Tag: writing process

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Authors

Tracy Kidder and the Human Code

Tracy Kidder died yesterday, March 24th, of lung cancer. He was 80.

I’ve been sitting with that quiet, heavy fact for a few hours now, staring at the screen, thinking about what his work meant to me—and specifically, about the enduring legacy of The Soul of a New Machine.

On its surface, the book is a chronicle of a team of engineers and coders at Data General Corporation, racing against the clock in the early 1980s to build a 32-bit minicomputer. If you haven’t read it, that description likely sounds like the synopsis for a dry technical manual. It is, gloriously, anything but.

What Kidder did—what hit me with such force when I first turned those pages—was capture the raw, unvarnished pulse of human obsession. He didn’t just document the architecture of a machine; he mapped the architecture of the minds building it. He translated the late-night pizza runs, the bloodshot eyes, the tribal hierarchies of the engineering floor, and the strange, almost religious fervor that overtakes people when they are creating something they profoundly believe in.

He called it:

“An adventure story, a kind of cultural anthropology.”

That is exactly right.

He ventured into a world most journalists would have fumbled or fundamentally misunderstood.

The early computer industry was hyper-technical, fiercely insular, full of impenetrable jargon, and populated by brilliant minds who regarded outsiders with a polite, if dismissive, suspicion.

But Kidder didn’t blink. He embedded himself. His deep reporting and novelistic prose illuminated the basement labs of tech just as deftly as he later illuminated home construction and global disease prevention. He held a fundamental trust that the human drama playing out inside the sterile machine room was worth finding. And he found it.

Reading Soul as someone who has spent years orbiting technology, I continually find myself marveling at a different kind of engineering: how does a writer actually do this? How do you make the arcane feel intimate?

As one reviewer aptly noted at the time, “Kidder makes the telling seem absolutely effortless.” Which is, of course, the ultimate tell. Effortless prose is always the product of staggering effort.

A friend once said of his process:

“Tracy throws up on the page and cleans up afterward. He was absolutely indefatigable in the writing.”

That immense labor shows—not as the sweat of a struggling author, but as the pure clarity of a master.

What the book quietly teaches, if you’re paying attention, is a profound lesson about the nature of craft itself.

Those Data General engineers weren’t just building a minicomputer. They were building an identity, a tribe, a shared sense of purpose. They were transferring a piece of themselves into the silicon and wire. Kidder understood this alchemy. He highlighted people who had mastered their realms, elevating them into characters whose struggles rang true because they were anchored by staggering amounts of research. He believed—and subsequently proved to the world—that ordinary people doing terribly difficult things in obscure rooms were worthy of the full weight of literary attention.

That was his extraordinary gift. And it is far rarer than it sounds.

The honors and brisk sales from the book vaulted Kidder into the top ranks of American nonfiction writers. But his true legacy lives in the narrative talents he inspired. I suspect a vast number of people who went on to write serious, empathetic nonfiction about technology read Soul at some formative moment and thought: This is how it should be done. I know I was one of them.

He will be deeply missed. But the book remains, waiting on the shelf. If you haven’t read it, today feels like exactly the right day to start.

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)

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AI AI: Prompting Writing

AI as a Mirror, Not a Maker

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we move past the novelty phase of AI—beyond just asking a chatbot to “write a poem about a turkey” or summarize a meeting—and into actual thinking with these tools.

As a lifelong learner, I’m always on the hunt for workflows that help me synthesize information better. Most of the “AI for writing” advice I see online is pretty generic. But I recently came across a breakdown of how four high-profile writers are making effective use of tools like NotebookLM and Claude in ways that are much more sophisticated than simple text generation.

What jumped out at me is that none of these writers use AI to write for them. They use it to structure, challenge, and code.

Here are the four models that caught my eye.

1. The Triangulated Research Base (Steven Johnson)

Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) has a workflow that solves a problem I face constantly: the messy “research phase.”

Instead of treating the AI as an oracle, he treats it as a connection engine. He creates a dedicated notebook (using Google’s NotebookLM) and uploads three distinct types of sources: a primary source (like a raw PDF or study), a secondary source (like a context article), and a multimedia transcript.

Then, rather than asking for a summary, he asks the AI to find the friction between them: “What themes appear in the interview transcript that contradict the historical account in the PDF?”

It’s less about getting an answer and more about finding the blind spots in your own reading.

2. The Diagnostic Editor (Kenny Kane)

This one really resonated with me because it mirrors the experiment I tried recently with my “Bubble Bath” post.

Kenny Kane uses Claude not to generate prose, but to act as a ruthless developmental editor. He uploads a messy draft and runs a “Diagnostic” prompt. He doesn’t ask “fix this,” he asks: “Where does the argument drift? Where does the energy drop?”

He even has the AI analyze his best writing to identify his specific “DNA” (sentence length, vocabulary choice) and then asks it to apply that same tone to his rougher sections. It’s using the AI as a mirror rather than a ghostwriter.

3. The Memo-to-Demo Shift (Dan Shipper)

Dan Shipper at Every is doing something fascinating that changes the definition of writing altogether. He argues that in the AI age, we shouldn’t just describe a concept; we should build a small app to demonstrate it.

