Category: Writing

Categories
Living Music Writing

The Tonic Chord of a Life

We spend a good portion of our lives surrounded by noise. Not just the literal kind—the hum of traffic or the ping of notifications—but the internal noise of unresolved tensions.

I was reminded of this while listening to a recent conversation between David Perell and the legendary journalist Tom Junod (https://youtu.be/JnHTUyZjwiY). Towards the end of their sprawling, beautiful discussion, Junod introduced a metaphor about writing that made me pause the audio and just sit with it for a moment. He talked about the “tonic chord.”

“Musicians, you know, back in the day, they were always looking for the tonic chord. And writing, I’m always looking for the tonic chord… where all the discordant harmonies are resolved in a single ba-boom, you know, at the end of Beethoven or whatever… looking for some sort of resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me.” [00:39:42]

It’s a striking image. In music theory, the tonic is the home base, the center of gravity. It is the chord that finally brings rest after a long sequence of tension and suspense. Without the preceding dissonance, the tonic chord has no power. The chaos isn’t an obstacle to the resolution; it is the very environment that makes the resolution meaningful.

This applies far beyond the blank page. We are all, in our own ways, searching for our tonic chords.

We carry around the stuff that gnaws at us—the contradictions in our relationships, the career choices that look good on paper but feel hollow in the chest, the quiet hypocrisies we tolerate in ourselves. These are the discordant notes. We spend so much of our lives trying to ignore them, turning up the volume on our daily routines to drown out the clash. Or we try to fix them with brute force, stubbornly demanding harmony before we’ve even listened to the melody.

But maybe the point isn’t to erase the tension. Junod’s genius—both in his essays and in this metaphor—is his willingness to sit with the discomfort. He looks directly at the friction. He places two opposing truths right next to each other, letting them rub like tectonic plates, waiting patiently for that final chord to finally release the pressure.

I think about the architecture of a well-lived life in much the same way. The most resonant moments I’ve experienced haven’t come from a smooth, unbroken string of successes. They usually arrive right after a period of intense confusion or struggle—a sudden moment of clarity on a foggy morning walk, a tough but honest conversation with a friend, or finally letting go of an idea that had lost its spark.

That sudden ba-boom of clarity. The release.

We are taught from childhood that a good life should be harmonious. But true harmony is earned. It requires us to listen closely to the discordant parts of our lives, to bear witness to our own messes and mysteries, and to patiently search for the truth that finally brings them all together.

Often, it is the ultimate act of self-awareness.

Seek serendipity.

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Categories
Living Writing

The Origami Swan

Fold a piece of paper enough times, and it begins to take shape. It looks like a swan, but it isn’t one. It’s origami. Two-dimensional paper masquerading in a three-dimensional world.

There is a profound danger, both in writing and in how we move through life, of viewing people as origami. We see the folded edges—what they do, what they say, where they go—and we mistake the shape for the substance.

The sportswriter Wright Thompson borrows a concept from a college Tennessee Williams class to describe what is missing when we do this: interiority. It is the subterranean emotional reality happening beneath the visible actions of a character. Without it, scenes are flat. Without it, people are just paper swans.

Thompson builds on the philosophy of Gary Smith, who argues that every profile fundamentally asks the same question: What is the central complication of this person’s life, and how do they go about solving it every single day?

Almost all of that solving happens quietly, invisibly, on the inside. The exterior architecture of a person’s life is entirely meaningless until you understand the interior architecture holding it up.

But how do you communicate something so deeply internal? You can’t just tell the reader what someone is feeling. It feels cheap, unearned. Instead, Thompson uses a technique of “loading the object.” You find an exterior detail—a habit, a possession, an avoidance—and you charge it with interior meaning.

“The exterior action… is only meaningful if you’ve built the interior architecture first.”

Consider Michael Jordan. Thompson learned that Jordan falls asleep to old Westerns. As an isolated fact, it’s just a quirky celebrity habit. But Thompson also learned that Jordan misses his murdered father every single day, and that watching Westerns was something they used to do together.

