Intelligence validated by experience.
If I had fallen into different life experiences, becoming a writer likely would've been the natural path... and other contemplations on work & life
Happy new year and welcome back! 😊👩💻
I had a lovely break in Berlin, and it was so nice to see the vast but modest city. I’m beyond lucky to have the most stimulating conversations with my friends when we travel together.
Here’s a cute snippet from our differing problem-solving processes: “It’s not maths, it’s logic. Recognizing patterns gets you further, faster, in life. And no, it is not random.”
Coincidentally, Farnam Street helped me stumble upon an interview of William Gass, and it was the most goddamn beautiful thing…
Here’s are two quotes that echoed our discussion:
“The reader has to feel a certain set of moves. He doesn’t have to know the calculations… I played with lots of different patterns before I found one that suited me. But what suits ultimately is not the fact that something fits an abstract pattern. You have to feel a resolution and a movement in the fit, otherwise it’s no good.”
“I never remember anything except language, the rhythms in the language patterns, and I do have a good memory for that. I think I forgot the basic plot of Middlemarch hours after I read it, and it was of course a terrific book. But the impression, the quality of its style, that I think I shall remember forever.”
Having friends whose only motivation is what is true is the gift that just keeps giving.
P.S. Always glad to entertain silent by-standers ;)
I think Chloe is my only friend who has come to genuinely share my whole deal with definitions… Gass reiterates:
“I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl’s room—a complete mess—so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.”
The purest of insanity and the purest of sobriety can look the same if impatiently understood:
“People tell me that my characters are going crazy, and perhaps they believe that because I don’t pay enough attention to verisimilitude. I don’t think they are crazy, but the heightened language, the rapid shifts of feeling, the kinds of construction I am fond of—these do make readers think that the mind they are experiencing is not an ordinary one, that the consciousness they’ve been made conscious of is unusual, and that therefore it must be unhinged, extreme.”
On life and the process and necessary components of growth:
“There is no way of communicating inside your head but speech. And if you can’t talk well to yourself, who can you talk to? You simply aren’t anybody.”
Not sure Gass went as far as the apply this to life, but this applies, and there are Platonic echoes:
“But I hope I’ve learned that the forms are inherent, that the formal discipline is inherent, so that when I want to start improvising I won’t have forgotten how to dance.“
Gass made me feel so heard and understood, here’s him on adversity and justice:
“I just fled. It was a cowardly thing to do, but I simply would not have survived… My situation certainly wasn’t more severe than most people endure at some time in their lives, but I was not equipped to handle it.”
“There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted. Justice, I think, is the word I want.”
Personal career reflections 💭
If fallen into different circumstances, I imagine becoming a writer would’ve been the natural path for me… Probably never would’ve achieved stability, but I think I would’ve been very very happy. I would’ve only really lived for myself, and—much more passively—for world. What was a chapter of my life could’ve easily become the rest of my life if I had let it come later… Ahh if only the timing had been different.
Even though the ones who conditioned me so would’ve prevented me from going down the right path to get there, I will always be privileged by having been told to dream enormously. There are no geniuses. There are only very atypical lives.
This from Derek Thompson of The Atlantic was good:
“Rarely does a scientific breakthrough leave us with a complete product that can be instantly delivered at high quality to patients or consumers.“
And anotha one:
“Sometimes the barriers to doing things are very simple: There are bad rules on the books, and we should remove them.“
Honestly, I cannot imagine writing about innovation with such intricacy without participating in it. I hope Derek secretly (or publicly, after all I haven’t done my research) has a startup or at least is a consultant.
Contemplating whether to grab his book: Hit Makers.
I loved this from Lenny’s Newsletter on virality:
“[T]he truer observation is that the article didn’t go viral in any meaningful sense of the word. It reached a lot of people who read the recipe section of a large international newspaper, and a few of them talked about it.”
The conclusion of this and all else is that definitions are everything. A conversation is useless if you first establish your counterpart works with different definitions.
BeReal has been a phenomenal real life experience of sustainable (many-to-many) viral marketing. Damn are they doing a good job over there. No wonder Zuckerberg is trying to snatch your idea ;) but I’m not worried for you guys…
I’ll for sure be exploring this article and its resources in more detail in the coming weeks.
When you understand nothing at all, everything in life is a lesson for everything. When you understand all the things that matter, everything in life is a lesson for everything.
And with that, I want to go back to some more gems from The Paris Review interview of Gass. Substitute “writer” and “reader(s)“ for “founder“ and “user(s)“ in every quote:
“I am happy to be aware of how complicated, and how far from handling certain things properly I am, when I am swinging so wildly around.”
“Rigor is achieved by pushing things very hard and trying to uncover every possible ramification, nuance, and aspect, and then ordering those things very, very carefully.”
“The writer’s business is somehow to create in the work something which will stand on its own and make its own demands; and if the writer is good, he discovers what those demands are, and he meets them, and creates this thing which readers can then do what they like with.“
The connection to startup building a bit more nuanced with these quotes, but they’re equally helpful:
“When work is going well for me—which is rarely—I have a clear metrical sense of sound and pace… When one section is singing, it sings the rest.”
“The song began and sang itself. Prose gives you flexibility, and you want to use it to shift the whole mode or manner of voice within a paragraph or within a single sentence. So you must have a notion, some clues, which will do the job.”
The following is good for visualizing the need for any starting point.
