Writing as crystallised thought, a way of expressing the labyrinth of interconnected, messy, and incoherent ideas in my mind. It is a form of knowledge distillation
Jacky
Writing is an exploration, an excavation of self and the world in this painfully intricate dance. It is a way to bridge the chasm between ideas, to extend a filament of one consciousness to others. It is an extension of self, a second brain, where bounded by constraining nets of syntax and grammar, providing grounds for freedom of expression and articulate one’s interests and curiosity. > The thing I like about writing is that it’s quite literally [_thinking_](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think)—a way for me access my own interiority and construct something from it. What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect. ^ava-writing > > —Ava, [how to avoid half-heartedness](https://www.avabear.xyz/p/how-to-avoid-half-heartedness)[When I write] I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key.
Ann Patchett
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Andy Matuschak, on books and writing
At its core, writing endeavours to transmute the [[thoughts/Chaos|chaos]] of [[thoughts/Existentialism|existence]] into discernible narratives, offering a conduit for shared understanding amidst the inherent disarray of life. Such a form of [looseness in mutation](https://subconscious.substack.com/p/hypertext-montage) ## as playground. Writing is also a playground for nurturing your [“baby idea”](https://substack.com/inbox/post/140191029#footnote-5-140191029). The mind are often overwhelming, and I found the act of writing therapeutic, and help organize and control inner [[thoughts/Entropy|entropy]]:What I am doing right now, writing this essay, is, technically, a linear walk through the network of my ideas. That is what writing is: turning a net into a line. But it is also very concretely what I do, since I have externalised my ideas in a note-taking system where the thoughts are linked with hyperlinks
Henrik Karlsson, Reader-generated Essay
I write for me, and for me only. I see writing as a [[tags/love|love]] letter from my past-self, crafted and permanently available on the internet for my future-self to read. Writing to me serves as an escape from the realm of the living, venturing into the wonderland. I didn’t grow up writing or reading much, but living [[posts/Chaos|abroad]], I found solace in the land of the writers, getting loss in their imagination envisioning what the world _should_ be. The playground is where writing diverges from communication. Most writing advice—show don’t tell, kill your darlings, know your audience—optimizes for transmission efficiency. But what if the point isn’t to transmit at all? What if writing is the thinking itself, not the record of thought already completed? Paul Graham captured this when he wrote about essays as {{sidenotes[attempts.]: The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” meaning “to try” or “to attempt”—a linguistic reminder that essays were never meant to be declarations but explorations.}} You don’t start with a thesis and defend it. You start with a question, a gap, something that bothers you in a way you can’t quite articulate yet. The essay discovers what you think through the act of writing it. This is fundamentally different from writing that knows where it’s going. The tension between these modes—writing as thinking versus writing as communication—creates most of the confusion around “good” writing. We inherit advice from the communication paradigm and apply it to exploratory writing, like using a GPS to wander. The twelve-dollar desk salad problem isn’t just about corporate prose flattening style. It’s about mistaking the purpose of writing entirely. ## paradox You see, I think writing is this pursuit of clarity in the midst of chaos, a striving to impose some semblance of order on the boundless and unpredictable swirl of sensations, feelings, and thoughts that define our existence. It morphs into a bridge, spanning the chasm among individuals, carrying it across the echo: “This is me, this is the world as I see it, and is it the same for you?” It’s a reverberation in the void, fuelled by a yearning that amidst the boundless human creativity, there exists a soul that perceives the echo, reciprocates the sentiment, and in doing so, forges a minuscule yet profound filament of comprehension and empathy. And yet, writing is an acknowledgement of the indelible solitude inherent to human existence. It is a quiet concession to the insurmountable walls that encase individuals’ inner sanctum. The act of writing is both a defiance of and a homage to the impenetrable mystery that shrouds the heart of another. Its delicate endeavour to articulate the inarticulable, to unveil the veiled, all the while knowing the quest may never consummate in total understanding. In this paradox lies the dichotomy between beauty and torment of writing. It’s a ceaseless sojourn towards the horizon of connection, propelled by a boundless hope and a quixotic resolve, yet shadowed by the solemn acceptance of inherent disconnection. This complex interplay births the agony and the ecstasy of the writing voyage, the ceaseless pull between the allure of communion and the stark reality of intrinsic solitude. ## as a journey for exploration You don’t need a complete thesis to begin writing. You just need an edge—a crack in consensus reality, a question about something others take for granted. The edge doesn’t have to be momentous. Darwin wondered how all those different birds could be {{sidenotes[Darwin's finches]: On the Galápagos, Darwin collected what he thought were blackbirds, grosbeaks, and finches. Only later did John Gould point out they were all finches—an observation that became crucial to evolutionary theory.}}. That’s it. That’s the entire edge he started with. Most people think you need something important to say before you write. But importance emerges from exploration, not the other way around. The insignificant thread, pulled persistently, unravels paradigms. Einstein’s edge was wondering what it would be like to ride alongside a {{sidenotes[light beam.]: He was sixteen when he had this thought experiment. It took him ten years to work out the implications—special relativity.