By introducing the Westerns early and casually, Thompson loads the object. By the end of the piece, when he simply describes Jordan falling asleep to a Western, he doesn’t need to explain the grief. The reader already carries the emotional weight of the object. A completely mundane action becomes devastating.

The same is true of Tiger Woods naming his boats Privacy and Solitude. To the casual observer, they are just wealthy indulgences. But once you understand the interiority of an extreme introvert who has been force-fitted into a global, extroverted marketing machine since childhood, those names are no longer just names. They are a diagnosis.

Executing this requires two distinct disciplines. The first is deep observation—what journalists call reporting. You cannot manufacture interiority at the keyboard. As Thompson notes, whenever a scene feels flat, it is because he hasn’t dug deep enough into the reality of the person to earn the meaning. Overwriting is simply underreporting with a better vocabulary.

The second discipline is restraint. Once you have built the interior context, you must stop talking. You have to let the exterior action land in silence. The human instinct is to over-explain, to ensure everyone gets it. But the magic happens when you step back and trust the connection you’ve built.

There is a philosophical lesson here that extends far beyond writing. How often do we settle for the origami versions of the people around us? How often do we try to talk our way into understanding them, rather than doing the deep, quiet work of observing their “loaded objects”?

To truly understand another human being requires the discipline to look past the surface, the patience to uncover their central complication, and the grace to let their quietest moments speak for themselves.

Note: Be sure to watch this conversation between Wright Thompson and David Perell.

Categories
AI Creativity Programming Writing

We Are All Painters Now: The Era of Vibe Coding

For decades, the act of creating software was exactly that: writing. It was a distinctly left-brained, agonizingly precise discipline.

Programmers were typists of logic, translating human intent into a rigid, unforgiving syntax that a machine could understand. A single misplaced semicolon, an unclosed bracket, or a misspelled variable could bring an entire system crashing down.

Building software meant placing one brick after another, working meticulously from the ground up.

In this traditional paradigm, coders were the ultimate embodiment of Annie Dillard’s writer. As she noted in The Writing Life, “Writers… work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.”

When you wrote code, your mistakes, your refactoring, and your discarded logic were all part of a linear, grueling journey. If a feature didn’t work, you had to physically wade back into the text, debugging, reading line by line, and rewriting the narrative of the application. The discarded chapters were the endless hours spent wrestling with a single broken dependency.

But recently, a profound paradigm shift has quietly taken over our screens. We are transitioning out of the era of writing software and into the era of “vibe coding.”

Vibe coding fundamentally changes our relationship with the machine. With the rise of advanced AI coding assistants, we are no longer placing the bricks ourselves; we have become the architects and the creative directors. You don’t write the loop or manually construct the database query. Instead, you describe the feeling, the function, and the outcome. You tell the AI, “Make this dashboard feel more modern,” or “The logic here is too clunky, make it flow faster and handle edge cases gracefully.” You are coding by intuition. You are steering by the “vibe” of the output rather than the mechanics of the input.

Suddenly, Dillard’s other metaphor takes center stage. In the age of vibe coding, we have become painters.

“A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them.”

When we vibe code, we ask an AI for a functional prototype, and it gives us a canvas. We look at it, test it, and sense whether it aligns with our vision. If it doesn’t quite hit the mark, we don’t necessarily rewrite the code from scratch. We simply prompt the AI to try again, adding a new layer of instruction. The AI paints a new layer of code directly over the old one. The awkward, underlying iterations—the messy attempts at styling, the inefficient logic of the first draft—are obliterated by the newest prompt.

The machine covers our tracks for us. We don’t need to know exactly how the underlying pixels were rearranged or how the syntax was refactored. The final application emerges as a stunning obliteration of its own clumsy past.

