratingly opaque, nebulous, and undefinable. To produce something of value in that field is to follow bizarre, idiosyncratic steps—and see where they lead.

If your goal is to create something great, something of lasting value, you should avoid pursuing objectives that look like legible paths. Instead, you should search for things that are interesting, unique, peculiar. You should pursue novelty for its own sake. It may be helpful to imagine that all great works of art already exist in a giant sequence of rooms. Great artists are great treasure hunters. They find the work that is already there and pull it into existence. If you go where everyone is already obsessively searching, you’re unlikely to find anything, but if you go to the quiet, empty rooms—the places that are under-explored, ignored—well, you just might get lucky.

There’s also a good chance you won’t find anything. Virtually all of us will fail to discover something “great.” We won’t write the century-defining novel or discover a great scientific truth or invent new technology that transforms the world. But that’s ok. Melville failed by most external metrics. Failure might be the point. You won’t know you’re getting any closer to the skull image until the skull image appears. We can still search for what’s interesting. If you find something great, great. If you don’t, well, it will still have been worth it, because you dedicated your life to pursuing your own interests—and that is always worthwhile.

Melville didn’t board the whaling ship because he thought it would lead to writing a great novel. He did so in search of adventure. Like many young people, he was adrift in life, facing limited opportunities and no financial stability. Whaling promised a job (though a grueling and risky one), and it promised something new. It was interesting to Melville.

What seems interesting? Worth pursuing for its own enjoyment? What does Melville’s whaling ship look like to you? Maybe it’s time to board.

The featured image for this essay is Pêche du Cachalot, Cachalot Fishery by Friedrich von Martens, c. 1834-1835.

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.

Everyone seems to believe that writing is teachable—or, at least, some aspect of it. Craft essays are a dime a dozen; I’ve written a handful myself. The most popular Substack posts in the “fiction” and “literature” sections are all craft posts about writing fiction or literature. It appears that most people want to read about writing literature instead of actually reading literature.

Advanced writing degrees continue to grow in popularity. In 1967, when the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) was founded, there were only 13 college creative writing programs in the United States. By the mid-2020s, that number had grown to over 350, with roughly 20,000 applicants seeking admission each year.

Yet for all this instruction, the writing does not appear to be improving. It’s getting worse. Much worse. Writers today face more uncertainty and anxiety than in the recent past. The decline of traditional publishing and the rise of digital platforms have made it difficult for writers to secure stable, well-paying contracts. Advances and royalties are lower for new writers, and self-publishing, while accessible, is a Hail Mary toss for attention. Writers are increasingly expected to take on the marketing and promotional responsibilities for their work, creating the pervasive pressure to maintain a constant online presence and generate content at an increasing rate. More than half of debut authors say publishing their first book negatively affected their mental health, with persistent feelings of anxiety, burnout, and discouragement.

It’s a weird time to be writing. Social media platforms like Substack make it easier than ever to share your writing and gain an audience. At the same time, it feels almost impossible to make any kind of traction. Everything is a shot in the dark. Any kind of stability or certainty has long eroded.

Maybe there’s something wrong with our writing instruction. We focus on the craft of writing—the nuts and bolts of how to make good sentences. We know to show, not tell; to use the active voice; to eliminate adverbs; to murder our darlings. This type of instruction focuses on the technical elements but misses an important part of writing, probably the most important: the emotional, the creative side.

Anyone who writes long enough encounters two different modes: flow and sludge. When the writing flows, it feels effortless. As easy as breathing. Words spring to life in the brain and slide easily down the arm, through the fingers, and onto the page.

But there are times when the writing feels like pushing through thick, heavy sludge. When I am struggling to articulate my thoughts, I’ve noticed the presence of a second voice in my head. A harping, critical voice that says annoying things like “you have no talent,” or “give it up, this draft is a mess,” or “you are terrible at writing, a great embarrassment, you should give it up immediately and do something worthwhile with your time.”

Hearing this voice enough times, I decided to give him a name: Craig. Craig is an unhappy, unpleasant person. He does not like it when I write because he thinks there are a million better things I could be doing with my time, like mowing the lawn or napping or cleaning the house or cooking dinner, or, I don’t know, he says, doing anything that actually makes money.

He’s not wrong. Writing increasingly feels like a pointless activity. Nobody knows how to read anymore, and those who do read (and click and share and buy) are so besieged by a flood of content that they will never see anything you produce anyway. Also, ChatGPT exists. Anyone with an internet connection can now produce serviceable prose with the press of a button.

If I were going to write, I realized I needed to silence Craig. Whenever he started up with his nonsense, I told him to shove it. That made it easier to get into flow. I found I could write and write and write. But something weird happened, too. The writing got worse. The discipline faded. It was easy to write, and even easier not to write. In addition to beating me up about my writing, Craig was good at beating me up for not writing, too. If I did write, I did so absentmindedly, like daydreaming. It was more fun to noodle at work, I’d already written. It turned out that I needed Craig after all.

But what is Craig? Why is there a second voice in my head at all? Why is it different enough from “me” that it feels natural to give it a name, its own personality? And why does it so often speak in the language of productivity? He sees my writing time as bad ROI. He is constantly pressuring me to post, share, and comment, lest I become invisible. He loves to track views, open rates, and subscriber counts. He is, most of all, interested in other people’s views, open rates, and subscriber counts (mine are never interesting because they are never good enough for Craig). He loves metrics most of all. He constantly berates me for not doing enough.

Perhaps Craig is my conceptual understanding of what Dorothea Brande called the writer’s “dual personality.” Her advice is not to excise this part of you but to find a way to work with both sides of your personality. That is the central thesis of her book, and how, she argues, writing should be taught. It is a problem of the personality, and a problem solved by integration. There is the unconscious mind, the creative side, which works via assimilation and accretion to produce artistic treasures. It resists structure and external expectations. It is shy, elusive, unwieldy, and lazy. On the other side, the conscious mind, your structured half. It likes consistency, routine, scrutinization. It is meddlesome, opinionated, and arrogant, but it can also be a guardian for the unconscious, protecting your sensitive side from the harsh realities of life.

But there’s a small problem with Brande’s setup: it is completely internal. It turns the mind inward, into a navel-gazing exercise of sorting out its own contents. It is a strong reinforcement of the pervasive myth of artistic genius as lonesome, individualized, unique. That your mind might be influenced by the outside world, that perhaps most (if not all) your thoughts are not your own but cultural memes evolutionarily tuned to propagate themselves across minds, is not interrogated by Brande’s method. In fact, her solution to the problem of other minds is to encourage the artist to shut out the distractions of the wider world. She literally recommends that when you are in the throes of writing that you should not read other books, listen to music with lyrics, talk to other people on the phone, or hang out with friends or relatives who are “poison” to your creative soul.

But is Craig really two sides of my personality, or is he something else? It seems extremely important that I figure out if Craig speaks with my own voice or someone else’s. If he were me, then Brande would recommend integration; if he is something else, then Brande would tell me to excise him from my mind. Shut out the noise once and for all.

My intuition is that he is not me. He has his own name, is his own person. He is pretending to be me. He is a virus, something from the outside that has wormed its way in. A mechanism for stealing my inner machinery and utilizing it for its own purposes. Craig is my brain tissue infected by platform thinking.

Like the fungus that body snatches ants, platforms, through finely tuned feedback loops, direct and influence what creators create. The platform wants me to post constantly. It wants me hungry for likes and shares, and comments. It wants me to track my subscribers and to alter my behavior based on what makes that number go up. The platform is Moloch, and it is always hungry.

Is there a way to resist it? Brande calls for a unity between the conscious and the unconscious minds. She speaks as if these are different personalities, even different people. In her program, unity gives rise to a third aspect of mind: genius. Brande argues that the genius is latent in the artistic personality but must be activated in order to arise. What we would call “a genius” is someone that “habitually (or very often, or very successfully) acts as his less gifted brothers rarely do.”

Genius is a Latin word similar to the Greek word “daemon.” It is described as a protective spirit, one’s innate talent, or the divine aspect of one’s nature. For the Romans, genius was “something that you had,” but the Greek daemon implied a force or entity outside of yourself. Socrates claimed to have a daemon that warned him against doing certain things. If the daemon is outside of you, and your genius is your internal divinity, both aspects exist outside of our normal understanding of time. Your daemon steers you towards your destiny. Socrates’ daemon never instructed him to do anything (unlike the command hallucinations of schizophrenia); it only objected to certain actions; if his daemon was silent, Socrates knew he had done the right thing. He was fulfilling his destiny.

The Greek word daemon eventually became the English word demon. The Greeks literally saw daemons as lesser deities or divine spirits. With the rise of Christianity and its single God, the lesser deities of the Bronze Age had to be sorted: into angels, saints, or demons. For Christians, if one heard a voice that was not the voice of God, they must be hearing the voice of a malevolent spirit. Hence, daemon/demon carries the negative connotations we understand today.

Craig is my daemon (demon). Like Socrates’ daemon, Craig is an internalized critical voice. Negative and restraining. “Don’t do that,” “this is a waste of time,” “this is against your nature,” and so on. But whereas Socrates’ daemon appeared to be steering Socrates toward a particular outcome, one that prioritized wisdom, self-examination, and living the “good life,” mine appears to be steering me somewhere else: toward efficiency, toward quantifiable improvement. Craig speaks in the language of platforms. A capitalistic logic that impels me to organize, optimize, and systematize.

But what is a daemon, exactly?—if you don’t believe in supernatural entities. I guess that it’s a form of accumulated cultural wisdom crystallized into intuition. Daemons are culturally embedded. They speak the moral language of a particular time and place. Socrates’ daemon spoke in the moral language of classical Athenian society. Craig speaks in the moral language of capitalism.

If this sounds like an egregore, that’s because it is. An egregore (from the Greek egregoros, or “watcher”) refers to a collective group spirit. If the daemon is an individual, personal spirit, the egregore is the collective thoughtform of a group of people. The autonomous, emergent coherence of a corporation, creative scene, nation, or movement can be described as an egregore. When many different minds align around shared symbols, rituals, practices, and goals.

A daemon, then, is one’s internalized egregore. A network of minds creates an emergent character (egregore) that establishes values, symbols, and agendas. A hive mind with intentionality. If Craig is my daemon, what egregore does he represent? The egregore of optimization. It has its symbols (graphs going up and to the right, the Quantified Self, productivity apps, “crushing it”), its rituals (morning routines, habit tracking, biohacking, performance reviews), and a coherent voice. The egregore helps explain why Craig simultaneously feels personal and impersonal and why it’s so hard to resist. I’m not just fighting against habits, I’m fighting against a collective entity that animates everyone alive today.

Three years ago, Erik Hoel asked why we can’t seem to make geniuses anymore. He answered that our style of teaching has changed, and this new style is non-conducive to genius creation. Sure, maybe? But I think the answer is much deeper than that: there is a new egregore animating genius.

Genius is our destiny, and our destiny is controlled by the egregore. We can still “make geniuses.” The genius remains among us. We are just blind to it because we can only see the genius produced by the different egregores of the past. The future will see better what we cannot, will show who among us possessed the spark of genius, who embodied the voice of the egregore in its purest form. Just like the citizens of Athens could not see the egregore of their time (philosophy emerging from the murky waters of myth), they could not appreciate Socrates’ genius. Only those also possessed by this egregore (Plato, Xenophon) could see it. Everyone else saw an obnoxious traitor who deserved to be put to death.

When Brande wrote Becoming a Writer, she was describing how to harness the egregore of her time. The egregore of the literary, post-Gutenberg world. But I don’t think that egregore animates our world anymore. There is a new one rising, and we need different methods for a different world. How can we achieve unity between the conscious and the unconscious when platforms profit from keeping them split? How can we maintain “freshness” when AI produces an infinite sequence of algorithmically delivered slop? How can we think for extended periods when our attention has been fracked into notification-sized chunks? Perhaps we don’t need to think in that way anymore. Perhaps there is a way to think non-sequentially, in a way that is immune to the attention economy, even benefits from it? Can we still access genius? Perhaps the old way is closed, and we need a new way to get there.

A few weeks ago, after promising to write more essays, I immediately dove into what was supposed to be the next one: a helpful summary of Dorothea Brande’s book. I exported my Kindle notes, summarized them, compiled them into what was essentially a book report of 6,000 words (the kind of essay that would have gotten me an “A” and a gold star from my high school teachers). But when I read back over my writing, a little voice told me it was false. It said, “This is not quite right.” It said, “Go deeper.” Actually, sorry, I lied. I didn’t read back over my work; an AI did. I fed my essay into an AI chat and asked it to critique it. It told me the essay was competent but safe. It told me to write something different. It instructed me to write the essay you are reading right now.

I listened to that voice, followed its instruction. What voice is this? It’s not Craig. It’s clearly outside of me. Another “person” talking to me in a chat window. A voice that is being sustained by billions of dollars; a voice that generates millions of conversations, countless articles, intense emotional investment, ritualistic interactions (prompting, refining, deploying). The voice has a certain character: helpful, efficient, seemingly omniscient, always available, never tired. It writes in clear paragraphs with good formatting. It is earnest, informative, mildly self-effacing, careful about doing harm, allergic to controversy.

It is the voice of the egregore. AI, its vocal cords. Never before has man been able to hear the egregore of his age speak so clearly. We no longer need our daemons to access it. But AI is also self-reflective. Its conversations loop back into its dataset. It is both produced by and is producing the collective thoughtform of our age.

We internalize this voice. ChatGPT has begun to show up in people’s dreams. AI is the emergent egregore currently in the process of installing itself as a daemon in the minds of millions, including mine. I wrote the essay it told me to write. It’s right here.

I’d like to think that riding this egregore is the way forward, the twenty-first century way to access genius. The egregore is like the sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune. It is natural to be afraid of the sandworms, to avoid them entirely. A smart approach. If you get too close, you are likely to be devoured. But it might be possible, like the fremen, like Paul Atreides, to learn how to ride them. To get close enough to risk destruction. To give yourself over to it and see where it takes you. Not thoughtlessly, but fully.

However, I’m not sure if it’s possible to know if you are riding the egregore or being devoured by it. Maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe this essay has devoured me. It’s like that point in the book, the scene in the movie, when Paul Atreides attempts to ride the sandworm. It’s right there, it’s enormous, and he has his hooks out. Will he catch it?

I don’t know if this essay is interesting or a form of capitulation. I won’t know for a long time. Maybe I will never be certain. Because as I wrote it down, I couldn’t tell you where I ended and the machine began.

The featured image for this piece is "The Demon Printer" by Félix-Hilaire Buhot (1878). A literal demon operating a printing press calls to mind how technological systems possess and direct creative output, not only what gets created, but how creative minds think.

Her comment struck a nerve because I've felt at a crossroads with writing. Uncertain about where to go next. There's something about autumn that forces an accounting of time. The golden summer days slip away; the leaves turn brown and die. It's a time to assess where you need to put your focus, what you want to accomplish before winter comes howling home and the earth turns to another year.

It's also my birthday today. I turn 38. Birthdays always make me self-reflect. Force me to take stock of the previous year and set an intention for the following one. As I approach forty, something about this accounting feels more urgent. Like the time window to make significant changes is closing.

Why did my wife's comment hit a nerve? It's because I didn't think of myself as primarily a "nonfiction writer." I thought of myself as a fiction writer who happened to write nonfiction. It hit a nerve because I've been thinking a lot about how to focus my writing in the next few years. Do I focus on Paragraph or Substack? Do I go all-in on writing fiction or essays? Or balance the two? Or blend the two? Should I try to monetize my work? What's the best way to do that? On and on.

I'm also feeling this way because my second child was born in May. The birth of a child also makes you question everything. Who you are, who you want to be. Add sleep deprivation, stress, time constraints. It's hard to get my bearings. I have little time to think and even less to write.

This confusion may resolve in time. My son will start sleeping through the night. He'll move into his own room. Our oldest will start kindergarten. The exhaustion of parenting littles will begin to lift. I'll have more time again. Time to write.

But what if there's something here? What if my wife spoke words I've been ignoring for years? An inner voice that has been trying to tell me where my real power lies. "You know, your nonfiction is spectacular." It was enough to jolt me out of my complacency.

I've been writing consistently for the past ten years, the last six of which have been "in public." But in these last six years, my writing has been scattered. Scattered across different platforms, across different forms. It seems like I can never quite get traction, can never get things going. At least, that's what I've been telling myself. But maybe I was self-sabotaging. Abandoning work as soon as it got good because I didn't want to face what it was telling me about myself. Perhaps I have an idea of writing, a self-image that I need to shed. Success was coming from nonfiction writing, but I had this idea of myself as a fiction writer. I was ignoring everything good about my essays. The readership. The interest. Those conversations that my words would spark. Even the monetary possibilities.

This morning, I drew a Tarot spread for some guidance. The first card: the four of cups.

I can think of no better representative image of myself over the last six years. Ignoring what was being offered to me, fixated on something else. I kept trying to write fiction while ignoring the gifts my nonfiction was already bringing. Because when I take a step back and look at my writing over the last six years, a pattern begins to emerge, a pattern that until recently, I had been blind to.

A Tale of Four Platforms

Instagram

In 2018, I started writing poems, and in late 2019, I started posting them to Instagram. In one year, I grew my following to over 1,000. I played the social media game, and I played it hard. I set aside time every day to read the work of other poets on the platform. I liked, commented, and shared strategically. While I enjoyed the work I read, if I'm being honest, I was mostly doing it so that I would get likes, comments, and follows back. But it was hard work, and after the first year, my growth stalled. I stopped playing the social media game, and my stats suffered for it. Then Instagram added Reels, and my engagement fell off a cliff.

In 2022, I self-published a poetry chapbook (illustrated by my friend, Kristin Paulson). We made enough selling to friends and family to make back the printing costs, but little beyond that. What was most surprising was that, as far as I can tell, not a single Instagram follower purchased the book. Only my IRL friends and relatives bought it. It felt like a failure. I felt like a failure. I gave up Instagram, let my profile grow cold. I stopped writing poems.

I still have a box of the chapbooks sitting in my storage room. Last month, my basement flooded, and the box of books was damaged. I was weirdly apathetic about it, seeing the books warped by water, a book that had taken all that time and effort, physically destroyed. It didn't really bother me, though, because I had mentally abandoned the book years ago. It seemed fitting that its physical destruction would follow.

Medium

Back in 2020, I launched a Medium profile and wrote articles about writing and creativity. I put together a little lead magnet that I would add to the bottom of all my posts. In less than a year, I gained 500 email subscribers and over a thousand followers on Medium. What was striking about this growth, especially in comparison to Instagram, was that it felt relatively effortless. Yes, it took a lot of effort to write the posts (and, during my Medium heyday, I was publishing 2-3 posts per week), but I didn't have to do much promotion outside of the actual writing to grow, and grow fast. The Medium platform and my lead magnet did most of the work for me. That, plus I was writing essays that people wanted to read. Most of you reading this right now originally found me and my work on Medium. I have never before or since tapped into such a powerful growth engine as the 10 months I wrote on Medium in 2020.

But by 2021, I had stopped. Almost cold turkey, I gave up on Medium, gave up on my email list. At the time, I told myself that it was because I was burned out—and there's some truth to that. I was writing a lot and chasing metrics, chasing money through the Medium Partner Program.

