David Perell Clips (@PerellClips) - Twitter Profili

Will AI ever write a great novel? Maria Popova says: "AI will never write the great American or French poem because it hasn't suffered. Even if you attempt to make it suffer by writing a command to execute failure, it will already be succeeding at executing that failure. It will never understand what it means to collide with its own impossibility. I don't think it's necessary to suffer in order to create. However, I believe that from our suffering comes the restlessness to find meaning, beauty, and wonder; to give voice and shape to feelings that can be so isolating. Why do we read? We read to be moved and to be changed. AI can tell me about the Eye of the Scallop without me spending days poring over scientific journals and papers. But if I hadn't spent those days, I wouldn't have written about it with feeling. All writing that is truly moving is born of feeling and time. AI has neither; it's an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure information."

David Perell@david_perell

Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words. All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Why writers should visit archives 04:39 Lessons from reading diaries 09:41 Letters vs diaries 11:35 Presence over productivity 18:30 How language shapes thought 19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry 36:46 Why college failed her 39:58 Reading to survive 41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick 43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes 47:32 Why AI can never make art 53:10 Stop calling it content I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·2d

Poetry and science have been pitted against each other. Liberal arts vs. STEM. Wordcels vs. shape rotators. But why should they be opposites? Together, they fill us with a greater understanding of the world and a greater sense of wonder. Maria Popova says: "Science enables us to meet reality on its own terms. Poetry helps us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. Between the two, truth and meaning, lies the sum of human experience. I believe a greater understanding of how starlight travels, the electromagnetic spectrum, and optics makes the rainbow even more wondrous. Science deepens, brightens, and magnifies our appreciation of the phenomena around us by adding another layer of understanding." As sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: "Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe."

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·2d

"Memoir is just the Instagram version of the diary." Until the 19th century, people didn't write their own memoirs. Somebody else had to write it about you, after you died. Maria Popova says: "Historical diaries, those more than 200 years old, tend to be more reliable as they typically originate from actual notebooks. People at the time were not engaging in the exhibitionist publication style common in the 20th and 21st centuries, the age of memoir. That simply wasn't a concept. The term 'memoir' meant someone else writing to commemorate a person who had died. When Margaret Fuller died, Emerson wrote Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, and other people contributed to it. It was a collection of others remembering the person, as opposed to the person self-reporting their life." Memoirs went from how others remembered you to a curated version of how you remember yourself.

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·2d

We've fallen for the trap of thinking something doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet. Maria Popova: "The internet is a surface level of the ocean, a common record of human thought, wisdom, and knowledge. We often believe that if something cannot be found on the internet, it doesn't exist. It's insane to think this because so much has been thought, felt, written, created, and drawn that still dwells in university basements and libraries. This content has shaped our present more profoundly than the 40-year depth of the internet. These are real events in the history of the world and the creative universe, yet they are erased from the simulacrum of memory that is the internet." She spent seven years digging through archives of the people featured in her latest book, Traversal: "I devoured all of their existing writings, both public and private. This meant going to the Library of Congress for Walt Whitman's notebooks and the Bodleian Library at Oxford for Mary Shelley's journals. If you only rely on digitally preserved materials, you will undoubtedly misrepresent a life. Much of my time in archives is dedicated to better understanding the people I'm trying to write about."

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·3d

"I'd rather have an ordinary character in extraordinary circumstances." Novelist Yann Martel on why he doesn't obsess over crafting quirky, highly detailed characters: "I want someone who is interested in the world, who's open, and then things happen to him — rather than someone who's really weird and curious and the banal happens. In Life of Pi, there's a shipwreck. In Beatrice and Virgil, the Holocaust. But those people are just ordinary people. They want to have their three meals a day. One might even say boring people, but then the appalling, the extraordinary happens to them. That's why I never describe my characters. Words are terrible at description. If you emphasize anything with someone's nose, you suddenly imagine this enormous nose. If you mention a little scar, you imagine this great cut. It becomes a caricature." The ordinary character is a mirror. We see ourselves in them, and through them, we discover something we couldn't have seen on our own.