As someone who has spent time wrestling with the rigid demands of syntax, there is a strange, quiet grief in letting go of that left-to-right process. There is a deeply earned, tactile satisfaction in building something manually, understanding the precise weight and placement of every line of code. Relinquishing that control can feel like a loss of craftsmanship.

Yet, there is also a breathtaking liberation in this new medium. We are moving from a world of manual construction to a world of artistic curation. The barrier to entry is no longer fluency in a specific, arcane language; it is simply the clarity of your imagination and your ability to articulate your intent.

The next time you sit down to build something digital, notice the shift in your own posture. You no longer have to carry the heavy burden of the writer, agonizing over every word and leaving your discardable chapters on the left. You can step back, look at the whole canvas, and trust your intuition. Let the AI cover the tracks. Embrace the obliteration of the early drafts.

We are all painters now, coaxing the future into existence one brushstroke at a time.

Categories
News Writing

A Tribute to John F. Burns

“The commitment to fairness and balance and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions has been our gold standard.” — John F. Burns

As I’ve gotten older I pay closer attention to the obituary section of the New York Times. It frequently teaches me and brings back unusual memories that surprise me. Today it was my memory of years of reading the writings of John Burns brought back to life as I read his obituary.

Burns retired over ten years ago. I now remember thinking at the time just what a loss that would be for the paper. Reading Alan Cowell’s obituary of John F. Burns this morning, I felt that absence acutely.

For years, Burns was my first read—a “fireman” of the foreign desk who didn’t just report on the heat; he translated the embers.

Burns belonged to an era of journalism that felt more like a literary calling than a content cycle. He was a man who could find the “sweep of history” in the “telling detail of the present.”

Who else would think to frame the harrowing siege of Sarajevo through the haunting notes of a cellist playing Albinoni’s Adagio amidst the rubble? He understood that to explain a war, you must first explain the soul of the city being broken by it.

His career was a map of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most jagged edges—from the “wasteland of blasted mosques” in Bosnia to the “harrowing regime” of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Yet, for all his Pulitzers and his debonair appearances in a Burberry raincoat on Red Square, there was a refreshing, stubborn humility to his craft.

He famously tilted against the “missionary complex” of modern reporting. He didn’t want to save the world; he wanted to see it—clearly, fairly, and without the blinding influence of ideology.

There is something deeply moving about his partnership with his wife, Jane Scott-Long which wasn’t familiar to me. While John was the “full force of talent” at the keyboard, Jane was the architect of safety, turning run-down Baghdad houses into fortified sanctuaries with “military-style blast walls” and, perhaps most essentially, a state-of-the-art coffee machine. They were a team that survived the “chaos of war” by creating a small, civilized center within it.

In his later years after she passed, Burns became more reclusive, a quiet departure for a man once known as a “raconteur with panache.” It’s a transition that mirrors the profession itself. He flourished in a pre-internet era, where time-zone differentials allowed for “considered writing.” Today, the “blue pencil” of the editor has been replaced by the instant, unvetted roar of the social feed.

His final story for the Times was about the reburial of King Richard III. It was a fitting end: a story about the “sweep of the centuries” propelling the news of the day.

As I reflect back on his work and my years of reading it, I realize that what I miss isn’t just the news he delivered. I miss the way he delivered it—with the patience of a historian and the heart of a poet. He kept the paper straight, and in doing so, he helped us keep our bearings in a world that so often feels lost. Especially today.

Categories
Creativity Writing

The Crucible of the Blank Page

There is a distinct, often uncomfortable silence that accompanies a blank page. It’s not a lack of noise, but rather an overwhelming cacophony of unformed ideas waiting to be given shape.

We often operate under the assumption that we must have our thoughts perfectly ordered before we sit down to express them. We believe writing is merely the act of transcribing a fully formed philosophy from mind to paper.

But the truth is far messier, and infinitely more profound.

Flannery O’Connor captured this beautifully when she admitted:

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

I find myself returning to this admission constantly, deeply resonating with the reality of it. I’m the same way.