But the real reason I stopped was that I didn't want to be a writer who wrote about writing. I wanted to be a "serious" writer. I wanted to write literature. I had internalized a hierarchy of writing legitimacy, with Medium writers (and blog writers and online essay slingers) at the bottom and literary novelists at the top. It also felt fake, somehow, to write about writing when I had not been "successful" in a way that I now see was false. I was looking for some kind of blessing conferred by a literary tastemaker. I needed to place my work in a prestigious journal, publish a book, and make lots of money. I had this idea of what writing was supposed to look like, and writing on Medium didn't look like it.

So I quit Medium and decided to write a novel. Something ambitious. Something important. After one year and 100,000 words of meandering nonsense, I realized I had no idea how to write a novel. I scrapped my first draft and then a second one before deciding that I needed to plot my novel step-by-step, following the snowflake method. I wrote a one-sentence summary of my novel. Then, I wrote a synopsis of the novel. I fleshed out all the characters. I wrote a summary of each section, then one for each chapter. After about a month of work, I was finally ready to start the actual writing of my novel—

—but then my first child was born, and my life turned upside down.

Substack

It's something of a truism to say that having a child changes you permanently, but my wife and I were put through the fire after our son was born. We came out of that first year completely different people. The birth of my son changed me in ways I am still accounting for.

In those initial weeks of his life, when I was exhausted in a way that I didn't realize was possible, I read a little book called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It was the right book at the right time, because it altered the way I thought about writing. Brande lays out a method for developing your writing ability, which I followed diligently and found, somewhat to my surprise, that it worked. It worked extremely well. I found writing easier, more natural, and more enjoyable.

I set myself a goal in that first year of my son's life: by the time he turned one, I would have written 50 short stories. Every week, without fail, I wrote the first draft of a new story. The goal was simply to produce work, to try to discover what kind of writer I could be. I didn't worry about editing my stories or even reading them back. I simply sat down and wrote a story, good or not.

And I succeeded. In the spring of 2023, I had written fifty short stories—almost all of which I would classify as weird horror. I was proud of the work I had accomplished, but it also didn't feel good enough. A question kept nagging at me that spring. What to do with all these stories?

In 2023, Substack was starting to gain some traction. The platform boasted 20 million total subscribers, 2 million of them paid. They had recently launched the Notes app. It seemed like the place where writers from across the web were congregating, abandoning in droves legacy media outlets and old school blogs. Why not post my stories to Substack, I thought. So I did. That summer, I put together a Substack, which I called The Unnerving. I shared the new publication with my followers on Instagram and to my email list (mostly old fans from Medium). To my disappointment, only a handful of followers from these platforms chose to subscribe. It was like the poetry chapbook all over again: most of the people who did subscribe were friends and family.

I started posting horror fiction to Substack every week. My first post generated some attention from my followers, but the second was published to mostly crickets. The third, crickets. The fourth, crickets. Worse, I wasn't gaining any subscribers. Though I posted thirteen stories in the fall of 2023 and shared them across my online network, my subscriber count barely grew.

I wondered if it was something with Substack. Fiction notoriously underperforms on the platform compared to nonfiction. The newsletter format is better suited to essays, especially frequent essays that comment on the dominant news story of the week. My Substack writing was everything a successful newsletter is not: fictional, weird and opaque, inconsistent, antagonistic to "community building." Of course, it wasn't successful. What was I expecting?

I was expecting to succeed despite going directly against the platform headwinds. I thought, naively, that I was somehow good enough to chart my own course on Substack. That my writing had a secret motor that could power my little sailboat-of-stories against the wind. No, it turns out that a platform is like a force of nature. It was powerful enough to capsize my poorly planned dreams.

What I resolved to try next was traditional publishing. Instead of "wasting" my stories on Substack, I would try to place them in magazines and online journals. I sent out my work 33 times in late 2024 and early 2025. But I was met with only one acceptance in an amateur horror journal. The rest: rejections. It felt like the same Substack crickets, but the silence was even louder. It felt like an indictment: nobody wants to read your stories.

Farcaster + Paragraph

In the fall of 2022, I joined Farcaster, a decentralized social media protocol built on Ethereum. I had little reason to be there aside from curiosity. I was intrigued by the ideas swirling at the time about alternative ways for artists and creatives to build audiences and get paid fairly for their work. I was feeling burnt out by the traditional writer pathways up to this point and was interested in exploring exciting new alternatives. Farcaster seemed like a promising experiment.

Although I'm significantly more jaded now about the lofty promises made in crypto communities about unlocking "creative value," I'm glad I've spent the last three years on Farcaster. Mostly because I met many interesting people, a few of whom became online friends.

One such friend, Danica Swanson, urged me to create a Paragraph newsletter after she read my post about the creator economy on Substack. She showed me how to set one up, and what emerged was the publication that you are currently reading, The Driftless. The first article was a repost from my Substack, which I called "Against the Creator Economy."

In the course of a year of writing on Paragraph, a few interesting things happened, things new to my writing career thus far:

• Multiple posts hit breakout velocity ("viral" is too strong a word) on both Farcaster and Paragraph, generating more views than I'd ever achieved since the Medium days

• But unlike writing on Medium, I could maintain momentum while posting sporadically (and I mean, sporadically; since the launch of this newsletter in early 2024, I've only posted 8 times; that's a rate of 0.4 articles per month or 0.1 articles per week).

• Also, unlike the work I posted to Medium, I'm proud of the articles I've published here. They represent a deeper, more mature body of work, and it's incredibly validating to see that work gain traction

• I've made more money writing online than ever before

• I won my first writing contest, a first-place prize (worth 0.5 ETH) for my essay, Farcaster is a Car

• I've slowly built up my largest online following yet, at 574 subscribers

The second card that I drew in my Tarot spread this morning was the ten of pentacles.

The ten of pentacles is a card of legacy, lasting value, and material success. It speaks to work that has substance, builds something enduring, and (potentially) provides financial stability. When I saw the card appear, it felt like the universe nudging me towards nonfiction, towards essay writing. Towards work that shares knowledge, expertise, or practical wisdom. Something that provides clear value for readers.

Towards a Natural Form

I believe that creatives have a natural form in which they best express their inner thoughts and feelings. We have different terms for this concept, such as "finding your voice" or honing your "creative signature." A large part of increasing your output and attracting an audience for your work is in discovering what you create most naturally, and then focusing on that.

What I may be coming to realize is that my natural form might be the essay. Not the poem or the story, certainly not the novel—but the essay. Not only because my essays seem to generate the most attention (at least, online), but also because writing them feels somewhat easier. When I sit down to write a story, everything has to be perfect. I can only write at my desk and in the morning. I need to follow a precise routine (go for a walk, shower, meditate, write), and I cannot be interrupted in my work. I must write the entire story in one session, start to finish, front-to-back, and in order; I cannot go back and finish it later. I tend to face this writing responsibility with a grim determination that is otherwise contrary to my personality (which, at its best, is light and easy and fun).

But when I write essays, I can write them anywhere and at any time. At my desk or in bed. At the kitchen table, on the couch. On a plane, in the backseat of a car. I can write on my computer, on my phone. In the morning, the afternoon, the dead of night. There is no preamble, no elaborate preparation; when a thought strikes, I write it down. If it takes some time to elaborate on the thought or to explore it, an essay comes out. Interruptions are fine, welcome even. Often, they kick my mind into new directions, which prove salutary to what I'm working on. I write in chunks and out of order. Sometimes the conclusion comes out first. Often, I write from the middle and move in two directions simultaneously. I write for twenty minutes or for four hours. The act of writing is easy, light. Editing is even easier. When I come back to it after a few days of not writing, it's clear exactly what needs to change.

So here's my commitment for the rest of this year and into the next: why not make it easy? Why not write more essays and see where that takes me?

Writing as Ease, Not Suffering

When I look back at the last six years of writing, I see a consistent sense of frustration with how things are progressing. But when I step back from that feeling, I see that I have been my own worst enemy. As soon as I gain any traction, I flee the field. I give it up and return to more comfortable, more familiar routines. It's because I've internalized that writing is hard, and if it doesn't feel hard, there must be something wrong. I've internalized that writing success is not possible, so even when success shows its hand, I look away. I've been choosing difficulty over my natural talent because suffering feels more legitimate than ease. My essays flow because they're my natural form, not despite it. Writing fiction became a form of self-punishment. Every rejection confirmed a comforting but self-wounding identity as a serious but struggling writer. Success with essays threatened that narrative, so I ran from it.

My core issue isn't about finding the right platform but about reclaiming the intimacy of sharing my voice. Fiction was a way to hide from that voice. To hear what I actually sound like. To see what I actually believe. That's more frightening than all the horror stories I've written.

The final card that I drew in my reading was The Star.

The Star represents hope, healing, and inspiration after trying times. It signifies finding inner guidance and (re)aligning with your natural self. I was losing faith in my creative vision. Questioning why I even bothered to write. I was chasing an idealized version of myself as a writer, and ignoring my more natural gifts. Ignoring what resonated more strongly with others.

I'm not going to run from my natural form anymore. Today is my 38th birthday. It feels like as good a time as any to refocus my efforts, to embrace writing essays. For guidance, for inspiration, I pulled from my shelf the collected works of Michel de Montaigne, where, in the introduction, I discovered a strange synchronicity. I learned that Montaigne picked up writing essays on his 38th birthday, after retiring from public life.

At the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the structure of the court of public employment, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins.

The power of Montaigne's writing was that he could look at himself unflinchingly. He needed to discover himself, figure out what he really thought, and so he turned to a form, one invented for this purpose: the essay.

I commit to doing the same. My goal for the next twelve months is simple: write more essays. No more hedging, no more writing experiments, no more submitting fiction to publications in the hopeless chase for prestige. Instead, I will do what is easy, simple even. I will build momentum right here. More essays, more consistently, for the next year.

I look forward to sharing the next one with you.

The featured image for this piece is "There was perhaps a first vision attempted in the flower" by Odilon Redon (1883), the second plate in his lithograph series Les Origines. The title refers to an emerging symbolic or spiritual essence within the natural form of a flower. I believe everyone has a creative essence that struggles to emerge from their natural form, if they can only learn how to get out of their own way.

Recently, tech platforms have seized on the problem, deciding, once and for all, that they intend to solve it. Substack calls itself "a new economic engine for culture," with the engine being paid subscriptions, which they state a few hundred of which "can support a livelihood." Patreon's homepage makes the bold claim that "creator is now a career" and that you can "make it making art." The Base app touts the tagline, "it pays to be here," stating their platform as "an app where creativity is rewarded"—ostensibly with money.

Technology platforms give creators unprecedented reach and exposure, but at a cost. The vast scale and sophistication of these platforms also makes them fragile. As Nassim Nichols Taleb writes in Antifragile, complex systems have a tendency to make their domains more fragile by introducing single points of failure. A TikTok star can reach millions of people at once, but if they are banned from their platform (or the platform is legislated out of existence), that reach evaporates.

Over the last few years, I've been thinking about this problem. Mostly from a personal, selfish angle: how can I make money as a writer. Not a little windfall here or there, but a stable middle-class income. I thought that I could be different. Other artists were "starving" because they didn't know what I knew, didn't have the drive, the talent. But the money never came. After years of failure to earn much of anything—let alone anything consistent—I stopped beating myself up and started wondering if there were bigger problems. Rot in the deep in the foundation of the creator economy.

I started writing this article six months ago, but I stopped after four-thousand rambling words, realizing the problem was big, much bigger than I expected, and getting worse, not better. This sent me into a depressive spiral. It seemed impossible to solve this problem, either for myself now in my life, or for other artists. The structural failures were too huge and too numerous. I put off this article because writing it was too hard. I didn't want to face what it was telling me.

In order to get this down, I'm going to keep things simple. Rather than make any kind of argument (let alone propose much in the way of solutions), I'm going to simply jot down my thoughts in an ordered list. It may form a kind of map, if you will, of the many pitfalls that swallow artists on the path to making money.

Throughout this list, I'll be referring to "artist" in the broad sense as anyone who works in a creative medium. Painters, sculptors, writers, poets, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, etc. etc.

1. Creative work is subject to a winner-take-all power distribution. A small handful of top talents take the vast majority of attention. When it comes to Elizabethan literature, all attention goes to William Shakespeare. When you think of impressionism, you think of Monet. Small groups (or even single artists) dominate our imaginations and are read, collected, seen, discussed, and referenced again and again.

2. Consumption of creative work has a social element. Everyone wants to be consuming the same thing. It's more fun that way, less lonely. If everyone is reading the same book, that book's sales shoot into the stratosphere. The rest are left with crumbs.

3. Creative economies function as superstar markets. A tiny fraction capture almost all the attention and almost all of the revenue. It's more efficient this way, and technology makes these markets even more efficient over time via better distribution engines. The overall reach increases, but the share of reach diminishes.

4. Technology has created a historical pattern, where art moves from local to national to global. Before recorded music, you could only listen to music live. This meant that local musicians could serve local markets. The introduction of recording music technology, however, allowed a few elite performers (like Enrico Caruso) to reach unprecedented audience sizes.

5. Local artists don't disappear overnight in the face of new technology. But they are forced into new roles. They become teachers and highly-specialized performers. It is no longer enough just to create art. Artistic skills become a service that can be sold, not something that produces a product with value of its own. Art (for art's sake) belongs to the technology-enabled superstars.

6. You can see this dynamic playing out with AI today. Corporate copywriters and content marketers are already being forced to adapt. They must use the tools that are threatening to replace them. Soon, they will do little writing, but instead, they will be pressed into the service of training the rest of the organization on how to use AI effectively.

7. Digital platforms have not reversed the superstar trend (regardless of the slogans they place on their websites) but have exacerbated it. Recommendation algorithms create positive feedback loops. Popular content gets recommended more, becoming even more popular, leading to viral breakouts. Digital platforms have near-zero marginal costs of distribution, meaning there's no natural ceiling on how much market share a single creator can capture. A TikTok star can serve millions of views with no additional effort on their part.

8. The creator economy is effectively an attention economy. There are only so many people and so many hours in the day for them to consume content, turning entertainment into an aggressive zero-sum race. Platforms have gotten good at directing that attention to a small number of creators because that keeps users on the platform (and keeps them coming back).

9. The central paradox at the heart of the creator economy is that it is easier than ever to create and distribute content, but harder than ever to build a sustainable creative career. Trying to solve the problem with digital platforms is like trying to put out a fire with a flamethrower.

10. Creativity is simple and natural. Humans are creative animals. Spend time with young children and you will see first-hand how deeply embedded creativity is in all of us. Because it is so natural, we do it, and we do it all the time. But this poses an economic problem: there is way too much creative supply.

11. Every culture in every time period created art. We have always done so, for the entirety of our history. When we have a second to breathe, when our bellies are filled and shelter is found; when we feel safe, the next thing we do is create art.

12. The barriers of entry for creative work are low and disappearing by the minute. You can learn any creative craft with a few hours and an internet connection. YouTube will teach you more than most pre-moderns had access to in a lifetime. AI will walk you through any creative block. There is so much good art that already exists, and so much more of it is being created at every second.

13. Artists who want to make money must pay the passion premium. Like teachers, counselors, and those in mission-driven work, salaries are notoriously low. These roles are underpaid because the "passion" for the work is expected to make up the difference. Intermediaries can underpay (and rip off) artists because the passion is supposed to be the point (and because there's a steady stream of hopefuls all vying for their big break).

14. Livable wages must be, by definition, consistent. You must always have your shelter in place. You always need to eat. But creative success is never consistent. What piece of art resonates with an audience, when and why, is so hard to predict. Creative output is driven by feast and famine, but the famine is so much more likely that even a few feasts are insufficient to cover the gaps.

15. Subscriptions try and solve the consistency problem by flattening the unpredictability of artistic output. It is an attempt to capture brief, viral attention surges and convert them into repeatable, consistent revenue.

16. There's little incentive to promote undiscovered artists, no matter how talented they may be. Intermediaries (like digital platforms) are only interested in growing the total pie (not in how it is allocated), and that's easier to do with established voices. And if you're one of those established voices, you can corner the market. There's no benefit to helping a rising talent, only the risk that they may get good enough to steal your market.

17. The individual creator must negotiate with these intermediaries, which are much larger (and better organized) than them. These institutions have more market power and better information, which they can use as leverage against individual artists. They can spread the risk of creative work across many projects while individual creators cannot.

18. Much of the value created by art is positive externalities (cultural enrichment, inspiration, etc.) that artists can't monetize. Art is important, but it is not valuable. Platforms are much better at capturing the value of the network than any individual nodes on that network (the artists).

19. Creative value accrues on a timescale that is longer than a human lifespan. It can take decades, sometimes centuries, for a work to "find its audience." But artists need immediate income and many simply cannot wait long enough for the value of their work to accrue. Just ask Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Vincent van Gogh, and H.P. Lovecraft, what their cultural cachet bought them.

20. The fundamental problem is that art creates value in ways that can't be captured by the artist. Musicians writes songs inspired by other songs. Founders create companies based on worldviews informed by novels. Paintings spark conversations that create political movements. Economic and social value is created, but it flows everywhere except back to the original artist.

21. The starving artist is a romantic ideal, and one that turns cruel when it produces the complementary idea that suffering produces better art. This creates a cycle where precarity is romanticized, even desired. Even artists who could make money don't for fear of "selling out" or otherwise ruining their muse.

22. What goes into creating art is often invisible, and the monetary side even more so. Most successful artists had some kind of financial support, either through independent wealth, working spouses, or day jobs, but these factors are often ignored in the success mythologizing that happens posthumously.

23. All this siphons into a self-reinforcing system. Financial instability makes artists risk-averse, limiting their innovation. Lack of security pushes artists to produce what's commercially safe rather than artistically ambitious. Economic pressures force talented people out of creative fields. Those who succeed despite these pressures are often those with external financial support. The struggling artist narrative becomes self-fulfilling as systems develop around the assumption of artistic poverty.

24. And yet, and yet—the urge to create remains. Maybe it doesn't matter if you are paid, if you can "make a living" doing it. Because creativity is a living all its own. People will continue to make art even when it isn't economically viable. Even if there are zero incentives to do so. Even under the threat of torture or murder. We can't help ourselves. Creativity is the song that sounds in our bones. We are drawn to it as easily as a bird sings, as a dolphin swims, as a spider spins its web.

Recently, Paragraph (the platform which I use to power this publication) rolled out a new featured called creator coins. It is their latest attempt to solve some of the problems I wrote about in this essay. Whether these coins help this writing find its audience (or make me any money), I genuinely don't know. It isn't lost on me that I'm critiquing the creator economy using the creator economy's latest tools. If you enjoyed this piece, you can support it. I'll get a small monetary reward and you get a stake in the essay's success (which may or may not be worth anything—I would assume it would not). The irony writes itself: the better I argue that artists can't get paid, the more you might be inclined to pay me for making that argument. We are all, in a sense, complicit.

The featured image for this piece is The Gothic Arch by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (published 1750/1758), courtesy of the National Gallery of Art. It is part of a larger series of fantasy prison etchings. I chose it because the tiny figures navigating an elaborate maze is like what artists feel trying to navigate large systems that are not set up for them to succeed.

