On Not Writing

Time and time again I come across advise from great writers who swear by the practice of copying text of other writers to become more intimate with a subject or their favorite authors. Let's take a look ...

Note for those in the back: this entire piece is satire, except the parts that aren't.

Walter Benjamin on copying text in One Way Street

The power of a country is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China's enigmas.

Hunter S. Thomson

Hunter talked about how he enjoys copying other peoples work for sheer pleasure and to "feel" what the original writer felt, copying Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, from which he typed whole pages, word-for-word “just to get the feeling”.

Nassim N. Taleb

NNT writes (I think in Antifragile), that the number of people who read his books is less interesting for him, compared to those people who made the effort to re-read his work and to better understand him. Taleb also mention's the classics and their chances to stay on the shelves for hundreds more years compared to current bestsellers.

Typelit

Typelit captures the general idea. But to me it feels inferior to writing things with pen & paper.

And pen & paper of course is incredibly lazy compared to chiseling the text into a piece of rock with your bare hands. Pen & paper will never evoke the same feeling as oozing wet blisters on both hands. Ghostwriters back then were prohibitively expensive for a reason.

Schopenhauer (On Style) and "Writing for an Audience"

Schopenhauer thought that "writing for an audience" makes the result unauthentic, or even intellectually dishonest. It seems then obvious that one should write first and foremost for oneself.

Schopenhauer also thought that not reading was as essential as reading. This is why I will never read what I previously wrote for myself. Heck I don't read, I don't write. Just feed me the memes straight into my veins.

Writing and self-radicalization

Social media in a way awards and optimizes for the exact opposite of these ideas aired by Schopenhauer and others. Not only do I not write for myself but I also condition my future writing style. A post that goes well triggers a dopamine high. Every time there are "likes" or comments I see myself re-reading what I wrote and agreeing the heck out of my own genius.

Robert Cialdini writes (in "Influence") that writing and then signing it, means committing to what one wrote. First I make you read it, then I make you say it, then I make you write it down, and finally I make you put your John Hancock underneath it. It's a powerful tactic used as effectively in a harmless sales transaction as it is to recruit a non-believer into a religious cult.

It's the psychological basis for why we put trust in signatures. Signing something means I read, and I understood the text. And I also fully agree, with what is said by putting my signature under it. Once that step is complete we are unable to retract it, because it would not be sincere, or look like "flip-flopping" while human society (and trust) builds on consistency.

While contracts (what we sign) are usually not made public, all our social media posts are. And our posts tend to be worded with a lot less care than a contract. Of course all my posts are proof-read by a steering-committee of the non-writers guild (which I'm the president of), but judging from all your content, there clearly is room for improvement.

Today most platforms force us to have our real names attached to it. And even they go bust or disappear you can be certain plenty of copies remain publicly available in other places.

And so, if we believe that Caldini was right in his assessment of writing things down and by doing so being forced to stand by that, it's also natural to conclude that every post we publish with our real name has a similar psychological effect as signing a contract. It becomes hard to retract things that were said in public. Changing ones mind was a lot easier 50 years ago. If your uncle decided to be no longer racist they could simply make that choice. Now the racist uncle remains online and their only choice seems to surround themselves with like-minded idiots and go on to form a global movement. You know who you are.

So publishing half-baked thoughts on social media then not only becomes the ultimate self-own, but even more importantly, a sure way to "self-radicalize"?

No idea if any of my claims are actually true, but because I wrote it, I need to believe it is. And the second this gets the first like, I'll re-read the entire text. And from that point onward my writing becomes fucking gospel. Considering how social media has made us more stupid, divided, and radical, maybe we should ask whether a "nom de plume" might be a healthier alternative than the real-name policies, currently mandated on many platforms?

But back to writing and how we can become a better at it (because let's face it, our phone has made us barely literate even compared to those people 300 years ago who lacked plumbing and modern dentistry).

Joachim's Rules for not writing

At what stage then should I write?

• Given that anything I write potentially self radicalizes me, ... Never!
• Writing thanks to social-media has become too dangerous ... This is why I'm taking all my important work back underground. To prevent it falling into the wrong hands. My own hands.
• But like any great non-writer I do have a strict process. A secret formula which I'm sharing with you.

Joachim's Process for not writing

• If I really must write things down, then publishing must be postponed to as late as possible.
• As a non-writer I have a sacred duty to not not rob my reader of time they could've better spent meditating over the classics. Or any second-grade ghostwriter for that matter. (Knowing that you could have read the first chapter of Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" but instead you decided to read my article here on LinkedIn is truly humbling and no non writer could ask for more.)
• Anything that is a bestseller is very likely not worth reading. Which is why I never write them.
• Nothing worth reading shall ever be published on social media, unless for the purpose of self-radicalization.

You might think: Ah he is just lazy. Actually this couldn't be further from the truth:

It's hard to keep it all in. All these bottled-up thoughts and feelings that begging me to pick up a pen and rid myself of this mental constipation.

Sometimes I end up what I call almost-writing. In these cases the editing cycle saves me. I start out by simplifying what I wrote. For example, a sentence that exclaims: "Simplify. Simplify. Simplify", during an editing phase is further reduced to "Simplify". I learned this trick by reading Hemingway. But unlike Hemingway I'm taking it a step further. Because even the single word "Simplify" is actually redundant, and so that too is eliminated. Once the process is complete I usually end up where I started - with a blank piece of paper! The paper then neatly goes back on top of the stack of empty papers (ready for another day of not writing). As you can see not writing is even more effort than writing!

Writing is also a question about time and money.

Who today can afford the time it takes to publish great content? Nobody. But then neither could the Medieval pleb.

The only differences between plebs throughout history and their modern version today (e.g. yours truly), are a social media addiction, possession of a mobile phone, and abundance of potatoes.

But both modern or Medieval plebs were unable to afford spending the actual time to educate themselves on a certain subject before picking up the pen.

The real and the artifecal

Even one has the time to form a solid opinion on the subject beforehand, what would be the point? There is just too much existing great literature that competes with what I'm about to publish. So making my work public is like diluting the existing pool of great content with my own piss.

Today to become a great writer I would first need to become an AI. If I only were an algorithm designed by someone whose mind hasn't been polluted by the arts or humanities, ... an engineer as pure and simple in their mind as an algorithm. (off-tangent sidenote: Scientists mapped the entire brain of a fruit fly the other day, ... which means that we'll be able to map any person with "software engineering" in their job title any day now).

If only I were an AI then I could be pure and ingest the entire Eastern and Western Canon, and everything that has been written about them, and also every comment that has been shared and liked by art or literary critics, perhaps then I could hallucinate a truly original and unique result. Like a human centipede that has been fed entirely on high quality and organic content.

My process for whenever I'm about to start writing a new best-selling novel then looks like this:

1. I open LinkedIn to read this article.
2. I close the laptop, go for a hike, and don't write.

I hope this explains why I've never published anything noteworthy, why I remain one of the most successful non-writer's in the history of the Western non-canon. .