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·3d

Here's one signature of "AI voice" that's easy to fix: every sentence is the same length. Short sentences. Like this one. Or this one. They sound monotone. Life of Pi author Yann Martel explains how he avoid this: "One of the very few rules of writing that I sort of try to stick to is, don't have sentences that are the same length one after the other. You don't want to have seventeen 10-word sentences in a row, that gets boring. You want to have one that's longer, one shorter, one longer. You want to gently vary them. You think the reader whose eyes are just gliding over the page wouldn't notice, they actually do. It does rhythm their reading."

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·6d

"Facts only go so far. You want story." Some of the most enduring narratives in human history have no historical records behind them, yet they are known by billions. "The foundations of Western civilization are Homer's Iliad, Odyssey, and the Gospels. Whether you've read them or believe in them is not the point. Whether you like them or not is not the point here. And it's amazing to think that none of them have any facts attending them. We don't know when [Jesus] was born. December 25 was the Romans mistaking it for the winter equinox. In fact, it's the twenty-first, not the twenty-fifth, and they thought what better day to have Jesus be born but the days when the winter days get short and there's more light in our life. There are no facts to do with Jesus. But what they both have is story. There's something about them that we endlessly wanna tell stories about. Where sometimes things have a billion facts attending them, but they don't live in us. So there's a moment of intellectual illumination that you know what, you don't actually need facts. You don't want lies, but facts only go so far. Then you want story." –Yann Martel

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·6d

"Artists are solitary agents." They have no constituency, no obligation, no boss. Novelist Yann Martel explains why that matters, and why it scares people in power: "We have no obligation to anyone but to ourselves, which is great, because we're free agents. That's exactly why tyrants are afraid of us, because we will say whatever we want, which will shock some people, but delight others. There's something inherently free about art, and it's because we don't owe anyone anything. But the downside is because we have no constituency, we don't represent anyone but ourselves. So our opinions don't necessarily reflect a greater, wiser judgment."

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·8 May

The better AI writing gets, the less we'll want to read it. Life of Pi author Yann Martel explains why: 1) AI Inflation "Once you know it's AI, then suddenly it's like special effects in movies. I find my kids when they watch movies with special effects, they'll just shrug because we know a computer can generate anything. So a sort of inflation sets in where we're less impressed. Then you have a great actor who's just acting with no special effects and it's like, wow, that works. What really has an impact is the actor emoting the authenticity of that." 2) AI Aversion "I think publishers are going to start saying, 'hey, it cannot be beyond spell check and maybe minimal AI, but you cannot use AI.' I think readers will agree with that, and that the ones who cheat on that will be seen as cheaters. They're not going to get published, but even if they do, they won't be read. They're not going to win prizes, they're not going to win good reviews. It'll be pointed out that this is not the way to do it."

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·8 May

In the last scene of The Dark Knight Rises, Alfred believes Bruce Wayne is dead. But then he sees him at a cafe. They exchange a nod and no words, and that's how the movie ends. Why does this ending work so well? Yann Martel says: "A good ending is one that properly concludes a reader's expectations without answering everything. You want a degree of mystery as to what might happen next or even what has happened. You want a degree of closure, but without forgetting what has just happened. You don't want something rushed, you don't want something completely unexpected. You want the reader to be left with a sense of wonder and questioning while also feeling like their expectations were fulfilled." So in the The Dark Knight Rises, expectations are fulfilled in the way the hero lives and the mystery comes from the how. -Expectations fulfilled = the hero lives -Mystery = how did he survive?