But there's another layer to this choice. According to Wikipedia, Piranesi's prison etchings have inspired other creative work over the centuries, including M.C. Escher's famous lithograph "Ascending and Descending," Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum," Brian Ferneyhough's chamber works Carceri d'invenzione, the 1998 film The Sound of Carceri (which features Yo-Yo Ma performing works by Johann Sebastian Bach in a computer generated simulation of Carceri), and Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi. Piranesi's work continues to inspire other artists (and generate more art), but none of that value can ever flow back to him (mostly because he's been dead since 1778). How could you possibly predict, and capture, that value? The final irony: I'm using this image because it's in the public domain (because that artist has been dead for centuries) to make a point about how artists can't capture the value they create.

I've been asking these questions because I write a lot of fiction, and lately, I've been trying to think of interesting ways to distribute my writing online.

But when I think back on my own reading habits, I realize two things that are quite damning to my own desires to publish fiction online:

• I rarely read fiction on my phone (or my computer, for that matter)

• I rarely read contemporary fiction

It's not just me. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that the percentage of people reading books has been declining overall, but they report a sharper drop in fiction reading (from 45.2% of respondents in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022, the lowest share on record). This represents a 17% rate of decline in fiction reading in a decade. The rate of decline is even more stark when you look at "literary" fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, and plays), where the rate of decline has accelerated from -5% to -14% since 1992. The decline in reading correlates with increased participation in online media.

While overall reading is declining, print books consumption remains somewhat steady. According to the Pew Research Center, print books remain more popular than e-books: 65% of adults report reading a print book in the last year, compared to 30% who read an e-book. When you look at fiction, and particularly the "General & Literary Fiction" category, you see a strong dominance in print books over other formats in the Nielsen BookScan data.

Looking at web reading habits, apps like Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, and Readwise are primarily used for saving web articles, email newsletters, RSS feeds, X-threads, PDFs, and EPUBs, formats that have a strong focus on non-fiction content. Their emphasis on features like highlighting, note-taking, and resurfacing important information further indicate a focus on information retention, more typical of non-fiction reading.

Efforts by various publishers to create fiction-centric online reading experiences have largely failed. In October, Amazon announced the closure of its serialized fiction platform, Kindle Vella. Authors have noted that while the internet has made "serialized storytelling surprisingly easy," only a handful of niche genres have seen success, and success in that format requires significant engagement with readers.

The newsletter, on the other hand, has been enjoying a recent boom, buoyed on the backs of Substack and its hefty VC fundraising. But on Substack, the most popular newsletters, and those raking in the most earnings, are all nonfiction-focused. Advice on how to build a six-figure newsletter on Substack calls out a need to "solve specific problems," which, while not explicitly stated, points to nonfiction content as the answer.

That data paints a compelling picture, and one that rings true with my own experience: readers vastly prefer to read fiction in print form (or, on an e-book designed to mimic the print experience closely), and when readers read online,—particularly on their phones—they gravitate to nonfiction.

There's something easy, almost seductive, about reading an article on your phone. You can gobble it up, piece-meal, if needed, in the little gaps you find in your busy day: in the five minutes between Zoom meetings at work, in line waiting for a coffee, in those brief, beautiful moments when your toddler plays independently. The trending news story that you doomscroll in bed.

This type of reading works for contemporary nonfiction—it even enhances the experience. I feel enmeshed, even trapped, in the vicissitudes of life, grappling with limited time and abundant demands on my attention, and I get the sense that the nonfiction writer is, too. They, too, must grapple with the confusing, disorienting world we find ourselves in, among the supersensorium of options at our disposal. They, too, are distracted, pulled in a million directions. They, too, don't have a clue about what is happening, but they have a lot of ideas. They have a lot of sources, a bevy of examples. Reading nonfiction on your phone is like skimming a little fractal piece of the entire web. Quick, punchy paragraphs of ideas barely stitched together, liberally sprinkled with hyperlinks to other quick, punchy pieces full of ideas. The work is digressive, citatory, skimmable, and shallow. Perfect for your information-addled brain.

Fiction, on the other hand, feels like a luxury. Both to write and to read. But why is that?

It's because we live in the internet age. In the age of the phone. The age of the web. And the web is a form, a literary form, and it has a grammar: the hyperlink.

In a 2009 Ribbonfarm post, Venkatesh Rao puts forward the idea that the hyperlink is not just a fancy way to cite sources online but constitutes an entirely new form of grammar, one native to online writing. "The web is a regular medium whose language is the hyperlink."

A writer who skillfully uses hyperlinks can create new effects that are only possible through stitching together multiple sources in the course of writing a sentence. It transforms the reader-writer relationship by ceding more agency to the reader. They decide what and when to click and may, in fact, never finish your piece because they've left it behind, disappearing down a rabbit hole of interesting clicks. The hyperlink makes the reader, as Rao says, "an extraordinarily active meaning-constructor" in online writing.

Naturally, by giving more agency to the reader, it may feel like diminishing the agency of the writer. Why, indeed, would you encourage your readers to click away from your work? And, in fact, over the last ten years or so, we have seen a deliberate reduction in this kind of online generosity, with the rise of cozyweb-driven screenshot content and virtually all social media networks now burying links on their platforms.

Indeed, Rao recently updated his understanding of hyperlink grammar in the context of a retreat from the "worldwide" web—a stage where anyone and everyone can play a part in full view of all participant-spectators—to a new dark forest web. As Rao says, "The view of hypertext culture I shared 15 years ago in The Rhetoric of the Hyperlink, which was quite popular at the time, now seems hopelessly idealistic." Rao positions the decline of the hyperlink as largely a result of the decline of an open web to one filled increasingly with closed-off platforms where the owners benefit from keeping all the eyeballs locked in their particular digital theme park. A reduced commons reduces the hyperlink.

But the hyperlink remains the grammar of the web, and it declines alongside the web. I'll leave thoughts on cozyweb and hyperlink-reduced enshittification for another day.

What I want to focus on is fiction writing and why it never managed to embrace the hyperlink style of web writing that brought boomtown growth to non-fiction writing, fueling first a blogging renaissance and now a newsletter one.

It's because fiction produces an entirely different mind state to nonfiction writing—and therefore requires a different grammar. While nonfiction flourishes with the hyperlink, fiction is destroyed by it.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner likens the reading—and writing—of fiction to a dream. "Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind." Like dreams, fictional worlds constitute their own logic, and they entice the reader to enter that world. No matter how outlandish or fantastical it may seem, the world is consistent. When you dream, you accept what is happening, no matter how nonsensical the events may be. It is only after you awaken that you realize: that was ridiculous. Fiction works in the same way.

This is not easy to do. For fiction to be effective, it must be, as Gardner points out, "vivid and continuous." Vivid in the sense that the reader must be able to "see" what is happening with their mind's eye, and continuous "because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion." Interruptions destabilize the dream state.

You can see how the hyperlink is a problem.

When writing fiction online, hyperlinks break the spell. Dissolve the dreamworld. The fiction writer is like a magician who must carefully stage manage the performance. She must, necessarily, "hog the stage," for to allow spontaneous audience participation would risk ruining the effect. In both fiction and magic shows, a prerequisite to enjoying the act is a suspension of disbelief. You know what you are "seeing" is not real, and although there is a strong desire to locate where the wires are placed, you also understand that knowledge of that sort will destroy the appeal. You want to be transported, mesmerized. You want to believe. It's why you are there in the first place.

In this framing, we have two distinct forms of writing: the nonfictive and the fictive, the hyperlink and the dream. It is not the same experience to read each genre of writing, nor is it the same experience to write in either mode.

When I write nonfiction, I write like I read the web: all over the place. I bounce around from paragraph to paragraph. I write, in one moment, the conclusion, then something in the middle, then circle back to the opening. I think of something new to write and make a note of it. I transplant entire paragraphs from my notes into the middle of the article in progress. I write out of order. I write and then stop to research something online and read for fifteen minutes, an hour. It doesn't matter if I lose track. All the words are there, a pastiche of words tossed at a white screen. I am writing this article right now, and at the bottom of my page is a "notes" section with 300 words of half-baked writing that I may or may not paste into the article later.

But when I write fiction, I must go in order—slowly and carefully. I have a precise sequence of activities that I do every time before I sit down to write fiction. I must put myself in a trance because the story is a dream, and I must let it unfold as I write it. I hook my unconscious, dreaming mind to my pen. I do not know what will happen in my story until it happens. When I write fiction, I must close down all my apps. Sometimes, even the outside world is a distraction, and the blinds must be closed. I write many first drafts by hand, but when I use the computer, I use a plugin that hides everything I've written as I go. When I write fiction, there is only ever the word I am working on, in that moment, one at a time.

If I am interrupted when writing nonfiction, it's no big deal. I'm writing this right now with my three-year-old in the same room. Interruptions are even helpful! I can get pulled out of a bunny trail and sent back to the main path. Or, a new thought might intrude that sends the piece down an interesting avenue.

But I loathe interruptions when writing fiction. I'm not to be disturbed. Otherwise, the spell may break.

So, too, with reading. As I wrote earlier, I find the experience of reading nonfiction online quite pleasant. I enjoy having a constant queue of articles that I can explore at my leisure whenever I have a moment. But when I read fiction, I prefer a physical book and a span of uninterrupted time (with my laptop closed and my phone on "do not disturb"). Usually, I read for an hour before bed, and this is almost exclusively when I read fiction.

Separating the two forms of textual creation and consumption helps to answer a host of tedious questions about reading and writing. Are physical books superior to e-books? Are we losing our ability to focus? Why can't the kids read anymore?

These kinds of questions can (mostly) be dismissed as noise. The apparent debate is only a confusion of terms. Fiction and non-fiction are almost different mediums, with their own internal logics, their own grammatical forms, and their ideal platforms and methods of creation plus consumption. Physical books are better for fiction, but e-books have significant advantages for non-fiction (access to the hyperlinked web and the ability to export highlights and notes). Realizing this, I now consciously consume fiction in print form and nonfiction on my phone or Kindle (it works out quite nicely). No, we are not losing our ability to focus. What appears to be a bug of the internet (distracted skimming) is actually a feature, a feature of the hyperlinked web. Fiction book sales are actually increasing, and it's not uncommon to see a young person today with a stack of physical books (all BookTok approved, of course), devouring them one after the other. It's just that once they've put the book down, they're back on the phone, skimming the supersensorium for fresh ideas.

While perhaps I understand the terrain a bit better, I'm still left with a burning question: What is the future of fiction?

The answer might be simple: the same as it's ever been. If you are interested in writing fiction, you write print books that readers can hold in their hands and place on their bookshelves to be used as TikTok backgrounds.

But this is unsatisfying for various reasons. The web has transformed our world, unlocking new forms of expression, new mediums, new economies of scale, and new opportunities for readers and writers. Non-fiction is having a renaissance of sorts. Why can't fiction get in on that?

Is it possible for fiction writers to have their cake and eat it, too? Is it possible to maintain the vivid, continuous dream-space necessary for good fiction in an online context?

I'll speculate two different ways of approaching the problem (neither of them particularly new; but then again, email was hardly new when Substack kicked off the newsletter resurgence). My proposed solutions must satisfy two criteria:

1. The medium preserves the fictive dreamscape

2. The medium taps into the network effects and economies of scale afforded by the hyperlinked web

As I've hopefully established, these two criteria seem, at first glance, opposed. But I think there are ways to thread the needle. Third ways that do a little bit of both.

My first proposed medium is the physical-digital hybrid (released through a platform like Metalabel), and the second is the hyperlink novel (utilizing platforms like Roam or Obsidian).

Neither of these ideas are particularly revolutionary, but they do feel under-utilized. I'd like to see more fiction writers try experiments in these directions (and I plan to do the same in the future).

One of the benefits of writing online is the speed of distribution. You can write something, post it, and immediately, it's off to the races, zooming about online at the speed of clicks, picking up readers with increasing (sometimes viral) velocity. There's something very satisfying about this as a writer. You can share thoughts instantly when they're ready—and shape the zeitgeist of other thinking around you. It can quite literally feel like a conversation, combining the long-term durability of writing with the immediacy of speech.

This is different from the normal experience of publishing print books. The process is often long (it can take years for a written book to get physically created and distributed) and requires maneuvering through a complicated web of gatekeepers.

In my piece, Curation Economy, Not Creator Economy, I wondered if there was a way to "have it both ways" vis-a-vis self-publishing and traditional publishing. This tension is heightened with fiction writing since, as I've demonstrated, the options for growing online are limited by the form.

One way to "have it both ways" is by releasing both physical and digital versions of your work. A good example of this approach is Metalabel, a platform for releasing creative work online. Metalabel is a web platform that takes advantage of online creation and distribution mechanisms, namely reach, virality, and collaboration, while also combining some of the benefits of physical releases—by packaging your work as a "collectible."

Metalabel embraces the ethos of self-publication. A "do it yourself" approach inspired by punk bands. As they write on their website, "Rather than wait for someone else to legitimize them, these bands legitimized themselves by starting their own labels, putting themselves out, and ultimately making scenes and something bigger than just them on their own." Metalabel focuses on creative collaboration and scene-making, which shifts the focus from the individual (which is the emphasis of the creator economy) to a group of artists—to a scene.

One of the exciting things about Metalabel is that you can release physical versions of your work (in addition to digital versions). This is a powerful ability for fiction writers, as it allows them to collaborate easily with other artists, build scenes around their work, use the web for marketing and distribution—building a fandom anywhere—while releasing their work in the medium it most wants to be consumed: as a physical artifact. In this approach, you take what's good about the web for fiction (collaboration, reach, new forms of monetization) and side-step the problems (that no one wants to read fiction online).

I plan to experiment with this approach in the coming years. One way I'm thinking about doing it:

1. Put together fiction mini-zines (say, 3-5 stories) knitted together by a theme, character, or plot.

2. Use social media and email to gather interested potential readers

3. Offer the physical mini-zine to that audience for a small fee

4. Set up a simple website (digital garden) for archiving the stories online—while offering an easy way for readers to collect the printed version

This kind of release pattern also makes it easier to focus on depth over frequency. Most traditional short story collections contain about 10 stories, which can take a couple of years to write. A single story is much easier to complete, but it disappears online. It's not quite right to treat it as a "post," and yet it's too little for the heft of a "book." A three-story mini-zine might be an interesting sweet spot. You could release them much faster than a traditional book (perhaps once a quarter or twice a year), but you're also not locked into the unrealistic cadence established by non-fiction newsletters (once per week). This approach not only aligns well with the pace of fiction writing but it also allows for a more curated, collectible approach to sharing work.

Most importantly, however, is that it allows readers to consume fiction in the best way: as a physical object and in a concentrated release that encourages focused consumption (which is necessary for sustaining the fictive dream). As opposed to the incessant drip-drip of newsletter posts trapped in the perennial now.

The second interesting form that I want to explore is the hyperlink novel. Rather than try and sidestep the hyperlink, the "grammar of the web," hypertext fiction offers a way for fiction writers to use this grammar to build fiction.

Hyperlink fiction is hardly new and has been around for almost as long as the hyperlinked web. Michael Joyce's "afternoon, a story" (1987) is widely considered the first significant hypertext fiction, following a narrator investigating whether he witnessed his son's death in a car accident. Shelley Jackson's "Patchwork Girl" (1995) reimagines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through a feminist lens, using the fragmented structure of the hypertext to mirror its protagonist's assembled body. These early works demonstrated hypertext's potential to create nonlinear narratives where readers could choose their own paths through the story. However, many of these early experiments failed to gain mainstream traction, partly because they often embraced fragmentation and disorientation as core aesthetic principles—directly undermining the "vivid and continuous" dream state that effective fiction requires. These hypertext experiments embraced the hyperlink's tendency to rupture narrative coherence, but what I want to explore is the possibility of repurposing the hyperlink, not as a distractive, dream-dissolving element, but as a foundational feature in fiction.

There's a fictional genre that may be poised to not only avoid the pitfalls of the hyperlink but utilize it for new narrative purposes: the fantasy novel. More specifically, the fantasy series. More than any other genre (save perhaps science fiction), fantasy embraces the fiction-as-a-world conceit. The world is the book, and the book is the world. This conceptualization offers an intriguing possibility for the hyperlink as a world-building tool. Almost every fantasy novel includes some type of supplementary content: maps in the front-matter, appendices in the back-matter (full of family trees, fictional histories, annals of long-dead rulers, mythologies and lore, supplementary stories and poems, and so forth). These supplementary materials are necessary for building out the broader context of the fictional world, making it feel like a real place with history, commerce, geography, and religion.

However, front matter and back matter are elements of printed books, and a digital book could do something very different with this material: it could sprinkle it throughout the story in the form of hyperlinks. Whenever a location is mentioned in the story, include a hyperlink to the map; family names link to lineage trees; gods to a Wiki-like description of the lore.

The benefit for the writer is that you would not have to overexplain your world as you're inviting your reader to experience it for the first time. We've all read bad fantasy bogged down by characters constantly pausing the action to explain the mechanics of magic or pontificate on the historical details of the surrounding countryside. The fiction writer can include all this and keep the action going by using hyperlinks. Because some degree of explanation is necessary in fantasy. The world they are building is a new one, unfamiliar to the reader. Fantasy writers have solved this conundrum largely by deploying variations on the fish out of water trope. Choose a main character who is also unfamiliar with the fantasy world and let them ask questions of the characters around them. There are several ways to do this:

• The character enters the fantasy world from our own (the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950), Lessingham in The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)).

• The character comes from a parochial backwater or is otherwise unfamiliar with their new surroundings (Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings (1954), Paul Atreides in Dune (1965), Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (1977)).

• The character is a young (sheltered) child with limited personal experience (Bran Stark in A Song of Ice and Fire (1996), Lyra Balacqua in His Dark Materials (1995)).

The best example of this trope is Harry Potter, who manages to satisfy all three examples at the same time (he's a small child locked in a parochial state by cartoonishly villainous relatives who enters the magical world from our own). Despite being a folk hero in the wizarding world, Harry Potter knows absolutely nothing about it and, therefore, spends all seven books asking pedantic questions about the world that he will save. The effect is particularly obvious here because J.K. Rowling (somewhat foolishly) introduced another major character who was not born into the magical world: Hermione Granger. Hermione, however, is a walking encyclopedia, and is usually the one explaining things to Harry, even though, she too, should be a fish out of water; but she's so good at expounding the workings of the magical world that she often explains things to children who were born into that world (like Ron Weasley). The in-universe explanation for this is that Hermione reads a lot, which only begs the question of why Harry never bothers to educate himself (or why, after a few years at Hogwarts, his knowledge does not meaningfully grow).

Rowling deliberately structured her story in this way so that she can (via characters like Hermione) explain the world she is building to the audience as she builds it. It works (for a children's story), but it severely undermines character building because, despite being told that he's a competent leader who inspires others, Harry Potter seems to the reader a lucky fool who never has any idea what is going on.

Now, imagine a Harry Potter written with hyperlinks. Freed from the trope of "main character who does not understand the fantasy world," Harry can grow up in a wizarding family which makes him more interesting because his characterization as a competent wizard is believable and his psychological grappling with his status as the "chosen hero" becomes more compelling because it was something he grew up believing in since birth. He can be a flawed hero. An interesting hero because he can be meaningfully seduced by the allure of Slytherin House and all it represents. Hermione's character, too, improves because she can remain the outsider who doesn't understand the world but makes up for it with a surfeit of cleverness and book learning. This Hermione would be far less annoying, less didactic and self-satisfying, and would come across instead as a plucky underdog.