The human mind is a brilliant but chaotic place, a swirling ether of impressions, emotions, half-remembered conversations, and half-baked theories. Left to its own devices, it rarely settles on a singular, coherent truth. It requires the friction of articulation—the physical, deliberate act of putting words into a sequence—to force those nebulous clouds into something solid.

In an era increasingly defined by the allure of frictionless output, there is a profound temptation to skip this wrestling match.

We are surrounded by tools and shortcuts designed to hand us the finished essay, the polished insight, the perfectly packaged takeaway without us having to endure the messy, chaotic energy of the drafting process. It is easy to look at the blank page as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a necessary landscape to be traversed. But bypassing that struggle is a critical mistake.

You cannot skip the work of wrestling with ideas. That struggle is not a barrier to good writing; it is the core chaotic energy that underpins it. It is the crucible where conviction is forged.

When you wrestle with a sentence, striking it out, rewriting it, abandoning it entirely for a new thought, you are not just editing text on a screen. You are editing your own mind. You are testing the structural integrity of your beliefs.

The chaotic energy of a rough draft—the fragmented sentences, the sudden leaps of logic, the tangents that seem to lead nowhere—is evidence of a mind actively searching for meaning.

It is through this very friction that we discover what we actually believe.

An idea might feel profound when it is floating weightlessly in your head, but the moment you try to pin it down with language, its flaws and hollow points become glaringly obvious. Writing forces a confrontation with our own intellectual blind spots.

If we outsource this process, or if we try to circumvent the chaos by relying on templates or taking the path of least cognitive resistance, we lose the very mechanism by which we come to know ourselves. We might successfully produce text, but we will not produce insight.

The value of writing isn’t just in the final product meant for a reader’s eyes; it is in the transformation that occurs within the writer.

To write is to step into the unknown spaces of your own intellect. It is an act of revelation as much as communication.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page, feeling the chaotic energy of unformed thoughts, don’t retreat.

Lean into the mess. Let the words spill out, rough and unpolished, and trust that in the wreckage of your early drafts, you will finally read what you say, and in doing so, discover exactly what you think.

Categories
Authors Storytelling Writing

The Architecture of Resonance

There’s a particular kind of madness that strikes writers late at night, or in the stagnant hours of mid-afternoon, when you find yourself staring at a single sentence for twenty minutes.

You’re weighing a semicolon against an em dash. You’re wondering if “murmur” is too soft or if “whisper” is too cliché. All of this while knowing, with complete certainty, that no reader will ever stop to appreciate this specific choice. They’ll just read the sentence and move on.

So why do we do it?

In Draft No. 4, John McPhee — the legendary literary journalist who spent decades at The New Yorker — shares a principle he still writes on the blackboard at Princeton. It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant: “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” The implication, McPhee explains, is that almost no individual detail is essential, while the details as a whole are absolutely essential.

I find this idea endlessly useful. And a little reassuring.

Think about walking into a beautifully designed home. You don’t notice the precise angle of the crown molding or the specific undertones of the paint. You don’t walk in and say, “Ah yes, Alabaster White.” You just feel warmth, or elegance, or comfort. The impression is singular — but it’s entirely built from a thousand invisible decisions someone made before you arrived.

Writing works the same way. The rhythm of your sentences, the specificity of your verbs, the way a paragraph ends — these are the details. Individually, they’re expendable. Swap “murmur” for “whisper” and the piece survives. Delete the semicolon and the world keeps turning.

But collectively, they are the piece.

Start compromising — reach for the easy cliché, let a clunky transition slide, settle for vague where you could be specific — and the foundation slowly rots. The reader won’t be able to name the moment they lost interest. They’ll just close the tab. The impression shifts from resonant to flat, without anyone quite knowing why.

Writing, then, is an act of quiet faith. It asks you to labor over things no one will applaud. Nobody claps for an em dash. But the work isn’t really for applause — it’s out of respect for the whole.

We curate a thousand invisible things so the reader can feel one visible truth.