If he’s writing about “Spaced Repetition,” he doesn’t just explain the theory. He asks Claude’s Artifacts feature to “Write a React component that lets a user test spaced repetition live in the browser,” and then embeds that little app directly into the essay. The writing becomes 50% prose and 50% software.

4. The Co-Intelligence Loop (Ethan Mollick)

Ethan Mollick focuses on breaking the echo chamber. Before he publishes, he spins up simulated personas—a skeptical VC, a confused novice, an expert in a tangential field—and asks them to critique his draft from their specific viewpoints.

It’s effectively a focus group of one.

How to Get Started

If you’re like me, seeing all these workflows might feel a bit overwhelming. My advice? Don’t try to overhaul your entire writing process overnight. Just pick one experiment to try this week.

Here are two simple entry points:

Experiment A: The “Blind Spot” Check (For Research)

If you are reading up on a topic, don’t just take notes. Open Google NotebookLM, create a new notebook, and upload your sources (PDFs, URLs, or pasted text). Then, ask this specific question:

“Based strictly on these sources, what is the strongest argument against my current thinking? What connection between Source A and Source B am I missing?”

Experiment B: The “Ruthless Editor” (For Writing)

If you have a rough draft sitting on your hard drive, copy it into Claude or ChatGPT and use this prompt (adapted from Kenny Kane’s workflow) before you do any manual editing:

“Act as a senior editor. Do not rewrite this text. Instead, analyze my draft and tell me: 1) Where does the argument lose energy? 2) Does the opening hook successfully promise what the conclusion delivers? Be critical.”

I’ve found that using the tools this way—as a partner for thinking rather than just generating—is where the real magic happens.

Which one will you try first?

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AI AI: Large Language Models Claude Creativity Writing

Unleashing Creativity: Separating the Acts of Making and Refining

I was speaking with a friend over the weekend who remarked to me how he has been using a workflow including dictation for writing his blog posts. This morning I happened across the following quote from author Kevin Kelly in my Readwise highlights feed:

“Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.”

Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living

Using Claude, I asked it to help me write this post. I used the following prompt:

Write a 750 word musing on the following quote. I would like to discuss a workflow that begins with initial idea capture followed by creating a mind map and letting that incubate for a few days. Then use dictation to create a first draft which happens faster than typing and with less mental editing. Then return to the keyboard for actual editing.

Here’s the final result I created which uses some initial writing from Claude which I then edited and revised to include some more specific details not the steps, tools, etc. for this workflow. I also used the title above that Claude proposed and I used Claude to generate a list of 25 keywords to associated with this post.

The creative process is a delicate dance between unbridled expression and careful refinement. Too often, we allow the inner critic to stifle our ideas before they’ve even had a chance to bloom, leading to a stagnant and stilted creative output. However, as Kevin Kelly wisely advises in the quote above, separating the processes of creating and improving can unlock a more organic and fruitful creative flow.

The initial idea capture is akin to planting a seed – a fragile yet promising spark of inspiration that requires nurturing and space to grow. In this stage, the mind should be free to wander, unencumbered by the weight of judgment or the pressure to produce a polished work. Allowing ourselves to simply jot down thoughts, scribble doodles, or record voice memos without censorship can be a liberating experience, inviting a torrent of raw creativity.

Once these seedlings of ideas have been gathered, the next step is to create a mind map – a visual representation that allows us to explore the connections and relationships between our initial thoughts. This process of organizing and expanding upon our ideas can be likened to tending a garden, where we prune away unnecessary branches and encourage the growth of the most promising shoots.

Letting the mind map incubate for a few days is akin to allowing the garden to flourish under the sun’s nourishing rays. During this period of mental rest, our subconscious continues to work behind the scenes, strengthening the connections and filling in the gaps. It is here that the magic of “slow hunches” can take root – those gradual insights and revelations that emerge organically as we revisit and ruminate on our mind maps over time. These slow hunches can open up entirely new avenues of thought, or shed light on the hidden paths connecting our scattered ideas.

Enter dictation, a powerful tool that allows us to harness the power of spoken word and let our ideas flow uninhibited. Unlike typing, which can sometimes feel like a bottleneck for our thoughts, dictation encourages a more natural and rapid expression, capturing the raw essence of our creativity before the inner editor has a chance to intervene. During this phase, we can use our work on the mind map to drive and inspire our first draft, letting the organized structure of our thoughts guide our verbal expression.

The resulting first draft is akin to a rough sketch or a sculptor’s initial clay form – a malleable and imperfect representation of our vision, but one that holds the promise of something greater. It is at this stage that we can finally invite the editor to the table, allowing ourselves to step back and critically analyze our work with a fresh perspective.

Returning to the keyboard for editing is like picking up the chisel and carefully sculpting the final form. We can refine our language, restructure our thoughts, and polish our ideas until they shine, all while maintaining a respectful distance from the initial creative spark that ignited the process.