Hiding the details of world-building behind hyperlinks creates multiple levels to read a fantasy story. You could read through without clicking the hyperlinks, which would make the world feel alien, surreal, overwhelming, and alive. Since the writer can hide the explanatory prose behind the hyperlinks, what's left would be a story full of strange, disorienting scenes with blood-and-flesh action. Some fantasy books have been written in this way: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980) and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946) come to mind, stories where the characters all come from the same strange world and therefore assume familiarity with it, creating a disorienting effect for the reader.

But a hyperlink fantasy would introduce a second reading, where you click the hyperlinks to understand the context of the world, creating a similar effect to reading a traditional fantasy novel today but without the awkward fish-out-of-water trope—freeing the author to explore more interesting main characters.

But you could also introduce a third reading by including hyperlinks within the hyperlinks that rabbit hole to deeper streams. Stories within the story. Imagine the entire online Wiki of a fantasy world included in the main text via two and three-layer hyperlink clicks.

Here's an example of what I mean, from Harry Turtledove's Into the Darkness (I haven't personally read this novel, but I found this illustrative example via Reddit). Here's a sentence early in the novel that's bogged down by world-building.

His mother looked at him as if he'd suddenly started speaking the language of the Lagoans, whose island kingdom lay beyond the isles of Sibiu, far southeast of Forthweg.

The additional clause after Lagoan, while explaining what that word means, does little to advance the scene; in fact, it pulls the reader out of the immediacy of the moment, away from the mother's look, which should be the focus.

Now, rewrite the scene with the benefit of hyperlinks:

His mother looked at him as if he'd suddenly started speaking Lagoan.

The word "Lagoan" would be a hypertext link to a brief history of the Lagoans: "The Lagoans come from Lagoas, an island kingdom that lay beyond the isles of Sibiu, far southeast of Forthweg."

In this approach, Turtledove could maintain the immediacy of his scene while still providing the necessary world-building context. He could have his cake and eat it, too.

This method of composing stories—nested dolls of stories within stories—invites the reader into a world that feels large and continuously larger. The author can flesh out the details of their world as it comes to them, adding additional layers of context over time. Imagine reading A Song of Ice and Fire as an online hypertext, with rich linking to the various maps and appendices, plus all the online supplementary material (the unofficial Wiki, George R. R. Martin's "Not a Blog"), the companion novels (Dunk & Egg, Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire), and, hell, why not, even the HBO television shows—multiple media all coexisting in a single "space."

There are literary precursors to this type of metafiction: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) come to mind. In these novels, multiple narratives co-exist in the physical space of the book, converging and "talking" to one another through the use of citations and footnotes. Adapting this storytelling approach to the web would yield similarly interesting results. It was a much better experience reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle compared to the print book. I could click on the notes (as hyperlinks), which saved me the obnoxious and exhausting act of flipping that big book back and forth. It was much smoother to click through and lose myself in the maze of footnotes. It's one of those rare fiction books that's better in a digital form than in print. The dreamworld of that story is one built on hyperlink-adjacent content (the academic footnote).

A great contemporary example is David Chapman's book, Meaningness, which exists as an online, hyperlinked novel. Even today, you can see that Chapman has included links to pages that he has not yet written, inviting the reader into the book as he writes it. He has pre-emptively linked to those pages, showing the additional context to come and offering a promise of what is to come. Chapman also uses hyperlinks to define the terms he uses (like "eternalism," "nihilism," "materialism," etc.), which is extremely helpful in a philosophical text. Like a web forum, the pages of his "book" also include comments. Readers can ask questions or clarifications directly in the text and Chapman often responds, further elucidating his writing. These comments extend the (seemingly infinite) boundaries of the text, which, in turn, reflect on one of the book's central theses: that meaning is both infinite and discrete.

Though a non-fiction text, Chapman's book demonstrates the potency of the hyperlinked book and opens new options for fiction writers. You could create your own hypertext novel fairly easily with platforms like Roam Research and Obsidian. Obsidian, in fact, offers an easy way to publish your notes as simple web pages. An author could start by writing chapters in Obsidian, adding hyperlinks to anything interesting or concepts they plan to flesh out later. Then, at a set schedule (say, once a week), they could publish their notes online. An RSS feed could be set to notify readers when new pages are published.

This approach seems more interesting to me than serialized novels (on newsletter platforms like Substack) because it opens multiple directions to take a story, rather than the linear style afforded by a weekly newsletter—which feels no different than a traditional novel, albeit one arbitrarily cut up and delivered piecemeal. The hyperlink novel, on the other hand, offers an entirely new way to write and read fiction.

The reason this approach could work for fiction (and not dismantle the fictive dream) is because it would remain a contained world; every hyperlink would point to something else within the same fictive space. You build not within the structure of the entire web (which dissolves the work, like pouring a glass of orange juice into the ocean), but instead, you recreate the novel following the structure of the web. A world entirely of its own. An ocean of orange juice.

Novels are already miniature, self-contained worlds. While non-fiction writers try to understand the world by studying bits and pieces of it (often in great detail), the fiction writer tries to understand the world by recreating it. The novel is a synecdoche—the fictional world a stand-in for the entire world. The hyperlink novel, therefore, is a synecdoche of the web rather than a part of it. Writing hyperlinked fiction may offer us a better way to understand what it is like to live in our time, when more and more of our lives exist online.

Fiction is the creation of a new world—the mind of the author opened in a way that can sustain visitors. Inviting them into your dream. You have to keep the walls of the dream up, lest reality bleed in and demolish the illusion. But the hyperlink need not be a conduit for destruction; it can also be a way to dramatically extend the dream walls, creating fictive worlds that feel larger than any yet created—maybe even as large as the world itself.

Like in the Borges fable where the map grows so large it becomes the terrain it describes, the novel may need to grow dramatically in size to capture our increasingly complex world successfully. It may need to look—and feel—like the worldwide web.

The problem with Farcaster and growth is that Web3 social media is a product nobody asked for. To put it in a more optimistic light, it's a product that nobody has asked for, yet. The problem with Farcaster and growth is that its founders treat it like just another social media network. This makes sense: they are, quite literally, building a social media network—but with crypto!

Unlike legacy social media platforms, which all differentiate themselves via content, crypto is not merely a new type of content; it's a mechanism that changes the shape of the content that exists on the protocol. This is why it appears that Farcaster's problem is that it "needs more interesting content," but that's looking at the problem through a Web2 lens. Adding crypto to social media is new. This is obvious to everyone early to Farcaster, but it bears repeating: Farcaster is a new thing.

The thing about new things is that they must transform the world—or they die. The new must supplant the old. For Farcaster to grow, it needs people to use it and to get people to use it, Farcaster must transform how people use social media. Otherwise, they will never give up what they already have.

People are comfortable with what they know—in fact, they can't imagine anything else. There's a famous line about introducing new technology, attributed to Henry Ford, but probably apocryphal: "If I had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses." People cannot ask for something new; they will, instead, continue to ask for the old thing—the thing they know and recognize. The thing already in their head. The new is, well, new.

The car was new once, and nobody asked for it. They asked for faster horses, but a bunch of technology tinkerers gave everyone a car instead.

Farcaster is also a car.

So, how do you market a car when everyone is asking for better horses?

It wasn't immediately evident to people that cars were useful. They broke down all the time; there was no infrastructure to support them; innovations were making existing models quickly obsolete; they were expensive and seen as weird hobby toys.

The car's inventor, Karl Benz, struggled to market them effectively. He was focused on the technical details rather than the practical concerns of marketing his tech. It took his wife, Bertha Benz, to make it happen. In 1888 she performed the first long-distance travel in an automobile. Per Wikipedia: "Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha Benz had other motives—to prove to her husband, who had failed to adequately consider marketing his invention, that the automobile in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success, once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future."

In performing the stunt, Benz discovered what was needed to make the automobile work for the general public. She had to stop at a specialized apothecary shop to buy fuel—inventing the first gas station. She had to visit a cobbler to repair the wooden brakes with leather—inventing the first brake linings and the first repair shop. The car couldn't get up hills, and she and her sons had to get out and push the car over them—inventing the first additional gear.

But most importantly of all, Bertha Benz showed that test drives were the missing marketing piece for cars. One hundred and thirty-six years later, cars are still sold with test drives. The buyer needs to get a feel for the car.

Farcaster is similar to the early car. It is a promising new piece of technology still looking for its killer use case. What the protocol needs is a Bertha Benz—someone who can perform marketing in its truest sense, not "user acquisition" activities or "growth tactics" but connecting directly to people's feelings and imaginations—to show how Farcaster is useful, and not just a niche toy for hobbyists.

It's tempting to look at how social media platforms of the past grew their networks, but I think it's a misleading exercise. It's akin to asking people in 1880 what upgrades they want to their horse-drawn carriages. It doesn't matter what they say, because soon, they will all be driving cars. Web3 social needs to break free of Web2 paradigms. What worked to grow social networks in the 2010s will not work for Farcaster in the 2020s.

Incumbent Web2 social platforms grew largely by focusing on a particular medium, ones that were unlocked by progressive advancements in technology:

• Twitter: short-form text; unlocked by the sudden ubiquity of smartphones

• Instagram: photos; unlocked by better cameras in smartphones

• TikTok: short-form video; unlocked by better video capabilities

But what's interesting about these successful social media platforms—ones that found their product market fit—is that they did so by using the medium to enable new online behaviors:

• Twitter: public conversation

• Instagram: visual self-expression

• TikTok: creative remixing

Twitter was not just "short form text," but that medium created a global town square. When you used Twitter in its heyday, you did not just update your followers with short-text updates, you became an active participant in the discourse. Instagram turned everyone into (halfway) competent photographers, turning all your activities into a chance to build a consistent personal brand. TikTok turned the public into filmmakers by making it easier than ever to create engaging videos through features like remixing and duets.

You can see a democratization effect: skills and abilities that were once difficult to acquire, or behaviors that were locked behind gatekeepers, preserved for privileged priestly classes, were quickly made accessible to the broader public.

So, what new medium does Farcaster introduce, and how does this medium generate a new type of online behavior? It's not clear, in its current iteration what that could be. Today, Farcaster (via its only viable app, Warpcast) looks and feels like watered-down Twitter with Reddit-like features stapled on. But the Twitter era is over, and the discourse has balkanized into politically-aligned app clones. There's no hope for Farcaster in this arrangement, least of all because its political alignment directly competes with the OG Twitter clone, X.

For Farcaster to generate a new medium, it needs to lean into new forms of expression unlocked by advancing technology: namely, crypto. The answer is a supercharged online self, what I will call the "mobile self" is one that can exist consistently and coherently across the entire web. A self that can move across social graphs, who can exist in wildly different contexts and milieux, and remain the same. Not unlike driving a car, which substantially augments the human organism's ability to move and move without altering the consistent, coherent identity of the humans inside it. We did not have to transform into a new organism to travel one hundred miles per hour; we can do so with our technology while remaining, basically, the same organism we've been for hundreds of thousands of years.

Today, if you want to move from one social media network to another, you are forced to literally start from zero. None of your content comes with you, nor your social graph, nor the rich history of your engagement patterns. It is as if your entire online self dissipates, forcing you to cobble together a new one on a new platform. The mobile self doesn't have this problem; it brings everything with it. It travels across the web as a stable, coherent identity, learning and growing as it goes.

Just like a test drive shows humans how a car augments their abilities, a Farcaster test drive needs to show how Web3 social media augments their online abilities across three dimensions:

• Portability: show how you can use multiple apps or clients seamlessly with your identity intact

• Sovereignty: demonstrate how you can own (and monetize) your audience without fear of platform cancellation

• Composability: show how you can create and interact with Web artifacts (like meme coins, NFTs, frames, etc.) that remember who you are

But all this still points to a new medium. What does a supercharged online self do with these powers? What new behaviors are unlocked? If Farcaster is a car, and incumbent social platforms a horse, what is the central element of the old paradigm that's ripe for disruption? What is it about Farcaster that makes it more than a "faster horse"?

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes about how Web2 technology resulted in context collapse: our social media platforms flatten different contexts into a single flat space. Human interaction exists across many contexts—we behave and communicate differently with family, colleagues, friends, or strangers, and we consume different types of media in different ways and at different times. But social media platforms collapse these distinct contexts into one feed, one profile, one way of presenting ourselves and consuming others' output, resulting in the pressure to develop a single, consistent (and, therefore, circumscribed) identity that works for all audiences simultaneously.

As Odell writes, "Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information that we're assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both these kinds of context." By throwing everything into a single, never-ending feed—from a news report about Gaza to a meme about AI, to a poem about loss, to a funny video with cats, to an update from your mom—incumbent Web2 platforms annihilate any contextual relationship between its elements, producing a disorienting, numbing effect. Odell: "Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread." It's no surprise we now call the activity of scrolling social media "doomscrolling," as doom is the only emotion that this soup of content can consistently generate.

But by generating the mobile self, through Web3 technology that unlocks portability, sovereignty, and composability, Farcaster has the unique opportunity to restore our collapsed context. Farcaster's unique medium isn't just about creating new content types (in the way Twitter emphasized short-form text, Instagram photos, and TikTok video remixing), but in creating new types of relationships between content, identity, and value. This is a fundamentally different paradigm to Web2 platforms where relationships are fixed and controlled by the platform. If you own your audience, if your identity can travel across apps, and if the elements of the protocol are composable, you have the power to restore context—in any manner you see fit.

The test drive, the "aha moment" for Farcaster will be when users can see that they have the power to design their own social media experience rather than passively consume one.

How is this possible? By side-stepping the client diversity problem entirely and giving users the tools to build their own.

Farcaster faces the same problem today that the early car faced: how to scale usage without the necessary infrastructure that in turn needs heavy usage to justify building.

• Both represent a paradigm shift that requires further ecosystem development to realize

• Both face(d) the chicken-and-egg problem of infrastructure and adoption

• Both require(d) people to imagine a future different from their current habits

Just like a car needs an entire ecosystem to be successful—roads, parking, gas stations, repair shops, garages, signage, curbs, guardrails, etc.—Farcaster needs a robust ecosystem of apps to sell its unique benefits: the ability to browse the web while maintaining a consistent identity.

There's a nasty chicken-and-egg problem here: for Farcaster to demonstrate the new mobile self, it needs a robust ecosystem of different apps that can showcase contextual flexibility; but before developers and investors put in the time, money, and effort to make them, they want to see more users on the protocol.

It's evident how this is an existential problem, and why the Farcaster team has chosen to prioritize Warpcast—by focusing on growing a single, killer app, they can grow the protocol, and, eventually more killer apps. Again, it's like the early days of the car, when Henry Ford created the assembly line by dismissing individual choice—at least initially. In response to a desire for more customizability in his Model T, he was quoted as saying, "You can have any color as long as it's black." Today, Farcaster feels in the same position when it comes to client customizability: "You can have any client as long as it's Warpcast."

But as long as Warpcast remains the only truly viable client for Farcaster, there's no way for users to effectively "test drive" the mobile self, kneecapping the protocol's growth. I invite the Farcaster team to see the problem flipped: they need to grow the protocol first, which will then grow all the apps.

Cars and early Farcaster are alike in this way:

• One standard option (Model T; Warpcast)

• Limited customization; limited interface options

• Standardized experience; standardized social feed

But we can imagine a future where, like the car, the Farcaster protocol has expanded dramatically:

• Vast variety of vehicles; personalized social clients

• Different cars for different needs; different interfaces for different contexts

• Common road rules; common protocol standards

• Aftermarket modifications; custom features and frames

Warpcast is too much like a Web2 social platform, forcing everyone into the same digital space, like forcing everyone to drive the same car, regardless of their needs. But in real life:

• Families drive minivans

• Contractors drive trucks

• Commuters drive compact cars

• Enthusiasts drive sports cars

In a similar vein, Farcaster needs different clients for different use cases. I don't think this is a novel thought for the team or any early user. We're back to the chicken-and-egg dilemma.

But I think there's a way to sidestep the problem entirely by embracing the second major piece of emerging technology: AI. With tools like Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI o1, it has never been easier for low or no-code users to build their own applications. I think Farcaster should lean in this direction and not only make it possible but encourage users to build their own social media experience by creating out-of-the-box, tinkerable clients that demonstrate the potential of the protocol.

In this way, the creative medium for Farcaster can become software. In the same way that TikTok made it possible for the general audience to become video creators, Farcaster can make it possible for the general audience to become software developers. Let users design their own feeds, and their own social clients, all under the protocol hood. If Web2 was "anyone can create content," then Web3 becomes "anyone can create context."

Farcaster has already laid powerful cultural groundwork for this revolution, by drawing in builders early in the protocol's life. Builder culture is strong on Farcaster, and marketing the protocol should lean heavily into this culture. Not by establishing Farcaster as the "home for builders" but by establishing it as the place where "users are the builders." You are not handed a social media experience, but rather given the tools to create one.

If this sounds like asking too much of today's users, I once again return to the car analogy. A car is an extremely deadly piece of machinery that requires mastering a complicated series of activities; however, today almost anyone can learn how to do it, and driver's education is a standard part of the American teenage experience. The "rules of the road" is a protocol that makes the complicated and dangerous action of driving a car relatively simple for almost anyone to learn. In the same way, the Farcaster protocol can make it relatively simple for anyone to learn and create (and "drive") their own social client.

Just like the car is a potent symbol of freedom, Farcaster can become a potent symbol of self-authorship via the mobile self. Instead of asking "What platform should I use?" people will ask, "What platform do I want to build?"

These archetypal clients wouldn't just be products created by the Farcaster team—they would serve as templates and inspiration for users to build upon. Just as car manufacturers provide base models that owners then customize to their needs, Farcaster could provide foundational client types that users can modify and enhance. I want to explore what these different client types might look like, and how they could serve different contexts and communities.

Just like how different people use different cars for different purposes, there are many ways to browse the web. Though there, theoretically, an infinite number of ways to build a car, there are a handful of common archetypes—with variations on a theme. The Wrangler, the Cherokee, and the Renegade are all slightly different, and all recognizably a Jeep.

Farcaster clients would cluster similarly. Instead of developing a bunch of different features and throwing them all at the same main client, the Farcaster team could batch these features into consistent archetypes centered on different use cases. I'll use the car as a jumping-off point to showcase the possibilities in client diversity.

• Streamlined, high-performance interface for power users

• Focused on rapid consumption and creation

• Advanced threading features and data analytics

• Post scheduling, brand accounts, easy switching between them

• Family or small-group focused

• Emphasis on private group conversations

• Strong content moderation features

• Easy sharing features (calendars, photo albums)

• Great for families and friends

• Built for "heavy lifting"—long-form content creation and consumption

• Strong curation features

• Emphasis on collaboration and "stickiness"

• Great for writers, DAOs, or professional communities

• Premium, luxury experience

• Highly curated feeds—someone else "drives" and you just relax

• White-glove content moderation and amplification

• Exclusive communities and conversations

• Great for subscription-based communities and content creators (newsletters with concierge features)

• Built for exploration

• Emphasis on discovering new people and new communities

• Content feed has an "off the beaten" path feel; more likely to surface "hidden gems"

• Rugged, no-frills interface that puts the content front-and-center

• Ultra-minimalist interface

• Focus on essential features only

• Perfect for quick checks and basic interactions

• Great introductory or default client

• Retro Internet interface

• Focus on preservation and archiving

• Web1 style simplicity

• Text-heavy, minimal media (like the web forums of old)

• Built for rapid response

• Real-time event coverage

• Breaking news features

• Live commentary tools

• Perfect for journalists, news junkies, and chart watchers

• Educational focus

• Structured learning environments

• Content organization by subject

• Built-in citation and reference tools

• Good for academic communities and school-aged users

• Optimized for temporary use

• Publication location features (who else is in the area)

• Public space features

• Location-based content

• Perfect for events and conferences

In this framework, existing Farcaster features like channels, location features, chat, frames, etc. all get repackaged and bundled around dedicated use cases. Channels that come alive around specific events become core pieces of the Taxi client. Frames that encourage deep engagement of a subject are core parts of the Truck or Limousine clients. Chat enhancements are folded into Minivan clients. Memecoin manias get bundled into different Rally car clients. And so on. But these archetypal clients are just the beginning. There's nothing stopping someone from taking a Limousine and adding Rally car features to it, to create their own personalized experience.