}} Not “I will revolutionize physics.” Just a curious question about something everyone else accepted. This is why writing optimized for the reader’s comprehension often fails to generate new ideas. When you write for clarity, you smooth over the rough edges where discovery happens. You explain away the gaps instead of exploring them. The reader gets a tidy package, but the writer learns nothing. I’ve been thinking about how we mistake polish for quality. A rough essay that genuinely explores often teaches both writer and reader more than a crystalline explanation of {{sidenotes[settled knowledge]: This connects to what programmers call “exploratory programming”—writing code to understand the problem, not to solve it. The first version is always thrown away.}}. The mess is the point. The false starts, the contradictions, the moments where you realize you’ve been thinking about it wrong—that’s where the thinking happens. When you write to discover, you follow threads that might lead nowhere. You indulge {{sidenotes[tangents]: The etymology of “tangent” is telling—from Latin “tangere,” to touch. Tangents touch the main argument at exactly one point before veering off. But sometimes that single point of contact is everything.}} that seem irrelevant. You let yourself get lost because getting lost is how you find new territory. This looks like bad writing if your metric is efficiency. But efficiency assumes you know where you’re going. ## motivation Excerpt from _George Orwell[^orwell]’s [[library/Why I Write]]_ [^orwell]: Orwell is often known for his democratic socialism, and opposed for totalitarianism. But his [[thoughts/Will to Truth|will to truth]] is fundamental to his writing, a true [[thoughts/representations|representation]] of intellectual honesty. In the context of totalitarianism, Orwell pointed out that such regimes demand the continuous alteration of the past and probably a disbelief in the very existence of [objective truth](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35610790-orwell-on-truth). He saw the danger in a society that drifts from the truth, stating that it will hate those who speak it. Sheer egoism - But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. - Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money. Aesthetic enthusiasm - Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement - Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story - Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. Historical impulse - Seeing things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. Political purpose - Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.I notice this change most when I try to write. I think working a lot has made me a worse writer. 90 percent of the words I consume and produce in a week are emails, strategy docs, research reports, and documentation—text designed to be as digestible as possible for a busy, distracted end user. My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
Jasmine Sun, audience of one
## query _Excerpt from [A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox](https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query)_ > The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surprisingly rapid stream. Then the words cascaded from the center down in a broader but slower stream to the periphery again. > When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it _accessible_. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking Henrik emphasises on specificity as _signal_, where when you write for everyone, you write for {{sidenotes[no one]: The paradox of accessibility—the more accessible you make your writing, the less likely it is to find the specific people who need it. It’s like diluting a chemical signal until it’s too weak to trigger any reaction.}}. The jargon, the peculiar references, the idiosyncratic obsessions—these aren’t barriers to understanding, just a more _efficient_ way of communicating your ideas. Similar to how mathematician invents their whole vernacular of languages to discuss theory. Think about it this way: writing optimised for maximum reach creates weak connections with many. Writing optimized for resonance creates strong connections with few. But those few become nodes in a network that amplifies and extends your thinking in ways you couldn’t predict {{sidenotes[network effects]: This is how obscure blogs sometimes have more influence than mainstream publications. The readership might be smaller, but the engagement depth creates cascading effects through the network.}}. The search query metaphor reveals the correlation between writing-as-thinking and writing-as-communication. When you write to think, you’re sending out highly-specific signal to find others who are thinking along similar fault lines. I keep coming back to this idea where most writing advice assumes you already know what you want to say and just need help saying it better. But what if you don’t know what you want to say? What if the writing is how you find out? Then accessibility becomes a kind of {{sidenotes[premature optimization]: Donald Knuth famously said “premature optimization is the root of all evil” about programming. The same principle applies to writing—optimizing for readers before you’ve optimized for thinking is backwards.}}. ![[https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FGqbUHOTog8?si=svR4lBUhMk_ZJdK6]] ## protocol > Why do you build software for writing over protocol such as file?If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
[Dan’s view](https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/) towards a file-first social systems, circa [AT Protocol](https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/atproto) [Zvi](https://substack.com/@thezvi) also wrote a [blogpost](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-writing-1) on some prolific characters structure their arguments in essays, including, but not limited to, PG, Andreesen, Visakan Veerasamy (ribbonfarm), Matt Yglesias, etc. ## more people should write see also: _File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
kepano, File over app
-I'm currently testing the concept of a "warmup soup" to get Claude into a basin of freer association. 2nd image is a 3-time re-edited prompt, I often do that if I think of something when the response comes up. pic.twitter.com/OaqRLpBzX8
— niplav is (@niplav_site) 22 mai 2025
-Don't worry about formalities.
— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) 24 avril 2024
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