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William Fitzpatrick
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William Fitzpatrick
@WriterScience
Day job: English professor, Developmental editor; Building: Writer Science—Studying the art and science of expert writing, sharing what I learn
Busan, Republic of Korea Katılım Mart 2021
693 Takip Edilen723 Takipçiler
The writer's core problem: experience arrives all at once, yet language is sequential.
David Abram shows how the best writers work against that grain, reflecting in their prose the texture of fused experience (instead of just inventorying its parts).
writerscience.com/the-senses-wer…
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@WriterScience @Chris_arnade @politicalmath It might be the best film ever made. Parts of it are fkn hilarious. A+ on cinematography, costume, music. Script is tight, narration is an improvement on the book. Performances solid.
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All of Stanley Kubrick's movies are better than the books they came from
stephen elliott@S___Elliott
Movies are that are better than the book: No Country For Old Men Goodfellas The Godfather Strangers On A Train
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On a cycling trip I once visited the island where they discovered the fossils of the new dinosaur, lovely area known for salt fields and recent human slavery
Pop Base@PopBase
A new dinosaur has been discovered in South Korea, called Doolysaurus huhmini. It lived ~103.45 million years ago.
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@Chris_arnade @politicalmath Is it? My girlfriend has been wanting to watch it and I keep putting it off, 3 hours 😭
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@politicalmath Baryon Lyndon is a better book but that's because the movie, while beautiful, feels empty
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I remember @naval calling this on @ChrisWillx last year: the only ‘problem’ with the birth rate is figuring out pension payments, everything else is self-correcting.
Nikkei Asia@NikkeiAsia
South Korean marriages jump 8% in 2025 as attitudes change s.nikkei.com/4dymEMh
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The lady who told the Cormac in an elevator story shut down her account, wish I screenshot it
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
@david_perell Someone saw Cormac McCarthy in an elevator and asked him for writing advice. He said to read a thousand books for every one that you write.
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Someone saw Cormac McCarthy in an elevator, asked him for a tip. He said, Read a thousand books for every one you write.
Writers often hear the way to get better at writing is by writing. But that’s just cope for people who don’t read.
The way to get better at writing is by reading.
Stephen King said the same: if you don’t read, you have no business writing.
George Mack@george__mack
If consumption is how you learn, you’d be a professional chef, with a comedy special on Netflix, and dunking in the NBA.
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@george__mack Tell it to the ‘You don’t get better at writing by reading’ folks
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If consumption is how you learn, you’d be a professional chef, with a comedy special on Netflix, and dunking in the NBA.
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Everyone talks about Cormac McCarthy's fiction.
Few realize that his nonfiction is just as bracing.
For years at @sfiscience McCarthy taught scientists how to write behind the scenes.
Some of his most powerful writing is the stuff he never put his name on.
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
Complexity scientist W. Brian Arthur cracked the code on how the internet economy works. But he couldn't write. So he asked Cormac McCarthy for help. They spent 4 days together, reworking every sentence. Twenty years later, it's still @HarvardBiz's most read article of all time. In this video, I break down the nonfiction writing tips that Cormac used to help Arthur go from unknown researcher to thought leader (so you can too). 04:17 Introductions establish problems 11:51 Maintain focus with topic strings 13:44 Use concrete language and specific examples 16:23 Choose your paper's theme and 2-3 points you want every reader to remember 19:18 Limit each paragraph to a single message 21:23 Inject questions and informal language to maintain a friendly feeling 24:01 Chunking for information compression 28:51 Examples prove your point; Intuition pumps let readers discover it
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Don’t write the way you speak.
The reason why is because the way you speak is full of fillers that make your ideas more difficult for readers to process—e.g., the preceding sentence.
Write the way readers read.
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@p_millerd Milton Friedman was visiting China. He sees a construction crew digging with shovels and asks his host why they aren't using machinery. When the host says it's to keep employment high in the construction sector, Friedman asks then why not just give them spoons?
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we collectively see the job as the core human adult activity
hence we continuously create more jobs. AI will be just like any other era. I don't see us abandoning the job anytime soon
most government "waste" is just job creation by other means because we like jobs
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@emeriticus Opening line of All the Pretty Horses:
> The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pier glass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
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Blood Meridian begins and ends with fire. "See the child" by the fire and the marking out of boundaries and the beginning of civilization. No Country ends with a kind of dream of decline, I think: a son riding out into the dark to meet his father who carried the fire for him and is waiting for him out there. The world has ended by fire in The Road before the book begins, and there is this recurring theme of carrying the fire, of the father passing the torch to the son he is leaving behind in a world that is dead and will never be the same. "Not be made right again." But the man decides to keep going anyway for the boy. Reading McCarthy has had the effect of making me more hopeful but not less pessimistic
Seth Largo@SethLargo
The "carry the fire" motif emerges in each of his Westerns: just a flicker at the end of BM and only in a dream in NCFOM. The physical presence of "the son" is, you're right, the most hopeful manifestation of it (McCarthy had just had a child himself, but the religious connotation is strong). It emerges just as hopefully in The Border Trilogy but you gotta read all three books to get to. His Southern novels are much more bleak because they lack this motif entirely.
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Since we're doing the Blood Meridian discourse it should be made clear that Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest American novelists of all time and anyone who doesn't understand this must be deported
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Great cultural criticism doesn't ask "is it good?" It asks "why did this take hold?"
Gopnik's 2003 essay "The Unreal Thing" doesn't review The Matrix so much as excavate it, tracing an ancient anxiety through centuries of philosophy to explain how the film became a cultural touchstone.
It's a great example of what ambitious nonfiction writing can do.
writerscience.com/weirdly-plausi…
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Most writers think their job is done once they've emptied their head onto the page.
This misunderstanding is what George Gopen calls the Tollbooth Syndrome, and it's a powerful reframe for our understanding of writing and its purpose.
writerscience.com/tollbooth-synd…
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📚
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
If your book doesn’t piss someone off, it’s probably not worth writing. Books that build authority don’t just offer tips and info. They challenge the status quo. Here’s how @astupple's parenting book flipped the entire genre on its head (and how your nonfiction book can do too)
ART
Great book, pairs well with The Sovereign Child by @astupple
Kevin Burch | Sky High Confidence@kevinburch
Book recommendation. Insightful, incisive and inspiring. Why self-directed, non-coercive learning, aka “play”, is the fastest, most efficient and most fun way of learning anything - at any age. (Could also be called: What School Took From Us)
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Montreal has the best food scene in the world right now. And it's not even close.
Here's @nytimes on Rôtisserie La Lune.
Rotisserie chicken. Obsessive craft. Packed every night.
One of my favorite restaurants on the planet. And absolutely in Montreal.
So proud of @vanyafilipovic, Marco and the whole team. @Montreal is on fire 🔥
nytimes.com/2026/03/17/din…
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