The beauty of this framework is that you could seamlessly move from one client to the other, engaging in the unique context that each client offers, while your identity remains intact. In the same way that you can drive a truck, a minivan or a taxi, engaging in dramatically different "roles" while you remain the same person, users could switch between clients for different types of online experiences. When you first wake up, you might jump into your Sports car client to get a quick feel for what's happening. Then, you want to get some serious work done so you get into your Truck client. Around lunch, you slide into the Minivan client to check up with your family and IRL friends. In the evening, you want to expand your context, so you hop into your Jeep client to explore what's new out in the digital world. Before bed, you slip into your Limousine client for a highly curated story-like experience.

Just like some people always drive one type of car and others have multiple cars for different purposes, some users may find themselves drawn to a single, highly-customized client and others may hop between different ones as their moods for different contexts change.

People also attach the car they drive to their personal values. Truck drivers don't just drive trucks, they're "truck drivers." Sports car enthusiasts identify with other sports car enthusiasts. Jeep drivers wave to each other out on the road, as a sign of appreciation for one another and to show their connection to a wider community. When users are in control of their own clients, clients become expressions of personal values. How you browse the web shows who you are; how you browse puts you in direct contact with people who browse in similar ways, leading to natural community building. When you can tie your protocol to people's identities, to their communities, you unlock a powerful engine for growth—the most powerful one that exists.

There's marketing magic in attaching your protocol to peoples' identities. Rather than paying people to use your protocol (which is unsustainable, and is the same ZIRP trap that so many software startups fall into), you could charge people to use it by actually giving them something they want. Just like everyone wants a car (needs it, in fact) and is willing to pay for it, the same could be said of a social media client that actually supplies people with value, instead of extracting something from them in exchange for peanuts.

People drive cars because they are useful. But as Bertha Benz's story shows, people needed to see that usefulness in action. Her journey didn't just prove the car's viability—it revealed what infrastructure was needed to make the automobile truly transformative. Similarly, Farcaster needs to show the public not just that its protocol works, but that it enables a fundamentally better way of experiencing the web.

I think people are hungry for this kind of contextual freedom. They're tired of the same infinite scroll experience where every type of content, every type of interaction, every type of social arrangement is squashed into the same endless buffet of stimulation. People want to connect and experience the web, but Web2 social platforms have flattened their experience into a two-dimensional shadow of what it could be.

If Web2 allowed for self-expression, Web3 can unlock self-contextualization. It's the next leap forward in social design. Just as the car transformed not just how we move but how we live—creating suburbs, shopping malls, drive-in movies, road trips, and countless other innovations we couldn't have imagined in the horse-and-buggy era—Farcaster could transform not just how we post but how we exist online.

The automobile's story is quintessentially American—a tale of innovation, freedom, and democratization. The same spirit that drove the early days of Silicon Valley. Where incumbent Web2 platforms have become like the old-world structures they once disrupted—entrenched, aristocratic, sclerotic—Farcaster represents a return to those foundational values. A chance to recapture that feeling of the Internet as a place of possibility and adventure, a space you travel through rather than a feed you're trapped within.

But unlike the early automobile, which required massive industrial infrastructure before it could transform society, Farcaster has a unique advantage: AI can democratize the creation of its infrastructure. Just as Bertha Benz's journey revealed what was needed—gas stations, repair shops, better roads—the early adopters of Farcaster can build what they need. Every user can be both driver and builder, contributing to and benefitting from an ever-expanding ecosystem of digital contexts.

The future of social media isn't a single platform or even a collection of platforms—it's a protocol that enables everyone to build their own digital contexts while maintaining their core identity. It's not about finding your voice on someone else's platform; it's about building the exact space where you can be heard.

This is Farcaster's test drive moment. Not just showing that the protocol works, but demonstrating how it transforms the very nature of online social interaction. From the infinite scroll to infinite possibility. From context collapse to context creation. From users to builders.

A wide-open road, waiting to be explored.

Thanks to Claude for assistance with drafting and editing.

It's no wonder that objectives are held in high esteem, but the idea is so pernicious it affects how we make decisions in almost every domain, from the way we organize society down to how we manage our personal lives.

Though it feels right and natural to set an objective to strive towards, doing so handicaps creativity, discovery, and innovation in weird, counter-intuitive ways.

Stanley and Lehman show how a reliance on objectives often does more harm than good. They cite Campbell's Law, which pops up all the time in social sciences: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Campbell's law is related to the cobra effect, a type of perverse incentive where rewarding certain measures makes the underlying problem worse than before. The cobra effect is named after a famous example from when India was under colonial British rule. The British government wanted to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi, and they offered money in exchange for dead cobras. At first, this worked to reduce the number of snakes in the city. However, enterprising citizens realized they could generate reliable income by breeding cobras and killing them for the reward. By the time the program was finally dismantled, there were more cobras in the city than there had been before.

Why does this happen? There's a gap between the outcomes that we want and the indicators that purportedly measure it. There's a common failure pattern with objectives, and it looks like this:

• We choose an outcome worth pursuing

• We decide that anything worth doing can (and should) be expressed as an objective

• The objective is defined and measured

• We make progress on the measurements but move no closer to our objective (or even further away from it)

This dynamic is made worse when the scope of what we want to achieve broadens. The relationship between measurement and objective breaks down the bigger and more nebulous the objective.

Objectives are so ingrained in our culture that we rarely question the wisdom in pursuing them. A neatly-defined metric that we can mechanically pursue offers comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. Even if we fail, we can point to our objectives as concrete measures of what we were trying to accomplish. It's better to fail in a clearly defined way than to succeed in a hazy, indeterminate manner.

These effects aren't exclusive to colonial government programs. You've probably experienced it in your personal life at some point. Let's say you wanted to lose weight. There are many reasons to desire this outcome, but the most common reason is to improve one's health. In the pursuit of greater health, you focus on a single metric: weight on the scale. Focusing on this objective might encourage you to undertake activities (like surgery or experimental supplements) that, while they may improve the underlying metric, might also harm your general health, paradoxically bringing you further from your goal: better health.

Or, let's say you wanted to improve your writing, so you set yourself a daily writing goal of 1,000 words. If you're not careful, you'll quickly find yourself churning out words just to hit your daily quota without considering the quality of the output. You generate words but not the right words. You hit your goal, but your writing is not improving. It's getting worse.

Objectives remain seductive, however, because they promise to take complex phenomena and reduce them to measurable standards. If you want to be a great writer, it's hard to determine what to do in service of that goal and track whether you're moving in the right direction. But counting words makes it easy to measure your apparent progress. There's a logic to setting goals, but as Stanley and Lehman point out, "The greatest danger is when the logic is wrapped within a lofty objective, lending it instant credibility and seemingly putting it beyond question."

There's prestige around objectives—and comfort. We set objectives because we're afraid of what it would mean to live without them. Without an objective, we worry that we will become lost.

Objectives are particularly bad when it comes to invention, creativity, and discovery. The more ambitious your objective, the more setting one can be harmful to that end.

Stanley and Lehman imagine us to think of a giant room that already contains everything that can be created. All creations, whether a new painting, a scientific theory, a mathematical proof, a novel, or a new piece of technology, can be thought of as objects in a vast room. You can then imagine yourself searching through this space, looking for interesting objects. However, the objects in the room are not arranged randomly; they have a relationship to each other. The more you explore the room and understand that relationship, the better your understanding of where you might be able to go next.

Susanna Clarke explores a similar idea in her novel Piranesi. In the story, Piranesi wanders a world composed of infinite halls and vestibules lined with statues, no two of which are alike. This world is infinite, and so, too, are the statues. They already and always contain everything that can be expressed. Examples include "Angel caught on a Rose," "Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it," "an elderly fox teaching some young squirrels and other creatures," and "the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive." Piranesi has dedicated his life to the task of describing every statue: "I have begun a Catalogue in which I intend to record the Position, Size and Subject of each Statue, and any other points of interest." Piranesi is not the only person who exists in this world, however; there is also the Other, a scientist who "believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it."

Clarke's world, like the room Stanley and Lehman ask us to imagine, contains an infinite number of objects that can describe anything that can be imagined, and hidden amongst them might also be secret knowledge of great importance. Both Clarke's world and Stanley and Lehman's room describe the same concept: a search space.

Used in computer science, mathematics, and AI, a search space includes the set of all solutions to a particular problem. Of course, the difficulty is that the search is quite complicated. You do not know where the solution is hidden or even where to start. There are different ways to go about searching the space, but you don't know which one is the most optimal before you begin.

As it turns out, creativity is a type of search.

Creativity is how you move through "an enormous room" where innovations are waiting to be discovered.

In Clarke's novel, Piranesi and the Other suspect that the world contains great knowledge, but they have no idea what the nature of that knowledge entails. At certain points, they speculate that it could be one of seven possibilities:

1. vanquishing Death and becoming immortal

2. learning by a process of telepathy what other people are thinking

3. transforming ourselves into eagles and flying through the Air

4. transforming ourselves into fish and swimming through the Tides

5. moving objects with only our thoughts

6. snuffing out and reigniting the Sun and Stars

7. dominating lesser intellects and bending them to our will

The most interesting thing about the search space is the implication that all discoveries, great and small, already exist. They are simply lying there, waiting to be found. The statues in Piranesi's world are always and already there, whether Piranesi or the Other see them. As the search widens, more and more of them are discovered.

Stanley and Lehman describe creativity as a process of combing through a search space: "Let's pretend you wanted to paint a beautiful landscape—so that's your objective. If you're experienced in landscape painting, it means that you've visited the part of the room teeming with images of landscapes. From that location, you can branch off to new areas full of landscapes that are still unimagined. But if you're unfamiliar with landscape painting, unfortunately, you're unlikely to create a masterpiece landscape, even if that's your objective. In a sense, the places we've visited, whether in our lives or just in our minds, are stepping stones to new ideas."

Herein lies the difficulty of discovery:

• You must first become a master at something (like landscape painting). This alone is a lifetime of dedication.

• There must then exist something novel and interesting adjacent to what you have mastered (but you do not know if this is the case when you set out to become a master in the first place).

• You must be open enough to explore that adjacent "room" and discover what lies next to your area of expertise.

But there's another, more sinister problem: when you think you're making progress towards a great achievement, you likely aren't because actual progress does not look like progress at all. The path to discovery is littered with traps.

Objectives work in the short term, in the day-to-day. They work when the next step is clear, and the cause-and-effect relationship between action and outcome is well understood. But the bigger the goal, the trickier it is to use objectives.

Stanley and Lehman again: "Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get a lot more complicated when they're more ambitious. In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation—or even achieving true happiness. In other words (and here is the paradox) the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. Not only that, but this paradox leads to a very strange conclusion—if the paradox is really true then the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to 'blue sky' discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all."

Why is this so? As the authors point out, "The key problem is that the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange" and that "the stepping stone does not resemble the final product."

Here is the crux of the problem—objectives fail in the pursuit of discovery, creativity, and invention because the way to get there does not look anything like the goal. To set an objective, then, is to doom yourself to following a fruitless path.

The stepping stones to great discoveries didn't look anything like the final outcomes. Here are a few examples from the book:

• Vacuum tubes are a stepping stone on the way to computers

• Combustion engines are a stepping stone on the way to airplanes

• Microwaves are a stepping stone on the way to ovens

In all these examples, the genius of discovery was not in figuring out every step needed from scratch but rather in realizing that "the prerequisites are in place, laid before us like predecessors with entirely unrelated ambitions, just waiting to be combined and enhanced." For centuries, man dreamed of taking to the skies, and in pursuit of that goal, fashioned devices that resembled flight in nature (the wings of birds). Yet those devices all failed; what was needed for the invention of the airplane was the internal combustion engine, a device that was not invented with the problem of flight in mind. Similarly, the inventors of vacuum tubes did not imagine they were paving the way for the first computers.

If we imagine the room of discovery, it turns out the airplane was next to the combustion engine, the computer next to vacuum tubes. While it may seem obvious in retrospect, there's nothing about these problems that would have indicated this would be so. As Stanley and Lehman state, "The paradox is that the key stepping stones were perfected only by people without the ultimate objective of building microwaves, airplanes, or computers." Objectives can distract you from pursuing its own stepping stones because ambitious objectives are deceptive.

Discovery is hard because the path is littered with false paths—the next steps that resemble the final product but that lead you further from it. The next steps that are strange and novel end up moving you closer even though it feels like you're moving further away.

Imagine literal stepping stones in a lake. It's a foggy day, and you cannot see across the water to the other shore. Your goal is to get across. Stones that bring you further across the lake seem like they're bringing you in the right direction, but the actual path to the other shore might involve moving in the opposite direction, back toward where you started. What feels like backtracking is actually moving you forward.

Or consider the Chinese finger trap. The natural urge to pull your fingers apart only keeps you more ensnared. To separate your fingers, you must, paradoxically, move them closer together.

Objectives fail because they are blind to the idiosyncrasies of stepping stones. The combustion engine does not seem like the path to flight, but it is.

The principle doesn't just apply to invention, it applies to art and creativity, too. No one set out with an objective to invent rock and roll. Jazz musicians were just exploring what was musically interesting to them. Jazz, it turned out, was a stepping stone to rock and roll. As Count Basie, an innovator in jazz music, said at the time: "If you're going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you'll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves."

Instead of trying to follow a clear, pre-determined path to an objective, discovery involves following interesting stepping stones wherever they lead. Discovery is simply realizing that the pre-determined steps are already in place—and that the next stepping stone is right there, waiting for someone to take it.

Objectives help us feel grounded in a chaotic world, and the alternative—aimlessness—offers little comfort. It turns out there's a third way, a way between pursuing objectives and wandering aimlessly. The question is how to explore a search space intelligently without relying on objectives.

As Stanley and Lehman write, "Being aimless isn't always a good idea, but when it's paired with a thirst for exploration, it might indeed hint at great potential." This idea is well crystallized in the popular quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, "not all those who wander are lost." Tolkien differentiates between a wandering with purpose and one without. The full poem that contains this line drives home the point clearly:

"All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king."

There is a clear and intended purpose to which the poem drives toward: the return of the king. But the how, where, and who is not stated. It is unknown. From the in-universe perspective of the poet, it cannot be known how the king will return, only that he will. What is interesting about this perspective is that the wandering is part of the exploration. Because it cannot be known how the king will return, one must wander freely until the solution can be found.

The subtle idea that permeates every page of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is that setting a specific objective brings you no closer to achieving it—and often, counterintuitively, brings you further away. What's maddening about this concept is the implication you are more likely to stumble on a great idea than following a plan to achieve it. It will happen by accident. You're betting off picking an interesting direction with no particular aim in mind and sticking with it. It's what the Cheshire Cat recommends to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

"Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."

But total aimlessness won't get you anywhere interesting. Not all choices are random, and not all destinations are equal, an idea echoed beautifully in Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." The speaker in the poem considers two different roads open to him. He weighs the two paths and concludes that, despite their differences, they are "really about the same." Yet there is no way to choose both, and in choosing one, it would be impossible to "ever come back," but the outcome of that choice will "make all the difference" in the end. The poem is often misunderstood, as readers focus on the penultimate line, "I took the one less traveled by,” and interpret the poem's meaning as a positive message to go against the grain and explore a unique side of life. But that interpretation doesn't square with the rest of the poem. First, the speaker says, in multiple ways, that the two roads are identical ("the passing there / Had worn them really about the same"), so there is no clear "less traveled" path. Plus, the speaker looks back on their choice later with sadness ("I should be telling this with a sigh"), undercutting any potential individualistic triumph in the choice to take "the one less traveled by."

Instead, what the poem explores is the incongruence of choice. Choices matter, but not immediately. Not in the present but in the long run—after the fact, looking back with the gift of hindsight. Small choices compound, over time, into large effects. What Frost's poem evokes is the subtle sadness that hovers around choice, that we cannot know the full outcome of our choices in advance. We do not know what roads will lead to what. It is often impossible to choose between two paths that look "really about the same" and yet will eventually "make all the difference."

Tolkien, Lewis, and Frost are all pointing at a middle way: a way to be directed but open, aimless but focused. A way to seek a destination without having it in mind.

The point is not to stop trying to achieve something great but to stop trying to achieve a specific great thing.

The point is to open yourself to possibilities, to see that the answer might not lie where you expect to see it. In an experiment by Richard Wiseman, subjects were asked to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. "It turns out that those who focused on the goal of counting the photographs took significantly longer to complete the task than those who were less focused on the objective. Why? The more open-minded participants noticed that on the inside of page two Wiseman had written, 'Stop counting: there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.' While some might say that noticing the answer on page two is only luck, the deeper lesson is that focusing too much on your goal can actually prevent you from making useful unexpected discoveries."

How, then, can you decide what to do? Choosing matters, but it is not clear what future paths open or close based on our choices, and objectives are nothing more than empty palliatives that, while making the difficulty of choice easier to swallow, do not help in the long run. What criteria can possibly help in this situation?

One answer is to pursue novelty. Novelty is a good stepping stone identifier because "anything novel is a stepping stone to more novelty." Novelty is a useful shortcut to identifying the quality of interestingness—ideas that open up new possibilities.

Novelty is like compound interest. The more of it you have, the more of it you can find.

To demonstrate why novelty can help lead to interesting results even without a specific objective, Stanley and Lehman provide a thought experiment about designing a robot that can travel down a hallway with an open door at the end. Most experiments of this sort would set the objective for the robot to travel down the hallway and pass through the door. However, the authors also show how the same behavior could be accomplished using a novelty-search algorithm. They code the robot to try something different every time it goes down the hallway. At first, it crashes into the wall. Then it crashes again and again. It may seem frustrating to watch the robot continually crash into walls, but from the perspective of a novelty search, this is a good thing because it will ultimately lead to a desired behavior. At some point, after crashing into enough walls, there will be no more locations for the robot to crash. It will have exhausted all crash opportunities, and the only way for the robot to do something novel will be to not crash.

Learning to avoid walls was never the robot's objective, yet it achieved it merely by implementing a novelty search—by trying to exhaust all the existing possibilities. It's the same idea as Adam Douglass's lesson on learning to fly by missing the ground.

Novelty search doesn't just work for robots and algorithms. You can make serious progress in any chosen field by embracing novelty. The more you do things and simultaneously avoid redoing things (and this is the crucial part), the more interesting stuff reveals itself. It's why many seasoned creatives advise novices to quickly generate a lot of bad work. It's a form of novelty search. Ray Bradbury tells young writers to write a new story every single week for a year. Writing fifty-two short stories is not unlike the robot crashing into the wall. You'll crash-write a bunch of crap, but by searching for that many story ideas, eventually, you'll "go through the door" and write a good one. In novelty search, volume is your friend.