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·8 May

The tortoise and the hare. The three little pigs. Animal Farm. Some of the most memorable stories in human history involve animals, but why do they make for such good characters? "People aren't as cynical about rhinoceroses and giraffes as they are of people from Texas or people from France or people from India or Muslims, where we're full of prejudices, which simplifies our life, but it's also very cruel and distorts reality." My novel after Life of Pi was called Beatrice and Virgil, and there I used a donkey and a monkey. And here they were heavily anthropomorphized. They spoke. They were together traveling there, even though you don't necessarily have howler monkeys and donkeys hanging out. So there was completely the traditional use of animals as vehicles for human thought. And there I just chose them for what they might symbolize. We hold monkeys to be clever. We hold donkeys to be stubborn and enduring. So they are very, in a childish way, in a sense of using animals as a vehicle for, as masks for human beings.” -Yann Martel

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·6 May

Should you write with AI? “Why would I? It’d be like hiring someone to have sex for you. For anything creative, why would I want to use it when it’s the very creative language that I like? I suspect we’ll tire of that quickly. I’d rather read a bad short story by a human than a good one by a computer. What you want in art is connection. It’s connection with another human being.” Yann Martell, author of Life of Pi.

David Perell@david_perell

Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. When I asked him about writing with AI, he said: "Why would you do that? That's like hiring somebody to have sex for you." We talked about why he knows how his book is going to end, what books can do that movies can't, why animals work so well as characters, and what great endings have in common. Timestamps: 0:28 The envelope method 5:34 Writing good scenes 11:43 Why animals are good characters 19:31 How to hook readers 32:52 Breaking the rules of writing 37:19 Should you write with AI? 44:55 Genre fiction vs. literary fiction 48:56 When should you read reviews? 52:38 Writing lessons from plays 54:59 Beware of describing characters 57:54 Facts don't make for good stories 1:02:40 What makes for a good ending? 1:08:20 Artists can't be indifferent — — Highlights: 1) Commas function like a drummer in a band, providing the rhythm for the sentence. 2) What makes for a good ending? "You want the reader to behold something at the end of a story, yet not have everything fully resolved. The ending should still glow with a degree of mystery, wonder, and invite pondering." 3) Beware of describing people in writing: "Words are terrible at description. If you emphasize a character's nose, you suddenly imagine an enormous nose. If you imagine a little scar, you envision a great cut. It becomes a caricature." 4) Why animals work well as characters in fiction: People aren't cynical about animals. They don't hold the same prejudices about giraffes or rhinoceroses as they will about people from Texas, France, India, or Muslims. We're full of prejudices that simplify our lives but are also very cruel and distort reality. 5) How much should you plan a piece of writing? Yann says it's like travel. It's worth doing research and making reservations, but it's the discoveries you make along the way that give the trip life. I've shared the full conversation with Yann Martel below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·6 May

The world needs more magical thinking. Life of Pi author Yann Martel believes the antidote lives in the two places we least expect: art and religion. "As a secular person I became interested in religion, because I put religion and art together as magical thinking. You posit a fantastical school called Hogwarts with a wizard called Harry Potter. You create alternate worlds that still resemble ours. You go beyond rationality, but that makes us more sane. We go beyond the rational to regain our sanity and live in this world. They're both about getting beyond what seems obvious and comprehensible to a sense of awe, a sense of the sublime. The sublime can be achieved quite simply if you're open to it. And that's exactly what religion and art are good at; putting you in that state of awe."

David Perell@david_perell

Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. When I asked him about writing with AI, he said: "Why would you do that? That's like hiring somebody to have sex for you." We talked about why he knows how his book is going to end, what books can do that movies can't, why animals work so well as characters, and what great endings have in common. Timestamps: 0:28 The envelope method 5:34 Writing good scenes 11:43 Why animals are good characters 19:31 How to hook readers 32:52 Breaking the rules of writing 37:19 Should you write with AI? 44:55 Genre fiction vs. literary fiction 48:56 When should you read reviews? 52:38 Writing lessons from plays 54:59 Beware of describing characters 57:54 Facts don't make for good stories 1:02:40 What makes for a good ending? 1:08:20 Artists can't be indifferent — — Highlights: 1) Commas function like a drummer in a band, providing the rhythm for the sentence. 2) What makes for a good ending? "You want the reader to behold something at the end of a story, yet not have everything fully resolved. The ending should still glow with a degree of mystery, wonder, and invite pondering." 3) Beware of describing people in writing: "Words are terrible at description. If you emphasize a character's nose, you suddenly imagine an enormous nose. If you imagine a little scar, you envision a great cut. It becomes a caricature." 4) Why animals work well as characters in fiction: People aren't cynical about animals. They don't hold the same prejudices about giraffes or rhinoceroses as they will about people from Texas, France, India, or Muslims. We're full of prejudices that simplify our lives but are also very cruel and distort reality. 5) How much should you plan a piece of writing? Yann says it's like travel. It's worth doing research and making reservations, but it's the discoveries you make along the way that give the trip life. I've shared the full conversation with Yann Martel below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets. Enjoy!