So the next time you’re agonizing over a single word at midnight, remember: you’re not just picking a word. You’re placing a tile in a mosaic. Cary Grant understood it. McPhee put it on a blackboard. You might as well make it count.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Writing

Notes for a Distant Shore

I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.

Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:

“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.

Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.

Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.

In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)

Categories
Books Writing

The Secret Handshake

Author George Saunders has a gift for articulating things you already knew but couldn’t say.

I was reminded of this recently when I returned to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his generous, luminous masterclass on Russian short fiction — the book that uses Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol as a lens for understanding what fiction actually does to a reader, and why.

Early on, Saunders wonders whether there might be certain laws governing how we respond to stories — not rules handed down by writing programs, but something closer to instinct, something wired into the reading mind.

One of his candidates is physical description. “We like hearing our world described,” he writes. “And we like hearing it described specifically.”

That line stopped me. It has the quality of a truth that, once named, you begin seeing everywhere — in the books you love, in the passages you’ve underlined without quite knowing why, in the sentences that have stayed with you for years long after the plot has faded.

Plot pulls us forward. Character keeps us invested. Ideas give us something to argue with on the drive home. But it’s the specific physicality of a story that makes it land in the body.

“It was raining” barely registers. Tell me instead about raindrops beading on a leaf, or the way mud sucks at a boot heel with a wet shlup, and suddenly I’m not reading about a place — I’m standing in it.

Why should this be?

Saunders doesn’t fully explain it, and maybe the honest answer is that no one fully can.

Our brains are pattern-matching machines, wired by evolution to map territory and imagine consequence — and concrete detail feeds that machinery directly. Or maybe the explanation is simpler and more generous: we love the world, and hearing it rendered with precision is a form of praise.

Whatever the reason, the great writers have always known this law and obeyed it joyfully. With the help of AI I’ve collected a few good examples.

Consider the opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:

In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.

No grand metaphors. Just pebbles, dust, leaves, color, motion. Yet the scene is so tangible you can almost taste the grit. And the specificity does double duty — it grounds us in a real place while quietly foreshadowing the war that will eventually powder everything.

Dickens, who worked at a different scale entirely, goes symphonic with it. The opening of Bleak House is one of the great set pieces in the language:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city… Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships… fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.

The repetition is hypnotic, but it’s the specificity — cabooses, rigging, toes, pipes — that transforms weather into a living, malevolent presence. You don’t just read the fog. You feel it in your lungs.

Fitzgerald does something different again in The Great Gatsby, using the same technique to make moral decay feel physical and inescapable:

This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Ashes don’t just lie there — they grow, they form, they crumble. The grotesque precision turns an industrial wasteland into an image of everything the Jazz Age is trying not to look at.

And then there is Chekhov, who Saunders loves most of all. In “Gooseberries” — the story that gives Saunders his title — Ivan Ivanych plunges into a river in the rain:

He plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his arms out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed.

Those white lilies swaying on the disturbed water — two words, one image — capture pure animal joy more vividly than any abstract declaration of happiness ever could. It’s the kind of detail that makes you want to jump in yourself.

Saunders is right.

Our reading minds light up at this stuff. Specific physical description isn’t decoration or craft-workshop virtue signaling — it’s the secret handshake between writer and reader. It says: I noticed this small, real thing. Did you?

In a world increasingly mediated by screens and summaries and the frictionless delivery of abstracted information, fiction’s quiet insistence on the pebbles and the fog and the lilies feels almost like an act of resistance. It insists that the world is worth looking at. That the particular matters. That rendering one thing exactly right is worth more than gesturing vaguely at everything.

So next time you’re reading — or writing — linger on the details. Describe the world specifically. Our hungry minds will thank you for it.