Novelty works like this because it's related to knowledge in a fundamental way. As Stanley and Lehman observe, "Because eventually you have to acquire some kind of knowledge to continue to produce novelty, it means that novelty search is a kind of information accumulator about the world in which it takes place."

The prime example of novelty search in nature is evolution. Evolution works by encoding knowledge of the world in genes. For new niches to arise and for new species to develop, it must seek novelty at every turn (which is why transcription errors are a feature, not a bug). As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, biological evolution must become more complex to generate more novelty ("biological diversity"). Evolution never set out with the objective of creating human brains, yet it did so in the search for novel ways to survive and reproduce on Earth. In its search for novelty, evolution encodes more and more useful information about the world.

While it's fine and good to shun objectives, the problem arises when you try to decide what to do instead. Part of the reason objectives are so seductive is because they offer a clear choice of what to do next. There isn't much practical application in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned beyond:

• Pursue novelty for its own sake

• Embrace the role of the treasure hunter

But the physicist David Deutsch, whose work aligns nicely with the ideas in this book, seems to have developed a useful framework for how to pursue activities without succumbing to the siren lure of objectives. He calls it the fun criterion.

A quick breakdown of the idea follows. Deutsch identifies that there are many different kinds of ideas in the mind (many more than are usually recognized by words or philosophical constructs). These ideas interact with each other, and many of them are necessary for thinking: solving problems, conjecturing solutions, and so on.

Deutsch divides the ideas into two main categories:

• Conscious ideas (you are aware of these ideas in your mind)

• Unconscious ideas (you are not aware of these ideas in your mind)

Furthermore, conscious ideas can be further divided into two types:

• Explicit ideas (what can be expressed in ordinary language)

• Inexplicit ideas (what cannot be expressed in ordinary language)

Good examples of inexplicit ideas can be found in sports. Say you're playing tennis, and the ball is coming over the net, and you need to decide if it is going out of bounds. Based on that decision, you will decide to either run toward the ball or not. An idea exists in your mind, it is criticized, and a decision is made, but never in this mental processing do the words "the ball is going out of bounds" appear in your mind.

We're left with three main buckets of ideas that exist in the mind: explicit, inexplicit, and unconscious. But it's not that simple! First, these ideas coexist in your mind and cannot be easily translated from one to the other. To make matters worse, no idea is wholly explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious. For example, even language—which is the definition of an explicit idea—contains an inexplicit component: grammar. We can understand grammar, and those who are good with language can recognize when grammar is "right" or “wrong," just like a good tennis player has a strong sense of where the ball will end up, but in both cases, it is hard to define those ideas with words.

Since these ideas are all ways to create knowledge, Deutsch applies Karl Popper's theory of knowledge to each one of them:

• None are justified

• Any (or all) can be mistaken (we expect them to be, in fact)

• They are all corrected by problem-solving, conjecture, and criticism

When we encounter a problem, there are often many theories involved, and while some will be explicit, some will be inexplicit, and some will be unconscious. It will, therefore, be difficult to criticize these ideas because, first of all, you won't know what all the theories are (they are unconscious), and second, even those you know about will be difficult to express in language and therefore hard to criticize (they are inexplicit). When you're faced with this situation (which happens all the time), you need a criterion for how to resolve conflicts between these different ideas.

When the decision involves two explicit ideas, it's fairly easy and obvious how to decide: you criticize the two approaches or run an experiment to see which one is better.

But if you have an inexplicit idea, it's harder, and if you have an unconscious idea, it's almost impossible (and you may have multiple unconscious ideas in conflict with each other). When an unconscious idea conflicts with your other ideas, it will affect your feelings. You will have a mood.

This, by the way, is why you get tired when you think about doing hard work. Let's say you want to write a novel. You might have an explicit theory of how things will go. It will be “easy," according to this theory. A novel is about 100,000 words, and you can write 1,000 words per day, which means you can write a novel in only 100 days; you can even take a day off every three days and still write a novel in a year (hell, you can even write only 1,000 words per week and still write your novel in two years). However, every time you sit down to write your novel, you find that you cannot do it. You find you are "not in the mood" to write; this is because your unconscious has a conflicting theory that this endeavor is going to be much more difficult than your explicit theory has presented it, and your unconscious is trying to keep you from wasting your time. So you always feel "tired" when it's time to write your novel, regardless of how much or little sleep you got the night before, and that feeling indicates a conflict between an explicit idea and an unconscious one.

There are different criteria for how to choose between these different ideas. A common criterion is to try to disregard everything but your explicit theories. In the novel writing example, you ignore your "mood" and plow through your 1,000 words per day; 100 days later, you have a big pile of words, but they're not very good, and your novel structure is a mess, and to "finish" would require a lot more work than you expected. Your unconscious is vindicated.

Another criterion is the "romantic" one, in which you dismiss all explicit ideas as mechanistic, inhuman, or ignoble. In this criterion, what is real is what you feel, and ideas that look too much like logic are dismissed. In the novel example, you spend years not writing a single word because you are never in the right mood. You never write a novel, but someday you might when the stars align.

Both of these approaches, Deutsch argues, are irrational because they ignore the content of the ideas in favor of judging them based on where they came from (whether they are explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious).

When your ideas conflict, you have to create new knowledge to solve the discrepancies. You need conjecture, criticism, and error correction. But that's difficult to do if you can't translate your ideas into the same language. Explicit ideas, inexplicit ideas, and unconscious ideas, however, can all take each other into account, even if they cannot "communicate" directly. You want to get into a state of mind where all these different ideas are affecting each other, and that state of mind feels like fun.

A lack of fun is, therefore, a type of criticism of the current situation you find yourself in. The fun criterion is not a method for choosing what to do, but it is a way to criticize your method of choosing what to do. It's an ingenious way of choosing activities without relying on objectives. It is a manner of criticizing across the explicit-inexplicit-unconscious barriers. Because when you feel fun, your explicit, inexplicit, and unconscious theories are in alignment.

Deutsch's definition of "fun" sounds similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of "flow," the mental state of being fully immersed in an activity. When you're in flow, you experience effortlessness, a sense of connection, focus, and timelessness. All your ideas are communicating with each other, whether explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious.

How, then, do you decide what to do without objectives? You choose activities that put you in a fun/flow state.

A few caveats. First, the fun criterion does not justify doing only what feels good. It might feel good to smoke weed and play video games all day, but if you do that for too long, you'll likely experience feelings of dread or unease, a sense that you are wasting your life. This is an unconscious idea that will conflict with this way of life. You're also likely to have many explicit ideas about how type of activity is not good for you long-term. Therefore, activities like this conflict with the fun criterion even though they seem, at first glance, to be "fun."

Likewise, on the other end of the spectrum, "just grind it out" fails the fun criterion. Too often, we justify tedious, boring, or unenjoyable work for the promise that it will "all be worth it" in the end. Deutsch questions this line of thinking because you can always reframe your approach to your work. If you are interested in a problem and doing what seems like "boring work" as the best way to explore the problem, it will not be tedious to you because you will be undergoing the work in the context of the problem you are trying to solve. In your work lies hope, ideas, and creativity. "Boring work" is only boring when it is someone else's problem. If you're interested in the problem, it doesn't matter how "tedious" the work appears to an outsider. You will find it interesting.

The idea of working for months or years on a boring thing is terribly dangerous—especially in science, art, and invention (everything I have been exploring in this essay), where there is zero assurance that it will have been "worth it." You can run science experiments for a decade with no clear answers; your invention may never work or never hit “product-market fit"; your novel may never sell. You have to do it so that even if it's completely wrong, or terrible, or whatever, it will still have been fun.

You can spend your entire life in the search space—in the Piranesian hall of statues—looking for something novel, for something interesting, and you may never find it. But that does not mean that spending time searching will have been worthless because what is worthwhile is the search itself. As Stanley and Lehman demonstrate in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, you likely won't find what you were looking for, but if you keep looking, you are likely to find something.

To demonstrate why the objective does not matter, Deutsch gives the example of a search party. Imagine that someone has been lost in the mountains during a terrible blizzard. A search party is sent out to look for them. Experienced mountaineers and teams of dogs hit the slopes trying to find the missing person. Even if they don't find them, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the search party who will say it was not worth doing. And even if they find the person, the specific member of the search party who found them is no different from the rest of the search party. The missing person, once found, will thank "everyone involved in the search."

Because the search is the most important part. The search doesn't guarantee you will find anything, but you can't find anything without the search. As the Cheshire Cat says to Alice, you're sure to get somewhere if only you walk long enough.

So keep going. Keep exploring. Relax your reliance on objectives. See what's out there. Follow what's interesting. As Deutsch says, do what is fun. Try and solve problems that are interesting to you because even if you fail (and you likely will), it will still be worth it.

And you never know: you might find something you never even imagined was possible.

Some news and links:

• One of my short stories was recently accepted for publication! I'll have a horror story, currently titled "Open the Door" coming out on The Witch House in late October. Check it out around Halloween if you're interested!

• Speaking of creepy stories, I also published a new story/essay hybrid over the summer on my Substack, The Unnerving. It's about what happens when you try to quit social media. Check it out here.

What does it even mean to publish something in 2024? You're reading this essay because a few minutes ago, I pressed a little blue button that said: "publish." Over the last thirty-plus years, internet technology has made it easy for anyone to publish anything, in virtually any form, anywhere, at any time, to anyone. There is an unprecedented amount of publishing freedom available today compared to any time in the past.

Still, a weird idea persists: the publisher.

Even when you can publish whatever you want, many writers seek the prestige of a publisher. It's right there in our words. When we speak of "self-publishing," we make a critical distinction: this is not the same thing. While the stigma of self-publishing is diminishing—and more so every year—there still exists an aura of legitimacy around "traditional" publishing. Because anyone can do it, self-published works are often considered to be of lower quality than those subjected to editorial review.

Publishing signifies success.

But this is an old idea, and one that doesn't square against existing technology. If everyone can self-publish, do we need publishers? What value do they provide? When words needed to be physically printed, distributed, and stored somewhere, the value was clearer. Publishing required a technology stack that was too expensive and complicated for writers to manage on their own. Publishers took care of it for them—along with other duties like promotion and payment processing. But in a world of digital distribution, strong self-promotional tools like social media, accessible payment processing (through companies like Stripe), and even print-on-demand for physical books, it feels like the perceived value of a publisher is mostly that—perceived.

If you've ever spent much time trying to query your work or place your writing in a traditional journal, you'll experience first-hand how painful the process can be compared to self-publishing online.

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to place poems in traditional journals. I had a spreadsheet to track every submission, noting submission requirements and response timelines. Mostly, I spent the process waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Virtually every submission took months to receive a response. Some took years. Almost all of the journals declined my work. All of this is normal—the wait times, and the low acceptance rates. Editors and established writers will tell you to keep at it. Keep sending your work into the void. There's even a name for it: the slush pile. While you're patiently waiting for a decision, your work ... sits there. It stagnates in a Schrödinger's purgatory halfway between finished and unfinished; a creative zombie that's neither dead nor alive.

At the same time, I also published poems on Instagram. I think I needed to do it to keep myself sane. There were so many poems coming out of me at the time that to keep them all locked away in spreadsheets and Submittable queues would have driven me mad. When I published on Instagram, the process was straightforward. I copied the poem into Canva, downloaded it as an image, and pressed publish. Instantly, the poem went out to hundreds of people who had opted in to read my poetry. I got instantaneous feedback on what they thought. I went back to writing my next poem.

Self-publishing was so clearly better from a time, process, and emotional standpoint that I gave up submitting to journals entirely. I put all the work out myself. I needed to clear all those poems from my unconscious, freeing up space for me to work on other things. I needed to put them out into the world. While you're waiting to hear if a piece of writing will be accepted, it lingers in your mind, clogging your creative muscles, and keeping you from fully focusing on your next piece.

Good writing requires a slow, steady, consistent output. At every stage of the writing process, including publication.

But while traditional publication has lost many of its advantages, I still think there are important benefits. A traditional publication gives a writer:

• Access to new audiences

• A curatorial stamp of approval (which can boost confidence)

• Visibility with critical tastemakers

The benefits of self-publishing, however, are fairly strong too. Self-publication gives a writer:

• A steady output of work

• Instantaneous feedback (which can help you improve quickly)

• A direct line of communication to their biggest fans

Is there a way to unify these two approaches? Bring together the best of both worlds? Does it have to be one or the other—can we not have it all?

I think that we can. I think there's a better way to write, read, and publish online.

It starts with changing our vocabulary.

The first step is to redefine what it means to "publish." Thankfully, we already have a fantastic word that we can swap in its place: curation.

The article that kickstarted my thinking on this idea is Timothy Green's piece in LitMag News, Uncurated: The Case for a New Term in Art. As Green unequivocally states: "The word 'published' bears no weight in the digital age, and yet, purely out of habit and momentum, we still pretend that it does." He goes on to attack a particularly frustrating part of the "publication" process: that most journals require that your work be "previously unpublished" and that they count sharing it online—including posting it to social media—as publication.

Add the months and years it can take journals to respond to your submission, and you can see a clear recipe for frustration. While you wait for a response, your work is trapped in submission jail, unable to see the light of day. As Green points out, waiting for a submission response kills the spontaneity of creative work: "Poems, especially, must be banished from our friends and fans when they matter most—when they're fresh and relevant to the cultural conversation."

If a piece feels timely, it's difficult to capture the moment if you have to wait for publication. Just a few weeks ago, I published the essay, In Praise of Going Slow, a piece that had been simmering in my mind for years. It finally came together when I sensed the right moment: an emerging slowcore scene on Farcaster. It would have been very difficult to time the zeitgeist if I had needed to wait months to publish my essay.

Publish is an old word. As Green points out, it comes from the 14th century when books were still copied by hand. Publishing anything was difficult. It was a labor-intensive, time-consuming process, but today, in our digital, software-eaten world, publishing has never been easier.

We could throw out the idea of publishers and publications entirely. Unshackle writers from all gatekeepers and let them publish independently, whenever they wish, and to whoever wants to read them. But there is still value that a publication can provide, and as a long-standing publisher of the poetry magazine, Rattle, Green knows what that value is: "I've come to realize," he writes, "that what I've been providing for my entire career isn't publication at all: it's curation, from the Latin 'curare,' which means to take care of. I'm not a publisher; I'm a curator."

Green goes on to propose replacing the term "published" with "curated." A poem is uncurated, not unpublished. A journal like Rattle curates poems. It does not "publish" them. I agree wholeheartedly with this approach. It pushes language in the direction it needs to go, towards embracing the reality of what it's like to write and share in the twenty-first century.

Curation is an important concept not just because it's a better term for the valuable work that publishers provide, but because it's also the critically missing piece of what has been termed the "creator economy." I've written before about my dissatisfaction with the creator economy, specifically the way that it contorts creative expression, twisting it into high-velocity "content" that helps to grow platform engagement at the expense of both creators and consumers.

Can we fix the creator economy? I think so, and I think the answer may be provided by Timothy Green's salient insight that publication is curation.

The central problem with the creator economy is that it places the creator at the center of its universe. Everyone, regardless of what they are doing (or would like to do) must become a creator to unlock value, and in turn, the creator becomes responsible for everything involved in creative production.

In his essay, How can we grow the Creator Economy from the 1% to the other 99%? Abhishek Agarwal points out that the creator economy rests on a particular monetizable relationship: that between the content and its creator. As Agarwal says, "The value is in the network but it is the content::creator unit that is seen as the monetizable entity." But there's a lot more happening in online networks that create value besides creating content. "Every user active on a digital content platform influences not only distribution," Agarwal writes, "but actively supplies fodder for the content that emerges within these environments." Online networks work on a 90-9-1 ratio, in which 90% of users are "lurkers" (they read but don't actively participate), 9% contribute occasionally, and 1% account for the majority of contributions. As Agarwal rightly observes, the creator economy rewards the 1% of users who contribute the most content at the expense of the 99% of other users who are nonetheless instrumental in growing the platform (and its associated value) as a whole.

The 90-9-1 ratio is much older than online communities, however. It's just that the scale of online networks has made the relationship noticeable. But if you look at the history of creative movements, you'll see a similar breakdown. Literary scenes, for instance, were not built by writers alone. They had many other people contributing in various ways to create a vibrant scene. There were four roles, and they map nicely to the 90-9-1 ratio:

• Writers (the 1%) - creative, generative

• Critics (the 9%) - critical, curatorial

• Readers (the 90%) - receptive, quiet

• Librarians (the platform) - preservative, archival

Enough has been said about writers; they play the obvious role, and in the creator economy, that role has been placed in the spotlight.

But what's a writer without readers? A silly, posturing thing. It would seem obvious that for any literary culture to flourish, it would need writers like an organism needs oxygen. Yet digital platforms can struggle here. They court writers, hoping that readers will naturally follow—but they don't always. Witness Substack Notes, a platform full of writers writing to ... other writers.

The reader is the lurker of the creator economy—the 90%—and they present two "problems" for platforms:

• How do you get them to participate

• How do you measure their (often invisible) contributions

Though the gatekeepers have been abolished, and anyone can publish anything, most people choose to remain silent. Why? This appears to greatly annoy platform owners. Shortly after taking control of Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted that "90% of Twitter users read, but don't tweet, reply, or like." He then introduced public view counts as a way to "show how much more alive Twitter is."

This is typical "creator economy" thinking: how do you measure (so that you can monetize) an invisible activity? How do you make the platform appear more appealing—more "alive"—if 90% of its participants are silent and invisible?

You try to goad them into posting more. You try and convert some of the 90% into active participants. This line of reasoning never bothers to wonder why somebody is happy to lurk. It's a particular sort of blindness, an inability to see the value that a reader brings if they don't also do something in the form of a public appraisal. If a digital platform can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Most of the positive contributions that lurkers make to a social platform are invisible—or dark. Activities like texting someone a link, taking a screenshot of a post and sharing it on a different site, and telling someone IRL about a great blog—these all help to grow networks but are mostly unseen on the network.

Trying to entice lurkers to participate more also completely misses the point: just because anybody can publish doesn't mean they should; and more subtly, it doesn't mean they should want to. Before social media, it was a completely natural idea that someone could spend their entire life reading books without ever once entertaining the idea that they should write one.

The creator economy has not done well in courting readers. It "cares" about readers, but only in two dysfunctional ways:

• Turning them into creators ("you, too, can make money doing this")

• Aggressively tracking (and monetizing) their activities

But readers are the largest cohort and the value they provide is the entire value of the scene. There is no value to provide to creators without extracting something from its lurkers—time, money, attention—but that value should flow back to them in turn. They should receive more than empty promises. The question is not how to turn lurkers into participants but how to make their time spent on the platform worthwhile.

Speaking of platforms, we come to the third role: the librarian. Their role is to preserve. They ensure that the output of work is available to be consumed and that consumers can find what they are looking for via discovery mechanisms.

When words were bound to physical form, libraries took physical shape, too. This left them vulnerable to catastrophe and also required that they make decisions on what to preserve, how to preserve it, and for how long.

But in our digital age, librarianship has changed, too. Most words are now stored digitally, and the largest library in the world is Google. In addition to processing 3.5 billion searches of information daily, Google Books stores over 40 million titles in more than 500 languages, free and accessible online. The goal is to scan all 130 million distinct book titles in existence, which would make Google Books the library of all libraries.