Substitute “title" for “problem,” “write” for “develop,“ “character” for “solution“, “word“ for “feature“, “story“ for “product“, and “destination“ for “MVP“:
“Certain characters in a sense emerged from their names. I never conceive a character and then seek to christen it. I always have to have the words. I can’t even get a story going until I have the title. The title, though, is a direct statement of the central image. If I try to think out in outline some linear structure, then I start pushing my material in that direction like a baby in a pram. When you arrive at your destination, all you still have is a baby in a pram. I want the work to write itself, every passage to emerge from the ones which have come before, so I have to keep looking at what I’ve done to see what will come out. Usually nothing does and I have to rewrite my beginning until something does suggest itself.”
You may even restart. Actually, I might encourage you to:
“In poetry, when you write the first two lines you have to have flung out the form fourteen or twenty-five lines ahead of you, but it takes me more than twenty-five lines to find the form I should have flung out ahead of me in the first place.”
After you start, try your best to be brave and reveal your most intimate ideas:
“It is the kind of error the beginning writer makes too—all this stuff that is so important to him never really gets to the page at all.”
And then the path becomes clearer and clearer:
“The story moves through a series of suggestions, of formal relationships. And eventually what you want to do is take account of the kind of formal relationship that begins to emerge simply from a set of notes—simply from an accumulation of data—from the flow of commentary and the appreciation of a set of poems.”
On outside reactions to the outcomes of your work:
"There isn’t very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit."
On dealing with criticism, and the nature of external opinions of your work:
“What happens is that [critics] don’t write against the book, whatever it is, but against some asinine prevailing critical climate in which the book appears.”
“It all interests me when I start to read it, but soon the critic is explaining to me what I meant, and then I get bored (whether I agree with what’s being said or not). I start to skip. But even a good critic isn’t likely to tell me anything about my work I don’t already know, since I’m pretty careful and self-conscious in what I do.”
“You protect yourself from critics, of course, by anticipating all their censures, so you can say, “Yes, of course, I saw that long ago.”
On getting and giving advice, substitute “write“ with “build a product“:
“I am also aware of how little I can tolerate other people telling me how to write. So why should I do it to my students? I do not invite or accept this sort of personal criticism… I also remember how bad I was. I wrote far worse stuff than I see from students. What can I fairly say to them?”
Yes yes that is the issue. That is why listening, used as a default, is an unhelpful choice. But you need to know your own shortcomings, so you can proactively ask for relevant advice.
And this is also why I no longer give advice.
The most lasting and genuine motivations for work:
“Every powerful reason is a cause… [Y]ou’ve got to be in an outraged and outrageous state of mind. I simply rejected my background entirely. I decided, as one of my characters says, to pick another cunt to come from.“
This all here feels like valuable, but incomplete realization.
“So all along one principal motivation behind my writing has been to be other than the person I am. To cancel the consequences of the past. I am not the person who grew up in some particular place, though people try to label me as a local Midwestern writer. But I never had roots: all my sources (as a writer) were chosen. I chose to be influenced by this or that book or chose to be defined as the author of this or that.”
On goals and the experience of life through work:
“That was Wittgenstein’s famous definition of philosophy: it was an activity, a certain way of doing which was without end. That notion is very similar to the one Valéry had about poetry. He was interested in the activity of writing, the consciousness in the act of composing, creating, and less so (he said) in the final result—which wasn’t for him final, only the sign of an absolute weariness.”
And here are the stages to meaningful understanding of your career…
“Gertrude Stein said, “I write for myself and strangers,” and then eventually she said that she wrote only for herself. I think she should have taken one further step. You don’t write for anybody. People who send you bills do that. People who want to sell you things so they can send you bills do that. People who want to tell you things so they can sell you things so they can send you bills do that. You are advancing an art—the art. That is what you are trying to do.“
Gass is getting so close here, but the logic trails off when he refers to his own motivations below. The “advancing“ of whatever industry you’re in is the process. Even if your work is incomplete (but well-documented), it “advances” the industry. Many “great” works have been released incomplete.
I think Gass only sees “advancing“ upon completion, and thus says this:
“But I am interested in the process because of what I want it to lead to—the story, the poem. Perfection. But the process is a great lure, and you can postpone failure by dallying along the way like Ulysses. I can hardly get from one sentence to the next.”
I think that those that strive for perfection are those who are yet to experience the final revelation… I don’t think Gass got there (in my meager opinion, of course), there are a few loose ends I disagree with him on. I think he missed the even more immense metaphysical perspective, one I think he would’ve acquired by dabbling more professionally beyond writing. But what he says in this interview is truly incredible, he evidently got very very close. I think this is one I’ll be referring back to.
With thorough understanding, there is no such thing as “failure.” At least not the sense of failure with the emotions or typical corollaries. You can acknowledge what the next step should be given a result; but you can never really call any event “failure,” nor can you call any event “success.” It all just becomes a continual unending process, though still fueled with the vigor gained through understanding.
Gass also adds wonderful and witty self-awareness and modesty. On contextualizing your work within the bounds of human greatness:
“All these writers who have been touted as great—it is not their fault that they are just poor writers like the rest of us, trying to do their best, and having the damn bad luck to be praised by fools because they write so badly fools think they understand them.”
…
In the end, Gass sums it up himself:
“One’s complete sentences are attempts, as often as not, to complete an incomplete self with words. If you were a fully realized person—whatever the hell that would be—you wouldn’t fool around writing books.“
Ah too many people go through life pretending to be realized, only rehashing what seems to represent being so… Kids who’ve been recounted the conclusions of self-realization without personal experience and understanding are very good at putting on this show. And it digs them a hole that is excruciating to climb out of.
Anyways, maybe Gass and I do agree after all. Thank you.
With much love and lols,
Angeline