Questions to Consider

  1. Saunders suggests physical specificity might be a kind of law in fiction — something the reading mind responds to almost instinctively. Do you think this is universal, or culturally conditioned?
  2. The examples here are all from the Western literary canon. Does this law hold in traditions — Japanese, Russian, African, South Asian — that handle interiority and landscape differently?
  3. If our appetite for specific physical detail is partly evolutionary — the brain mapping territory — what does it mean that so much of what we now consume is deliberately abstract and summarized?
  4. Can over-specificity fail? Are there writers who pile on detail to the point where it stops doing its work?
  5. Saunders uses fiction to make the point, but does the same law apply to nonfiction, memoir, or long-form journalism — and if so, who are the writers doing it best right now?
Categories
AI AI: Prompting Books Writing

How to Write a Book (The Voice-First AI Workflow)

We’ve all seen the “How to write a book in 24 hours with AI” tutorials. Usually, they involve a single prompt and result in a 200-page book of absolute “slop”—generic, robotic, and devoid of any human soul.

I recently came across a workflow on X that flips the script. Instead of asking AI to write for you, it uses AI as an editor, librarian, and investigative journalist to extract the book that’s already in your head.

I’ve adjusted this process a bit (with Gemini’s help) and built a revised “Toolkit” that makes it even more rigorous. This is a system you can use to write a book that actually sounds like you.

The Philosophy: Knowledge Extraction > Generation

The biggest mistake people make with AI is using it to generate ideas. The best books come from extracted knowledge. You already have the expertise in your head; the hard part is the “manual labor” of organizing, structuring, and filling gaps. We often overlook stuff that we should have included or we can’t quite resolve how stuff should be sequenced for the most reader impact.

This workflow uses voice dictation as the first step to capture your raw energy and then adds in AI to help handle the structural heavy lifting.

The 7-Step “Enhanced” Workflow

1. The Walking Braindump

Go for a walk and record a voice memo of everything you want to say about your topic. Don’t worry about structure, grammar, or “the right way” to say it. Just talk. Don’t worry about it. Movement usually activates parts of the brain that sitting at a desk shuts down. You’re just using the outdoors to open up your mind and bring fresh perspective.

2. The Transcription & “Essence” Extraction

Use a tool to convert your voice memo into text (something like the built-in tools in the iOS Voice Memos app on your iPhone or, if you prefer, a third-party app like MacWhisper or Wispr Flow. I find the built-in tools work quite well these days so give them a try before spending the money for a third-party app.

Once you have the transcript, don’t ask the AI to “write a chapter.” Instead, you want to ask it for help identifying the Core Thesis, the Target Audience, and the Unique Vocabulary you used. This creates a “North Star” for your project.

3. The Voice Mirror

This step is the secret sauce. To prevent the AI from making you sound like a corporate brochure, provide it with 3-5 pages of your best previous writing. Ask it to analyze your rhythm, sentence length, and diction. Tell it: “Clean up my transcripts, but keep my fingerprint.”

4. Recursive Brainstorming

Work on the outline with the AI. Iterate. Ask it what’s missing. How does it compare to the other best-selling books in your niche. Where are you being redundant? Where is your “original” angle?

5. Filling the Gaps via “Socratic Interview”

Once you have an outline, you’ll find “thin” areas. Instead of typing, flip things around and ask the AI to play the role of an investigative journalist. Have it interview you about the missing pieces. Dictate your answers. As with the first step, this pulls deep insights out of you that you might never have thought to type. Think like you’re talking to a friend and reacting to their reactions.

6. The “Devil’s Advocate” Pass

Before you get too far, ask the AI to “Red Team” your outline. Ask: “What would a skeptic say is the biggest leap of faith in my argument?” This forces you to add evidence where you were previously relying on “trust me.”

7. The Manual Polish

Finally, sit down and type. As the original author of this workflow noted, typing activates a different, more “painful” part of the brain that is essential for final quality. Use the AI-organized markdown files as your foundation, but always do the final “human” pass yourself.

Your “Project DNA”

If you’re going to try this, the key is consistency. Keep a file called Project_DNA.md. Every time you start a new session with AI, paste this file in first. It tells the AI exactly who you are, who you’re writing for, and what your voice sounds like.