By separating the processes of creating and improving, we honor the unique strengths and needs of each stage, allowing our ideas to flourish and our creativity to flow without unnecessary constraints. The initial idea capture and mind mapping foster uninhibited exploration, while the incubation period nurtures those elusive “slow hunches.” Dictation then provides a rapid and unfiltered avenue for expressing our matured thoughts, guided by the framework provided in our mind map. Finally, the editing phase allows us to refine and polish our work, transforming our raw creativity into a polished and cohesive final product.

In a world that often demands immediate perfection, embracing this workflow can be a liberating and empowering experience, reminding us that true creativity thrives when given the space to breathe and evolve. By separating the processes of creating and improving, we not only honor the integrity of our ideas but also cultivate a deeper appreciation for the rich tapestry of the creative journey itself – one that is woven with flashes of brilliance, patient nurturing, and the magical unfolding of our “slow hunches.”

Summary of Steps:

  1. Initial idea capture – let ideas flow freely without judgment. Using a tool like Drafts (iOS, iPadOS, Mac) allows quick capture even using an Apple Watch.
  2. Create a mind map to visually organize and expand on ideas. As you create your initial mind map, capture new thoughts that get triggered and place them appropriately near others.
  3. Let the mind map incubate for a few days to allow “slow hunches” to emerge. Your mind will continue “noodling” on the idea and each time you re-open the mind map you may trigger new insights you want to add or adjust.
  4. Use dictation to rapidly capture a first draft, using the mind map to drive and inspire the content. Just talk out your thoughts without any effort at editing them.
  5. Return to the keyboard for editing the first draft, refining and polishing the work. Let the edited draft sit for a few days. Reopen it a couple of times with fresh eyes and edit, usually removing words to tighten up the clarity of your thoughts.
Categories
Creativity Writing

The Faucet of Creativity

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

– Louis L’Amour

This quotation from renowned author Louis L’Amour gets at one of the fundamental truths about the writing process – you can’t produce anything until you actually start writing. The blank page or cursor blinking on the screen can feel intimidating, even paralyzing at times. But L’Amour’s metaphor reminds us that words won’t magically appear until we muster the courage to turn on the faucet and let them flow.

Few pieces of advice are more important than this simple reminder to begin. Launch into that first sentence, that first paragraph, without judging whether it’s perfect or polished. Overthinking and editing prematurely are among the surest ways to stifle creativity before it ever emerges. No matter how talented writers are, their genius remains dammed up unless they release it through the act of writing itself.

The good news is that writing begets more writing. Once you turn on the faucet and let those initial words and ideas trickle out, they help erode the dam of hesitation and doubt. Momentum builds. The trickle becomes a stream and then a forceful current carrying you to insights, descriptions, and creative formulations you couldn’t possibly have conceived until you began writing.

That’s because the very process of writing seems to unlock portals in our minds. The simple act of articulating partial thoughts on the page sparks neurons to fire in new patterns, illuminating connections and opening new cognitive pathways. While staring at a blank page, our brains may feel stuck in rigid philosophical grooves. But acting on L’Amour’s advice and beginning to write, no matter how clumsily or inchoately, dislodges our thinking from its ruts.

By writing, we inadvertently begin a mystical and profoundly human process of turning the lead of our murky semi-thoughts into the gold of lucid, coherent ideas and arguments. But this alchemical magic can only be triggered once we turn on the faucet and accept whatever initially pours forth, no matter how unrefined and unlovely it may appear.

Of course, once the raw material has been expressed, then the real craft of writing takes over as we revise, rearrange, edit, and refine. But that crucial first step cannot be skipped or procrastinated any longer. As L’Amour knew, nothing can flow if the faucet stays off. As Picasso allegedly quipped, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Without the courage to put words on paper and let creative juices drip, writers will find that even the muses cannot help them.

The metaphor also reminds us that once we do turn on the creative faucet, we often cannot fully control the rate or nature of the flow. Sometimes it pours too quickly, with a torrent of ideas gushing in a scattered frenzy. Other times, it dribbles out maddeningly slowly. The water may run murky for a while before it clears. Creative flow frequently alternates between droughts and floods in ways beyond our control.

But the important thing is to trust that the faucet works if we only switch it on. The water will ultimately flow, even if it takes time to find its steady, crystal-clear stream. As long as we don’t shut off the faucet prematurely out of impatience or self-doubt, the channel of imagination remains open and unblocked.

So to all the writers reading this who stare despondently at blank screens and feel creatively frustrated, heed L’Amour’s simple wisdom: Just start writing, with the faith that the faucet works even when it doesn’t seem to. Don’t judge or fret over the initial quality, just turn it on and let it run until it flows freely. Give utterance to the tangled threads of your thoughts and watch in awe as the very act of writing begins to unsnarl and weave them into glorious tapestries.

For those special times when true inspiration does strike like a lightning bolt and ideas pour forth in an unstoppable gush, then you can cry joyful thanks that the faucet was turned on and unobstructed. But for most of the ordinary writing days, you simply have to show up and turn on the flow through plain old self-discipline, grit and persistence. See what wonders and marvels flow when you finally give the waters of your art a path to travel. L’Amour assures that they will indeed flow, if only we have the bravery to turn the tap and let them go.