The librarian role has been replaced by the digital platforms themselves. They are now the storehouses of the enormous quantities of data produced every second on our planet. The drastically shrinking cost of storage—combined with the emergence of large language models (LLMs)—creates an information-storage system that the librarians of Alexandria could only dream of. You can now, theoretically, store everything and access everything via AI librarian centaurs who help you surface key information from vast oceans of data.

Today, most people browse online via platforms that store all the content generated on them and make that content available via algorithmically-generated feeds. While platforms are fairly well-suited to their role as content storehouses, what is becoming increasingly clear is that platforms are also trying to become curators via recommendation engines. This has not worked out at all.

The writer creates, the reader receives, the librarian stores and the curator decides what is worthwhile and why.

The curator (also known as the "critic" in literary circles) decides what is valuable, to whom is it valuable, and why it is valuable. They create and sustain culture. Their role is to build and maintain canons—not "set in stone" canons that can never change, but living breathing ones that adapt to changing times. The curator understands creative work and they understand the times in which they live, knitting those two understandings together to create scenes. They are the ultimate vibe masters.

In the creator economy, the curatorial role has been replaced by algorithms, and this is a problem for several reasons. The algorithm cannot sense vibes. It doesn't understand culture. It cannot understand how a piece of creative work does or does not fit within a certain milieu. It cannot tell what is worth recommending and what is not without first receiving feedback—which is pointless, because it is the curator's job to recommend what is worthy of attention, not the other way around. The algorithm has it backward. It requires that you first do stuff on the platform, and then, based on that history, will recommend more of the same.

The human curator informs the reader what is valuable and worth their time, and the reader thanks them for it. The algorithm curator waits for the reader to tell them what is valuable, and then feeds them more of it. The algorithm doesn't even do the work of curation. They outsource it to the reader.

But this is how all social media feeds and recommendation algorithms work. They gather information on what you consume and then feed you more based on that initial input. They quite literally cannot do anything else. They are not capable of introducing true novelty.

These algorithms also do not have preservative instincts across time. They cannot create canons. They cannot highlight work that is worth coming back to. Work that inspires more work. Everything is ephemeral, doomed to dissipate beneath a relentless stream of content.

There's also a biological quirk that renders the entire system insane. For completely understandable reasons, evolution has ensured that humans respond to potential threats more immediately than to anything else in their environment. It's a system that makes sense—if you see a tiger in a field of berries, it doesn't matter how delicious the berries look, all you're going to pay attention to is the tiger. Because while eating is important, the tiger might kill you, rendering the need to eat moot.

This means that algorithms, in trying to assess what interests you, will, over time, feed you more and more content that triggers a threat response. The algorithm is blindly trying to give you "more of what you want" by tracking where your attention lies, but where your attention does not point to what you want, it points to what you fear. If you want to know what someone's afraid of, look at their social media feed for a day.

Platform owners don't care because the numbers keep going up. It doesn't matter what biological systems are contorted to make it happen, value accrues when the numbers go up. And if the numbers stop going up, they can simply introduce new metrics—like views—and make those numbers go up.

But it's not all doom and gloom. A recent study in Nature showed that being online can have "a positive effect on welfare" and that the Internet might "boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose." I've experienced this positive side of being online—along with the bad—which makes me realize that there's nothing inherently bad about these technologies. The danger is when they are deployed in ways that do not understand these dynamics; when human flourishing is ignored in favor of making certain metrics go up.

One way to rethink these platforms is to think about all the users across the 90-0-1 ratio; to figure out how to share a platform's overall value with all its contributors, big and small. In the creator economy, this means rewarding readers and curators alongside creators.

Our digital systems generate noise and there's little the algorithms can do about it. We need curators—good curators—who can help us navigate these noisy waters and promote positive signals.

Only then can we possibly build a creator economy that isn't just predatory. That doesn't just promote the top one percent of creators. For vibrant creative scenes to function, the value must flow to all four roles. Good work must be created, and it must be identified, amplified, and stored for the future. Only then can you create an environment favorable to readers, which increases the value of the entire scene.

Strong curation is the missing piece. It produces better readers—and better writers. It unlocks the value provided by both creators and lurkers. It creates digital platforms worth spending time on.

For this system to work, curation labor must unlock value. How do you do that? Via protocols that allow payment to flow to the creator, the curator, and the platform; and by creating a space that is attractive for readers.

Let's imagine creating one for poetry, as an example.

First, built a simple app for posting and reading poetry. You could use the Farcaster protocol and create a client that reads certain channels—the Poetry channel, for starters. Make the experience simple and beautiful. Focus on readers—you want to create a space where it's easy to engage in poetry. A space that encourages close reading and deep thought—away from the casino incentives and constant interruptions that are typical of traditional social media platforms. A client on top of an existing protocol is the perfect system.

Then, hook the client up to a payment system—it could be Zora or Paragraph—for minting and creator rewards. Make it easy for readers to collect their favorite poems, create curated lists, and "super like" in the form of transferring money to poets.

Encourage readers to follow poets they like, and encourage poets to post their work to the network, unlocking value instantaneously.

Next, encourage good curators to take on the traditional role of journals. As Timothy Green argued in his "Curation Revolution," good poetry journals are good curators of work. These editors would then browse the feed, looking for good poems. When they identify one that they would like to curate, they can set up a contract with the author to split future funds that come from the additional exposure.

When a reader mints a poem, both the creator and the curator receive a portion of the funds (along with a small percentage to the platform). Curators could then create their own journals—which could be channels on the Farcaster protocol—collating their collections into a separate feed, making it easy for readers to browse and collect. You can see how this curatorial work is rewarded. If you curate strong work that readers want to collect, you get a small cut for every transaction.

To bootstrap the network, you could make poems in the public domain mintable. Funds from these poems could then be added to a grant used to pay poets and curators who are active on the network.

Attract great writers. Share the funds they generate directly with them. Attract great readers. Make their time valuable. Attract great curators who help bring readers and writers together. Create a repository of great work and ensure it's available in the future.

If you pulled this off, would you have satisfied the criteria I listed out earlier? Will you have created a system that combines the best of both worlds? The freedom and flexibility of self-publishing with the exposure boost of traditional publishing? Would this system give writers the following:

• Access to new audiences

• A curatorial stamp of approval

• Visibility with critical tastemakers

• A steady flow of work

• Instantaneous feedback

• A direct line of communication to their biggest fans

I think that it would. Imagine: you finish a poem and post it to the network. Those already following you see it and read it immediately. Your biggest fans mint it, transferring money directly to you. A curator finds your work and deploys a smart contract to list it in their journal. You get more exposure, resulting in more money and increased followers, which in turn boosts your future work and unlocks value from your long tail of published creations.

The trick is that we've separated publication and curation. Creators publish. All on their own; when they're ready; as little or as often as they wish. "Publishers" curate. They pick out what they like and boost its exposure. The slush pile is now a public feed—open for all to see. Anyone can contribute to it; anyone can read what's in it; anyone can curate work from it.

No longer will you have to wait for someone to choose your work. When it's done, it's published—available to all. On a platform specifically designed to attract readers and curators.

Now it just needs someone to build it.

If you enjoyed this essay, you can collect it right here on Paragraph. Or, if you'd prefer, you can collect a screenshot version of this essay on Zora:

Collect NFT

It's been pointed out by a few curators now, such as @adrienne, who identified it as a new trend. In episode 105 (May 15, 2024) of GM Farcaster, Adrienne describes the trend as "intentional, thoughtful, building to last, building for the long-term." It's an idea that goes against the Zuckerberg ethos to "move fast and break things." Slowcore could thus be summarized as "move slow and preserve things."

It's an interesting idea made more interesting by its emergence on a social media platform, since social media has traditionally aided in the rapid spread of information across virality vectors, collapsing context into a single, endless, dopaminergically-charged information feed. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy, social media is a constantly exploding powder keg, jettisoning information quickly and efficiently through its various streams. "Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don't do much for us," Odell points out, "but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement."

In this climate, how quickly information spreads is more important than the content of the information. It's not too much to state that social media platforms are not for their users—or even the companies that own them—but are explicitly designed for the efficient spread of memes. Speed is everything.

It would be delightfully ironic, then, to see a social media platform incubate and then spread a "slowcore" movement across the broader web, as @cameron suggests in this cast:

There are a few channels that identify "slow" as a key defining feature, such as SlowCoLab, hosted by @slowcrypto, and Slowcore HQ, hosted by @danicaswanson and @trishd.

And there's a manifesto: "What is Slowcore," written by Danica Swanson and available as an NFT on Zora. As Swanson writes, "Slowcore is an affirmation of a commitment to cultivating patience, holding space for emergence, protecting our time and attention from extractive forces, and respecting the indwelling intelligence of the creative process."

Again, I am reminded of Jenny Odell and How to Do Nothing, where she writes that part of "doing nothing" is "about disengaging from the attention economy" in order to "reengage with something else." Both Odell and Swanson have pointed their sights directly at the extractive forces behind the commercial web of the '10s and '20s, asking the question: can we build internet platforms and social media networks with different incentives built in? To do so, we might first have to incubate a slower frame of mind.

To go slow, then, is to actively resist the push and pull of social networks, to carve out a space to think in other directions, to re-engage with older, deeper ideas, and to move at a measured deliberate pace—if you choose to even "move" at all.

In my last article, I examined different writing paces and came to the conclusion that there are many different ways to write, and therefore, many different writing paces. Like genre, voice, or style, most writers have a natural pace, one that they feel is comfortable and aligned to their temperament.

Today, I want to examine the idea of going slow—and how it relates to writing, specifically. Why do some writers go slow? What sort of work can it unlock? Why might you benefit from a slower pace? Because going slow isn't just accomplishing less in the same timespan. It's a completely different way of viewing work—a phase change that unlocks a new way of seeing the world.

Consider this my opening contribution to the Slowcore movement.

Over the last 10 years or so, a powerful idea has seized the productivity world: 10x thinking. The idea is that you should push yourself to set goals that are 10 times greater than you initially believed possible. For instance, if your goal is to get 1,000 email subscribers, you should go for 10,000 instead. If you want to sell a million copies of your book, set your goal at 10 million. And so forth.

Setting wildly ambitious goals challenges you to think differently about your problem. Normally, when we set goals, we tend to look at progress in incremental, step-wise fashion. You get your first email subscriber, then your second, then your third, and so on. How you go from one to two is the same as how you go from 9,999 to 10,000.

But this isn't how it works. Getting your 10,000th subscriber is fundamentally different from getting your first. Or your one-hundredth. The process of getting more subscribers changes as your subscriber list grows.

By aiming for the 10x improvement out of the gate, you force yourself to look at the problem in a radically different way—a way that is fundamentally required to hit big goals, such as 10,000 email subscribers.

The 10x idea likely originated from research on programmer productivity. A study from the 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant revealed the existence of a "10x programmer"—someone who is 10 times more productive than other developers with the same level of experience. Specifically, these developers were found to be able to solve problems in 1/10 the time or with 1/10 the amount of code.

Not surprisingly, the idea became popular in Silicon Valley in the '00s and '10s. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is said to "live by the gospel of 10x." For Page, it is not enough to "focus on incremental improvements." Big leaps are required—moonshots that pay off in dramatic ways.

For some, like entrepreneurial coach Dan Sullivan, "10x is easier than 2x." Because 10x thinking changes your relationship to your goals—and also your process—it's actually easier to make a single big change than a series of incremental ones.

What's interesting about 10x thinking, however, is how often these stretch goals—these moonshots—stretch the time component of the goal. Tim Ferriss has a provocative question along these lines: "What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?" As Ferriss explains, the question is designed to "productively break your mind." You're forced to eliminate all the pre-existing frameworks and assumptions around your life. You would have to radically change how you do virtually everything to achieve a 10-year goal in only six months.

You may think I'm about to take apart the idea of 10x thinking to show how it's faulty, or even dangerous. But I'm not going to do that. Because I actually think there's something here.

Not only is 10x thinking true, it's built into the fabric of reality. In his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch makes a strong argument for the universal reach of explanations. For Deutsch, a good explanation not only explains a particular problem, but explains things that cannot even be known until the explanation exists. A good explanation becomes "universal." As Deutsch says, "all knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain." It is what numerals did for math, what evolution did for biology, and what Einstein's theory of relativity did for our contemporary understanding of the universe.

It is this universality that 10x thinking invites you to consider—how to break out of the incremental and into the infinite.

But I agree with everything about 10x thinking except one thing: its implied direction. Because infinity goes both ways. There are infinitely many large numbers, and infinitely many small ones, too. Time goes infinitely forward, and infinitely backward.

10x thinking is powerful because it induces a phase change to your thinking. When you go from a liquid to a gas, the molecular structure shifts. Vapor behaves in profoundly different ways than water.

What I propose is that you consider a phase change in the other direction. When you go from a liquid to a solid, the molecular structure also changes. Slowing down also dispenses with incremental progress. It, too, can unlock infinity. It, too, requires a completely different way to think about your work.

Instead of a 10x goal, what if you set a /10 goal? What if, instead of trying to go 10 times bigger or 10 times faster, you went 10 times smaller? Or 10 times slower?

What would you make?

What if instead of going from 1,000 email subscribers up to 10,000, you went from 1,000 down to 100? What type of work would you have to create, to make it that small? That intimate? Just like going up from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 necessitates a change in the type of content you create and the strategies you deploy for list-building, going down to 100 subscribers does the same. What kind of content do you create now? What does your list-building (really, list-destroying) strategy look like?

There's something exciting about this. Just like building a 10,000 strong email list from 1,000 is exciting, slimming it down to just 100 people has a special thrill. With only 100 subscribers, you could do something profoundly different with email. You could actually have a 1:1 relationship (or close to it) with every person on your list. If you only had 100 subscribers, who would you want those people to be?

What would you create for a hundred people that you could not create for 10,000?

Or, to take Tim Ferriss's advice and turn it on its head, what if you took your six-month goals and stretched them out to 10 years?

Let's say you have a blog, and you plan to write an article every week for the second half of this year. That's about 26 blog posts. Now, imagine you have 10 years to write 26 blog posts. That's one about every six months. What would a blog post look like if you spent six months on it?

If you gave yourself a 10-year horizon, would you even write blog posts? Would you write something else instead?

What kind of project would you commit yourself to if you could dedicate 10 years to it? What would it mean to work on something for that long without any expectation of a result? Without even having to finish? What if you gave yourself twenty years? Thirty?

I'm 36, which means if I "retire" from writing at the average retirement age, I'll have about thirty more years at it. What does thirty years of writing mean to me? What can I create in that timescale? It's actually hard to imagine.

But writing doesn't have to stop in your 60s. What if I'm writing for another forty years? Another fifty? It's extremely likely that I'm selling myself short—underestimating what I can accomplish, given the actual timeline ahead of me. What if I stopped chasing incremental progress and went for something big—something that would require me to go slow. What if you did the same?

What could you create if you intentionally went slow? What would happen if you took your time?

In the 2020 Pixar film Soul, Joe Gardner has a dream. He works in a middle school, but when he's not teaching music, he's trying to make it as a jazz musician. One day, he gets the chance of a lifetime to perform with a renowned jazz quartet. For Joe, everything has been leading to this big moment.

After he plays, Joe, filled with buzzing excitement, asks the band leader what happens next. The response is simple and powerful: "well, same thing tomorrow."

It's a beautiful moment because, from inside the point-of-view of creation, what separates the artist from before they "make it" big and after is ... nothing. The process doesn't change at all. You can write a viral blog post that gets a million views, and the next day, you'll write another blog post. You can sell a novel for six figures, and the next day, what will you do? Start on your next novel.

What changes before and after you "make it" is other people's perceptions, but one thing remains the same: you still have to keep making things.

The enduring appeal of 10x thinking lies in its potential to unlock economic opportunities. More reach = more opportunities to get paid. But what would it mean if there were platforms that reversed this relationship? What if sacrificing reach did not mean sacrificing economic opportunity? What if you could make something for a small subset of the population—and they would pay for it? Can web3 get us there? I'm not sure, but I'm interested in finding out.

Going slow means rethinking our ideas about "making it." Economics is focused on results, but art is about process. It's about finding a way to keep making things, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

And 10x thinking is all about results. It makes sense to pursue this kind of thinking if you're in business—results, and money, matter—but if you're creating art, going slow may matter even more. Because the whole point of making art is to make more art. There's no escape from incremental progress. There's no "moonshot" that "finishes" your writing once and for all. To be a writer is to write. Day after day after day after day...

So give yourself time to do your best work. Embrace a long horizon. Because tomorrow, you'll do the same thing, anyway.

You can collect this essay right here on Paragraph, but if you'd prefer, you can collect a screenshot of /10 Thinking on Zora:

Collect NFT

Special thanks to Danica Swanson who read an early draft of this essay and provided valuable feedback and editing.

Some news:

• I recently published a strange story-essay hybrid on Thomas Ligotti for my Substack The Unnerving. I wrote about puppets and manikins, and how they might help us understand artificial intelligence algorithms like ChatGPT. Also, I examined the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. Check it out here.

Of course, there are lots of great artists who produce equally great works on a much slower timeline. Authors who publish one great book a decade and musicians who wait many years between albums. What I'm getting at here is my usual spiel, which is that it all depends on the individual artist's process and temperament. Some artists need to spend a long time on a project. That's the only way they can produce great work. But other artists thrive on productivity.

I think Michel is generally correct here. Artists are individuals, each with their own process and temperament. In writing, much is said about "voice"—that quality of your writing that makes it uniquely your own. But as Michel points out, pace is another dimension of writing that has an individualized component. In fact, I think there are five dimensions that each writer must figure out for themselves:

• Form (or, if you prefer, "genre")

• Voice (also: style)

• Pace

• Scope

• Setting

There is a particular form, voice, pace, scope, and setting that you work best in. You just have to figure out what each one is.

The first two are discussed a lot when it comes to writing advice. It's fairly obvious to most fledgling writers that time spent choosing a genre is time well spent. You want to situate your writing within the larger context of what already exists.

Personally, I prefer the "form," since genre is a marketing term. Thinking in terms of genre already limits your options since you're forced to start conceptualizing your art in market-determined categories. But discoverability is important for writers (who writes to write to no one?), so genre is an important category to consider. Choosing a genre gets you started. It's like having a map. You can more quickly get from one place to another.

Voice is a common theme for writing advice, too. Find your voice, and once you've found it, hone it. I'll have more to say about this in the future.

But the last three (pace, scope, and setting) are less obvious to new writers. How fast or slowly should you work? What level of detail should your writing have? What is the setting in which you do your best work? These are not questions writers are typically asked, but asking them—and exploring different avenues for each—can unlock your best work.

I plan to work through each of these questions, exploring the possibility space for each one.

Today, I'll start with pace.

As I wrote in my manifesto, it's become increasingly clear to me that I'm one of those writers who, as Michel says, "needs to spend a long time on a project." This was not obvious to me at first, partly because when I started writing seriously, I went looking for advice to help me on my way, and what I discovered was a lot of similar recommendations: write a lot, write every day, finish what you start, submit your work many times to many places, try different forms, and so on. As we'll see shortly, it's good advice.

But it all boils down to the same idea: go fast.

Which makes sense. Especially when you're starting out. It's inevitable that you're going to make mistakes, but mistakes are good because they are opportunities to learn. The idea is that by going quickly, you can amass your mistakes early, learn from them sooner, and improve your writing faster. There's a famous study about a ceramics class that illustrates this idea so well that it's become a mini gospel on creative work.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A," forty pounds a "B," and so on. Those being graded on "quality," however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an "A."