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·6 May

The reason most stuff you watch on Netflix is forgettable is because you aren’t doing any work. When you watch a movie, you are given all the visuals. The soundtrack even clues you into how you should feel in each scene. But as Life of Pi author Yann Martel shares, this form of kidnapping makes for forgettable stories: “I binge watch Netflix like anyone. But when they supply too little for you to imagine on your own and they give you everything, they’re forgettable. You haven’t worked enough for it. Which is why books can be so powerful because it leaves so much for your imagination. A movie doesn’t do that. The more you withdraw, the more the reader has to come halfway. They like being engaged in co-creating the story.”

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·4 May

The best way to deal with your inner critic: Sit them down for a conversation. Inspired by her husband’s work, Anne Lamott runs through this exercise with her writing students: "You bring it forward and you have it in your hand and you start to talk to it. You do both voices. I say to it, 'Who hired you?' And it usually says, 'You did.' 'Why did I hire you?' 'Because you were afraid of looking bad, you're afraid of embarrassing yourself.'" "Then eventually you say to it, 'I'd like to take over.'" And then you thank them: "Thank you for keeping me alive as a child. But I won't be needing you right now. I'm in the middle of something." By talking to your inner critic, you stop fighting it. Instead of pushing back and hoping it never comes back (it always does), you learn to tell it “not now.” @ANNELAMOTT

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·4 May

Whenever Anne Lamott picks up a new book, she’ll give it three pages. This is what she looks for: 1) The writing: "I'll start to read. And I'll see if these sentences are pleasing to me." The sentences invite you to read the next one, and the next one after that, enough to want to turn the page. "The sentences are pleasing. They're not ostentatious. They're not show-offy." 2) The story: “I want it to be about the drama of humankind. And, you know, I'll pay extra if it's sort of funny.” “Tell me a story, make me care.”

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·4 May

Anne Lamott coined “shitty first drafts” in her book, Bird by Bird, where you “let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” So, how do you shape it? You take it through three drafts: 1) The child's draft / shitty first draft: be firm but friendly. "I like this. I like your description, but we're going to maybe use it somewhere else." 2) The adult draft: you take out, you fix, you find the stronger verbs. 3) The dental draft: "You go twos by twos. You wiggle and jiggly floss. Some teeth might need a little attention. Some teeth are fine. You go on to the next one, and that's really what good writing is." Great writing rarely emerges on the first pass. It’s an iterative process where you get it all on the page, remove and strengthen, and then tweak the details to end up with a great piece. @ANNELAMOTT

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David Perell Clips@PerellClips·2 May

Anne Lamott's storytelling formula: ABDCE 1) Action: something has to happen. Make the audience curious enough to stay. 2) Background: why are the characters together? What's the context? What are the stakes? 3) Development: things start moving. The story is directing you somewhere. 4) Climax: everything collides. The minor chords you've been playing crash into one another. 5) Ending: you walk the audience out gently in a way that feels. It should feel surprising but inevitable. Here’s an example using Start Wars Episode IV: 1) Action: Desperate princess hides messages in a droid. Luke Skywalker discovers it. 2) Background: The Empire’s Death Star threatens the Rebel Alliance. The princess must be rescued. 3) Development: Luke and Han rescue Princess Leia. Plot to destroy the Death Star. 4) Climax: Epic space battle. Luke uses the Force, destroys the Death Star. 5) Ending: The Death Star is destroyed, but Darth Vader survives. The Empire plots vengeance. Don't think of this formula like a straitjacket. Rather, think about it as a way to compose a master dish; you need salt, you need texture, you need heat, you need color. @ANNELAMOTT

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