Here’s the full toolkit with prompts that I’ve just described:

The AI Book Writing Toolkit: The Prompts

To help you get started, here are the exact prompts I use for each phase of this workflow.

Phase 1: The Essence Extractor

Use this on the transcript you’ve created after your first major walking braindump.

“I am providing a transcript of a raw ‘braindump’ for a book I am writing. Do not attempt to write the book yet. Instead, perform a deep thematic analysis to extract the ‘Essence’ of this project. Identify: The Core Thesis, The Target Audience, Unique Vocabulary (metaphors/phrases I use), and the Tone Map.”

Phase 2: The Voice Mirroring Protocol

Use this before organizing transcripts to ensure you don’t sound like a robot.

“Act as my Editor and Voice Stylist. I am providing 3–5 pages of what I consider to be my best writing. Analyze this writing for sentence rhythm, diction, and structure. Whenever you help me organize my voice transcripts, you must apply these stylistic ‘fingerprints.’ Clean up the grammar, but keep my rhythm.”

Phase 3: The Socratic Interviewer

Use this when a chapter feels thin or you hit a wall.

“Act as an investigative journalist interviewing me. Identify 3 areas where my current draft is fuzzy or surface-level. Ask me ONE question at a time. After I answer, challenge me: ‘That makes sense, but what about [Counter-argument]?’ Summarize our findings afterward.”

Phase 4: The Devil’s Advocate

Use this to stress-test your draft.

“I want you to ‘Red Team’ this rough copy of my book. Imagine you are a critical reviewer. Point out the ‘leaps of faith’ I am asking the reader to make. Identify where my arguments are ‘low-hanging fruit’ and tell me specifically where I am being too similar to existing books in this niche. Help me make it better.”

Final Thought

Your goal isn’t to use AI to work less; it’s to have it help you work deeper. By offloading the “clerk work” of organization and editing to AI, you free up your brain to do the actual “author work” of thinking, connecting, and writing.

Are you working on a book? I’d love to hear how you’re using (or avoiding) AI in your process. What prompts are you using? How have you adjusted them to fit your needs?

Categories
Living Writing

The Loop and the Pixel

There is a distinct muscle memory associated with the 1950s classroom. It smells of chalk dust and floor wax, but mostly, it feels like the cramping of a small hand wrapped around a pencil. We didn’t just learn to write; we were initiated into the discipline of the loop. The Palmer Method or Zaner-Bloser weren’t suggestions—they were rigorous architectures of communication. We made endless rows of O’s and l’s, tilting the paper just so, learning that language required flow, connectivity, and a certain deliberate grace.

Then, the world sped up.

By the 1990s, the loops began to unravel. As keyboards clattered their way into dominance, the efficiency of the printed letter—and eventually the typed pixel—took precedence over the artistry of the connected script. By 2010, the erasure was formalized; cursive was dropped from federal education standards (Common Core) to make room for “electronic literacy.” We traded the unique signature for the standardized font. We gained speed, certainly, but I often wonder what we lost in the translation.

“New Jersey this week joined a list of more than 20 states slanting in favor of bringing cursive instruction back to classrooms. Lessons on the looping letters were dropped from federal education standards in 2010, part of a shift toward focusing on electronic literacy.” — The New York Times

It seems the pendulum is swinging back. Proponents argue for its utility—the ability to read historical texts or a grandmother’s birthday card—but I believe the resurgence touches on something deeper.

In an increasingly digital world, cursive is an act of resistance. Typing is percussion; it is staccato and disconnected. Cursive is string; it is continuous and fluid. When we write in cursive, we are physically connecting thoughts, linking one letter to the next without lifting the pen. It forces the brain to slow down and the hand to dance.

As we stare into screens that demand our instant reaction, perhaps we are realizing that we crave the friction of pen on paper. We are bringing the loops back not because they are faster, but because they are human.