Writing is power

“Strategy is the art of getting other people to do something. In the pursuit of that, narrative is the strategist's tool.”

“By asking them to read, professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

“because no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changed hundreds of diapers for said child or fed them in the middle of the night from your actual body”

“The first public online community was created in Leopold’s Records, in Berkeley, California, in 1973.”

“Everything about the book is mortifying, and it totally set me free.”

“If you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream.”

“Nice little personal essay you’ve got there, lady, but I know what you really are; time to get my knife out, time to start digging around under your skin until I find the wires.”

“What can the future look like for me?”

“What does this say about us, that we so passively acquiesce? Are we not the valiant knights, the truth-tellers, the beauty-makers, who journey to the dark side, slay the dragon, and bring back the dripping treasure? Are we not the guardians of the world’s soul?”

“A better question for any creative person is: what activities do you want to pursue? What kinds of understanding will that create?”

“I’ll use aggressively casual language, like, ‘hey yo, for real,’ or drop a bunch of exclamation point”

“Machine-generated text reads as smooth and polished, but it loses the meanders, interruptions and leaps of logic that communicate emotion.”

“That is anti-dystopian action at its core: doing what makes the world more human, even when you cannot prove it matters in the grand scheme.”

“As dry as ... my humor?”

“There's a referendum on the value of writing, and writing is winning.”

“Young man, you don't understand. You've chosen a profession that doesn't exist.”

“A Substack post exploring how narrative and business strategy intersect in modern organizations”

“Corporate America is converging on a single voice. The brands that opt out will own the next decade.”

“a willingness to stand behind words, to mean them, and to accept the consequences of having claimed to have written them.”

“That pattern would follow me through my creative life until I found a way to write or make art that allowed me to bypass my inner critic.”

“Rates of daily reading for pleasure have declined over the past 20 years in the US”

“The LLMs are pushing the essays away from anything that a human would have ever written”

“What does it mean that to publish a book with as little labor as possible is the system working at its efficient best?”

“It takes what you know instinctively about your own writing and makes it legible for a machine to use.”

“For many authors, particularly those with a pre-existing platform to work from, hustling to convert a new newsletter subscriber is likely much more profitable (again, on a single-customer basis) than working on a new book.”

“Most people are wildly inconsistent writers.”