#storytelling

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From compost, whole gardens grow. It can be useful to think of writing as gardening. You plant the seeds, but each plant will take its own way and shape. The gardener's in control, yes; but plants are living, willful things. Every story has to find its own way to the light. Your great tool as gardener is your imagination. Young writers often think-are taught to think-that a story starts with a message. That is not my experience. What's important when you start is simply this: you have a story you want to tell. A seedling that wants to grow. Something in your inner experience is forcing itself up towards the light. Attentively and carefully and patiently, you can encourage let it happen. Don't force it; trust it. Watch it, water it, let it grow. As you write a story, if you can let it become itself, tell itself fully and truly, you may discover what it's really about, what it says, why you wanted to tell it. It may be a surprise to you. You may have thought you planted a dahlia, and look what came up, an eggplant! Fiction is not information transmission; it is not message-sending. The writing of fiction is endlessly surprising to the writer.

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Impact depth over efficiency. The most thoughtful AI implementations I've seen don't ask "how can we do more?" but "how can we go deeper?"

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The web made the investigative process Bush described possible by preserving trails of association. When we navigate the web via links, we are in a sense travelling through the series of connections made by someone else, not unlike reading something they wrote.

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In that moment of vulnerability – that beautiful imperfection – the audience leaned in. I felt my chest tighten with recognition. I heard whispers in the crowd afterwards: "That wasn't my best performance technically, but it felt really real." That's the paradox we face: in a world where AI can generate flawless execution, our humanity shines brightest through our limitations, not despite them.

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Social media and the internet are powerful social conformity engines that push us toward least-common-denominator appeals. As Alex Murell documented, from Airbnb to coffee shops to Instagram face, there is a pressure for maximally efficient, minimally offensive design. These things are "unfamiliar but completely recognizable."

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definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one.

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A story that's mere wish-fulfilling babble, or coercive preaching concealed in a narrative, lacks intellectual coherence and integrity: it isn't a whole thing, it can't stand up, it isn't true to itself. Learning to read or tell a story that is true to itself is about the best education a mind can have.

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What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?

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