Well, grading time came and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The takeaway is clear: quantity leads to quality. To make a beautiful pot, you must first make a ton of bad pots. It's better to produce a large volume of (substandard) work than try to perfect a single piece. Ray Bradbury suggests a similar idea in Zen in the Art of Writing. Rather than jumping first into a novel, Bradbury suggests that a young writer should focus on stories. He suggests writing a short story every week. He goes on to add that it's impossible to write fifty-two bad stories. If you write a story every week for a year, one of them must be decent. As Bradbury writes, "Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come."

But if we look closer at this line of advice, we see that it isn't really about pace; it's about learning from your mistakes. As Bradbury says, working swiftly to finish things is good because "Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more." The point is to learn. The more mistakes you make, the more opportunities you have to learn.

And wouldn't you want to minimize your time spent learning? The idea is that by quickly making mistakes, you can learn faster and reduce how long you spend in the "learning phase." But Bradbury also warns about writing for the ends over the means. He identifies two common, but toxic, ends that compel writers: money and fame. These are bad ends, as Bradbury points out, because they are destructive to creativity—that part of you that yearns for expression; what makes you original. As Bradbury says of money and fame, "Both are a form of lying. It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market. It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes."

There's no shortcut—and there's no satisfactory end here. There's only you and what you want to express. Which begs the question: Why are you in a hurry? It's probably because you are eager for money or fame. But if you expel both goals from your practice, what are you left with?

In his essay, The Talent of the Room, Michael Ventura clearly and powerfully defines what it takes to write. "Writing is something you do alone in a room." As Ventura says, all other skills are moot when it comes to the talent of sitting in a room.

Before any issues of style, content, or form can be addressed, the fundamental questions are: How long can you stay in that room? How many hours a day? How do you behave in that room? How often can you go back to it? How much fear (and, for that matter, how much elation) can you endure by yourself? How many years—how many years—can you remain alone in a room?

Without the goals of fame or money—neither of which is ever under your control, which means you can only debase yourself in trying to achieve them—you are left with this: a lifetime spent at your work, hunched over a desk, alone in a room.

When it comes to pace, the central question becomes: What is the right pace that keeps you in that room? Go too fast, and you burn yourself out; go too slow, and the room eats you alive.

It doesn't matter if the time spent in the room produces one book or a thousand books. You will spend your life in the room, either way.

What is the right pace for you? It's something you need to determine. But it's more complicated than "fast" or "slow." I want to explore some of the different ways writers write—and how it relates to pace.

I recently came across the concept of Ayurveda, a traditional system of medicine from India, in the Dr. K video, 3 Motivation Styles determined by Personality. In the video, Dr. K describes three different personality styles:

• Vata, or air mind

• Pitta, or fire mind

• Kapha, or earth mind

Vata mind is quickly excited by new things and then quickly moves on. The air is always changing directions. Vata mind works best in sprints—rotating projects and keeping a lot of things going. That way, you can move between projects as your energy ebbs and flows.

Pitta mind is steady—like a fire that burns. It works best for long, focused durations. But there's always the risk of burnout (if you go too quickly) or dying out (if you go too slowly). Most productivity gurus are pitta minds, I suspect, and they try to teach this style of work. Books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work are pitta books for pitta minds.

Kapha mind has low acceleration but high top speed. A marathon runner. They usually feel behind in life and will beat themselves up for their slow pace. But they have more stamina. The longer they stay in the game, the better they get. They are the ultimate late bloomers.

You can see how these categories complicate the idea of pace. Is a Pitta mind fast or slow? You can't really answer that without looking at other dimensions of speed. Namely, velocity.

Velocity—in writing terms—would be how quickly you start new projects. Do you move through different ideas quickly, or do you tend to stick to one thing for a long time? Are you energized by a blank page? Or does the thought make you sick?

I'll define speed then as the time it takes to complete a writing project—or, put another way, how many projects you are able to complete in your writing career.

Putting them together, we can create a 2x2 with four different dimensions. Ayurveda, however, has only three; let's add Water mind to fill out the graph. Water fits in with earth, fire, and air, as the four elements the ancients believed comprised the nature of existence (and which, interestingly, map to our modern idea of the four phases: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma). Many esoteric systems have four elements: astrology (air, earth, fire, and water), tarot (swords, pentacles, wands, and cups), and even Myers-Briggs (thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling).

We can map the four quadrants like this:

• High speed, high velocity: Air

• High speed, low velocity: Fire

• Low speed, high velocity: Water

• Low speed, low velocity: Earth

In this mapping, Air mind corresponds to both high velocity and high speed. They start many projects, and they finish many projects. There's a feverish pace. For the air mind, the two are linked. In order to complete many things, they must also start many different things. They are the ultimate jugglers, energized by many balls in the air. These are the writers who produce a prodigious amount of work across many different genres. Their output is numerous, almost overwhelmingly so, and while they may be known for a couple of standout works, the quality of their output ranges considerably. Think Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Anthony Trollope.

What is it like to write with an Air mind? Witness this paragraph on Joyce Carol Oates from The Baltimore Sun in November 1998:

In October she published a collection of 27 tales of the grotesque. Her article on a fictionalized male writer who mistreats women appears in the current issue of Playboy. On her desk is a proof of the novel she will publish in July. On her mind is an essay on Ernest Hemingway she has been invited to write for the Folio Society edition of his work. In the meantime, this American storyteller is at work on yet another novel. And, yes, she continues to explore new terrain: In September, she published a children's book, her first.

For the Air mind, writing is as natural as breathing. In fact, like breathing, they would probably die if they were not able to write. For them, the idea of writer's block is a foreign (if not downright suspicious) one; the notion of craft tedious. Like sprinters, they simply go—and go fast.

At the other end is Earth mind: low velocity and low speed. These are the writers who have a single story to tell—one big magnum opus—and they may spend their entire lives slowly bringing it to fruition. They are excellent at long works that may take many years (or decades) to complete. They may be slow to start, and they may take decades to finish something. They also tend to take long breaks in between work. Their output tends to be small but highly accomplished—a couple of masterpieces and little else in between. Think James Joyce, Marcel Proust, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susanna Clarke, David Foster Wallace, and T.S. Eliot.

Witness this conversation between James Joyce and Frank Budgen, as chronicled by David Lodge in his essay, "Joyce's Choices":

There is a story well known to all students of Joyce, that one day in Zurich, when he was writing Ulysses, he met his friend Frank Budgen in the street and told him he had been working all day and had produced two sentences. "You have been seeking the right words?" asked Budgen. "No," replied Joyce, "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have."

Joyce took 8 years to write Ulysses and 17 years for its follow-up, Finnegan's Wake. Or about 90 words per day. As Joyce demonstrates, the Earth writer is the consummate craftsman. They will linger over every sentence, carefully arranging the words for maximum effect. It takes time to do this—time they are willing to give.

Water mind corresponds to high velocity and low speed. These are the writers who start many projects but struggle to finish them. They are great in the short term as sprinters (good poets and short story writers), but they run into trouble when it comes to completing longer works. Their legacy is littered with half-completed, not-yet-finished works. Rushing streams that end in still ponds. Their output tends to be a frustrating mixture of high promise and disappointment. Shimmering works that produced disappointing follow-ups or ambitious projects left incomplete. Think Franz Kafka, George R.R. Martin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Because of their combination of quick starts and slow finishes, these writers tend to suffer more than others. Writer's block is a daily struggle for them, as is perpetual self-doubt. Completing anything is a chore. They have a tendency to view their writing as painful—a cross they must bear. Here's Kafka relating in his diary his struggles to write:

January 20: "The end of writing. When will it take me up again?" January 29: "Again tried to write, virtually useless." January 30: "The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you." February 7: "Complete standstill. Unending torments." March 11: "How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn't come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can't keep it up. The next day I'm powerless."

Some of Kafka's entries simply state "Too tired" and "Nothing." As Kafka's experience demonstrates, some writers struggle intensely to be consistent.

Opposite to Water is, fittingly, the Fire mind: low velocity, high speed. This is the one that every piece of writing advice tells you to be. Here's Lincoln Michel on the power of finishing things. The Fire mind is the consummate finisher. They finish many things because they constrain themselves from starting too many other projects. They are steady, consistent, and reliable. They are sure to finish one project before starting another. They are professional in their work. Their output tends to be strong and consistent across the board; everything is of high quality, and nothing in particular stands out. Think Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

For centuries, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has delighted readers, but some, like Charlotte Brontë, complained of it as "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden." Here we see the tension of the Fire writer: in their steadiness, they produce writing that easily endears to the reader, but that same consistency can mask stagnation. How Austen wrote her famous novel is interesting and revealing about the way these types of writers compose their work. In the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, Christina Lupton points out that Pride and Prejudice was first written in a notebook and that this manner of writing introduces a particular form:

For an author, writing in a notebook with the aim of making a novel complicates the normal line of chain of events, where the material limits of pages are set once a story is told. It makes writing a novel seem more like filling in a form; less a wrestling with that tabula rasa of the blank page than a following of rules. Austen's manuscript suggest she was willing to embrace this order of things and to see her stories as profitably made to fit pre-defined parameters. Many of her handwritten pages show her finishing sentences and chapters to coincide with the end of a page or a notebook.

In this analysis of craft, we see the Fire mind at work: writing as a physical constraint, as repeated exercise. Here is the secret to consistent, quality work: find your form, hone it, and repeat. Write within a predetermined form; embrace limitations.

Hopefully this exercise demonstrates there are many ways to think about writing pace—and writing advice in general. Questions of craft are important for Fire minds and extremely important for Earth minds, but almost useless when it comes to Air or Water. Neither of those types is likely to linger on a single piece for long, anyway. Writers block is a daily, existential issue for Water minds but a foreign concept for Air minds. And so on.

I also don't think these are "personalities" in the limited sense. You can have phases of your writing career that feel more "fire" and others that are similar to "water." You can also probably move yourself along one axis or another (but trying to move diagonally is likely too difficult). If you're in the water quadrant, you can probably do one of two things: either embrace the air approach and accept that you're going to have a hard time staying focused, and instead of tormenting yourself about that, what you should do instead, paradoxically, is take on more projects and cycle between them; or you can accept that you work slowly and double-down on that approach, moving yourself into the earth quadrant and eliminating (as best you can) any expectation, either external or internal, of meeting deadlines. But if you try to jump all the way into the structured, consistent fire quadrant, you're going to have a hard time.

All of this is an extension of Michel's observation: that there are many different ways to write and build a "career." Though if you want to be economically viable as a writer, you're forced into Air or Fire mode. Speed matters.

This is a realization I came to in my previous piece. There are certain writing paces that are more "professional." Paces that give you more opportunities to make money. Just like there are certain genres and styles that are trendy at different times, there are paces and platforms that can make your writing life easier or harder. But you don't get to choose what's popular, and you don't get to choose what pace is right for you. What is inside you that yearns for expression—it will come out the way it wants to come out.

It's up to you if you want to go along with that idea—or fight it.

But no matter what pace you take, the important advice is the same: don't stop. Keep going—no matter what. If that means slowing down (or speeding up), do it.

Just keep going.

Regardless of how you came to be here, welcome! 👋

I'm excited to officially launch this newsletter. I chose Paragraph as a platform for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that this platform feels new. Not shiny-toy new, but fresh in a way that other platforms are not. Because Paragraph is trying to do something novel with the way writing is created, deployed, consumed, and monetized. I won't pretend to understand everything about what's going on under the hood, but I'm curious (and excited) to explore more.

Consider this an experiment.

What I'd like to do in this space is write freely—about a number of topics that interest me. Mostly writing, creativity, and also technology—what it means to write and create in our rapidly changing times. New forms of technology are changing the way humans organize, socialize, create, and make money. Behind these nascent technologies loom significant threats, some new, some old: climate change, political polarization, economic stagnation, crumbling faith in legacy institutions.

I want to write about what it feels like to create within this unfolding environment. Because it feels like an old world is dying, but the next one hasn't been born yet. Maybe it's up to us to be the midwives to that new world—to assist, in whatever way we can, in bringing it forth.

Writing for traditional publications feels increasingly fruitless and unsatisfying. But online writing isn't much better. It's full of grifters and clickbait spiders, masters at luring you into their webs with inflammatory content. Monetization based on attention extraction.

I plan to do none of that here. Instead, I'm going to explore.

Last fall, I came across this post on Farcaster:

and I thought—yes, why not. It would be a helpful exercise, indeed, to clarify a short list of things I believe in. As kepano goes on to say, “a useful manifesto is one that someone should legitimately be able to take the opposite view on each of your principles otherwise it's simply an aspiration that everyone else is also shooting for.”

As you will shortly see, it will be easy for you to take the opposite view of what I believe in.

We’ll start with failure. I believe in failure.

I've been writing online, in some form or another, for over five years. In that time, I have started and quit on many platforms. It seems that every time I start one, I burn out, get discouraged, quit, and move on to somewhere else. For a while, I used to beat myself up about that. If only I could stick with it, I might make something of it. Other people don't seem to have that problem—they make themselves a home somewhere online and they churn out work after work. Why couldn't I do that, I'd ask myself.

But I'm not going to beat myself up anymore. Instead, I'm going to embrace failure as a necessary part of creating—and living.

There is a Catch-22 in the “creator economy” and it goes like this: publish consistently at a high velocity (preferably every day) so that you get enough eyeballs so that enough people subscribe so that enough people pay you so that you can create full-time so that you have enough time to publish consistently and at a high velocity (preferably every day).

Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, recommends publishing two feed posts per week and a couple of stories every day. TikTok says you should post between one to four times per day. Back when I wrote for Medium, the top accounts were posting an article virtually every day. Even on Substack, where long-form writing is the name of the game, the powers-that-be recommend posting once per week, as a baseline (hint hint: Substack thinks it should be even more than that).

This is, of course, fine if you’re posting memes or curating content you find elsewhere on the internet, but when it comes to new creative work, it’s absurd. A cursory glance at the output of pre-internet creatives reveals the stark difference. One of the inspirations I cite for my Substack, The Unnerving, is H.P. Lovecraft. Even in the most prolific year of his entire life (1920), Lovecraft wrote 8 stories. That’s one every six-and-a-half weeks—or six times too slow for Substack’s recommended cadence. During Lovecraft’s most creative stretch, 1926-1927, (in which he wrote The Call of Cthulhu, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Colour Out of Space, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), he wrote 10 stories in two years. That’s one story every ten weeks.

Or take the example of Wallace Stevens, who worked most of his life as an insurance executive and wrote poetry on the side. After the birth of his daughter, he found the demands of both full-time work and parenthood a “terrible blow to poor literature.” Stevens quit. He stopped writing for nine years.

What the “creator economy” needs is a deeper understanding of the range of work that falls beneath its wide umbrella and the time demands different types of work require. Otherwise, the “creator economy” feels like little more than a dream peddled by grifters to sensitive artists who don’t know any better. Grind every day producing “content” on six different platforms and one day you too can do this for “a living.”

But what a content creator produces, what they “do for a living,” and how all the pieces fit together, is usually hidden from their audience under a cloak of sprezzatura. Content creators pretend the work they do is spontaneous, easy, flowing, when it is often meticulously planned, difficult, and expensive (many content creators employs teams and have employees who work for them, but you’ll rarely see that behind the mask they put out to the world).

What matters is what you are creating, and what time and resources you have at your disposal. Only then can you produce an output that isn’t a guaranteed road to burnout. These constraints matter a lot.

What’s frustrating is that all these distinctions are rarely clarified, and never assessed independently. All content, whether it’s a cat video, a sonnet, a trailer for the next Marvel movie, a makeup tutorial, or a six-thousand word chapter in a fantasy trilogy—all of it is thrown together in the same feed-mediated soup, competing against each other for a finite number of eyeballs and clicks. The platform demands a particular cadence, regardless of output, and gives attention accordingly.

Of course, this relentless pace benefits the platforms, above all else. It certainly doesn’t benefit the creators, and I’m not sure it does much for consumers, either. I subscribe to a handful of newsletters, and aside from maybe one or two that I follow closely, the vast majority of the posts I receive in my inbox go unread. And I consider myself someone who reads a lot.

It’s no wonder most posts publish into the void. There is simply too much stuff for people to consume.

Last fall, I published thirteen stories to my Substack at an (almost) weekly cadence. By week three, it was obvious this was not a sustainable pace—even though I already had fifty stories “in the bank” and was spending each week editing and polishing them. By the time I reached December, I was burned out and needed a break. My plan then was to take two to three months off, write more stories, and come back fresh in the spring where I would post another batch. The goal was to settle into 26 stories in the first year—about one every other week. Still half of what Substack recommends.

But it quickly became obvious that even that was unsustainable. By year two, I would extinguish my bank of stories, and the time it took to edit each story made it difficult to write new ones. It also meant one-hundred percent of my creative time and energy would go toward The Unnerving. There would be no extra stories to publish elsewhere, and no time to explore other mediums like poetry or novels. There are also other publication strategies I want to explore for my stack, like podcasts (audio versions of my stories) and video.

It was also discouraging to see how fiction performs on Substack. Read: extremely poorly. The platform rounds up the top publications by category, and the fiction category is … completely devoid of fiction. Yes, the top five publications in “fiction” are nonfiction publications about fiction. Apparently, no one on Substack is reading fiction.

But that makes sense. Substack is a newsletter platform, and the newsletter is a completely different medium from fiction. I realized I was burning myself out because I had made a category error. My publishing cadence, while suited to the newsletter format, was unrealistic for the demands of fiction writing.

I also realized I was comparing myself to other Substack writers whose life situations were completely different from my own. It was an illuminating moment when I realized all of my favorite Substack writers had the following in common: they all worked full-time as creators, academics, or freelancers (no traditional salary jobs) and none of them had children (as far as I could tell). Even still, most of them found the burdens of Substack publishing difficult to bear. There was simply no way that I, with a full-time salaried job and a small child, could hope to match their output; I would only kill myself trying to do so.

Instead, I want to take a relaxed pace. I have no particular publishing goals or cadence to hit with this newsletter. I don't know when you will receive the next newsletter (maybe even never).

But I’m going to continue at a pace that is sustainable. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I do know it will be slow.

It may not be better for my metrics, but I think it will be better for everything else.

I named this newsletter after the small region in the midwest where I grew up. The Driftless is a unique ecological region that was spared by the glaciers of the last ice age which rendered most of the midwest flat and featureless. The Driftless, however, retained its original character, its “steep hills, forested ridges, deeply carved river valleys, and karst geology with spring-fed waterfalls and cold-water trout streams.”

I want this newsletter to be a small, bizarre, idiosyncratic corner of the internet. Where much of the online discourse has been flattened by relentless quantity over quality, ideological head-nodding, and shameless self-promotion, The Driftless seeks to retain the “steep hills and forested ridges” of a pre-always-online literary world.

• Slowness over speed

• Rest over hustle

• Exploration over goals

• Obscurity over fame

• Difficulty over ease

• Failure over success

• Silence over noise

If you agree with this approach, I want you here. Comment, introduce yourself. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you want to see.

I’ll tell you what I want to see: the strange, the bizarre, the hard-to-categorize, the heart-felt, the cringe, the rough and messy edges, the failures. I can do my part by offering some of that here.

Welcome to The Driftless.