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William Fitzpatrick
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William Fitzpatrick
@WriterScience
Day job: English professor, Nonfiction writing coach; Building: Writer Science—Studying the art and science of expert writing, sharing what I learn
Busan, Republic of Korea Katılım Mart 2021
793 Takip Edilen769 Takipçiler
There is no secret architecture to great writing.
Writing style can’t be understood through a rational analysis of surface features—
sentence length, word choice, etc. Those are the outputs.
Take the iconic Seattle Library: strange shape on the surface; like it or not, its style is unique.
But its architects at OMA didn’t begin with that shape in mind; they began with its users. They apportioned square footage to specific use cases, arranged those functional units so they could each get light and views, and wrapped a skin over the result. Like an ant colony, its shape is weird yet perfectly suited to the purposes of its users. Form follows function.
Prose is the same. You can’t understand (let alone design your own) writing style through attention to surface-level features; those are the downstream result of the rhetorical stand of the text.
Fix your stand—your orientation to your reader and to the world—and the style follows.
This happens naturally when we speak. You look at your interlocutor, you look at the world, and the words occur to you spontaneously. If you’re appropriately oriented, the words and patterns that follow are perfect—regardless of what the pattern analysts prescribe.
We forget this in writing because we ignore the reader on the other side of the page.
Focus on the reader, and style will follow.
English
After years of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a friend once told me: I'm still unhappy, but I'm not unhappy about that.
Aziz S̸◊a 𓅒@Psy_Lacanian
Psychoanalysis isn't about feeling better; it's about becoming free enough to care about what truly matters.
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@camilomoresala @Opera_Rocks @PerellClips @david_perell Since we agree on my only point—that Holiday is a hypocrite—I'm sorry that this exchange became so pointed. I may have misinterpreted your points and been a little quick to draw. Regrets!
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A red herring would have been saying that Holiday did nothing wrong because Trump is bad (I'm not distracting from the main issue, since this whole thing started because Holiday made the point that the Ivanka has no place in claiming she follows Stoicism based on the actions of her father and her family). That's directly related to the issue. So please, spare me the middle-school debate tactics.
My argument is two-fold: Holiday perhaps departed from some of the tenets of Stoicism in expressing his views of the current administration, but he was broadly aligned with principles of justice and virtue that he are not present in our current leadership and he felt compelled calling out since they associated themselves with it. Again, you can make the argument that Holiday is a hypocrite, but that his observation that the Trump family may claim to be influenced by Stoicism, but show no evidence of practicing it (particularly the President) is correct.
I don't have time for further conversation with you.
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If you don't have a solid introduction, you don't have a book worth reading. Here's Ryan Holiday:
"The introduction has to grab you by the throat and make a statement."
"I'm trying to introduce the central metaphor of the project, the central conceit of the book."
"It's very hard to figure out shape, structure, form as you go. You gotta figure that out from the beginning, or else it just becomes unwieldy."
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@p_millerd * not a sales call (I have nothing for sale), just to learn about your problems and how I might be able to solve them. This call comes with a 100% no hustle-tactics guarantee^^
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@p_millerd Just wrapped up a 8-week writing sprint in Paul's community, currently gathering feedback and improving the design for the next iteration.
If anyone is looking to get started writing/improve their nonfiction, I'd love to hop on a call.
x.com/WriterScience/…
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
Developing a community for writers, I realize that what's needed is neither cheerleading nor accountability nor craft. It’s engaged, careful readers looking over your work. Bad writing is just a text that readers don't know how to use. By incubating a piece with a small group of careful readers—readers who are committed to a practice of setting aside their personal taste in service of helping the piece become what it's trying to be—the work grows and matures into something that serves its readers. Once the early readers are satisfied, the text is ready for the world. Writing programs of the past focused on self-expression or volume. The former leads to Substack solipsism, an infertile meme pool of texts that everyone writes and no one reads. The latter is subject to Goodhart's Law: when your daily wordcount becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The best writing isn’t made for the writer alone, nor does it emerge by accident from volumes of slop. It’s made for a small circle of early readers who are committed to helping the piece become what it’s trying to be. For the past month I've been building this in public with a group of 20 bright, energetic writers. This insight is the engine of the community. Currently setting up the social infrastructure to keep it driving forward. Excited to see what may arise from this hive mind.
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what are some cool things you've been working on
reply below and ill do my best to boost and support
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@kadavy Read a thousand books for every one that you write.
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Authors, what advice would you give someone thinking of writing a book?
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The ultimate luxury a writer has now is the ability to disappear. Guys like Ben Lerner and Chad Harbach really figured it out. Atticus Lish. Emma Cline, too. No commentary on social media or begging. Nothing. They just put out a book or a piece and disappear again. Maybe show up in a photoshoot for a magazine. That’s how you know you’ve really made it. Good for them.
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@kimyurry I believe Korean branches off the Uralic family
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This is what I like about tweeting, sometimes you start writing 280 chars only to realize that the idea is hitched up to a whole complex that’s been stewing just below the surface of awareness
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Nothing personal, it’s just plain to see why everyone has lost respect for Ryan Holiday: he preaches stoicism, while he’s clearly an ideologically captured crank—ie, a hypocrite. To say that Trump and his supporters are also biased is no defence of Holiday’s stoicism; it’s just a red herring. You don’t need to live in the US to see this.
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It's a bit of both? You know, multiple things can be true at the same time.
My response was not directed at you personally, so it's a bit odd you took it like that? And I mean, since I live in the US, and you don't, my response seems appropriate since I have to deal with the consequences of Trump's policies and you less so.
I'll be enjoying Ryan Holiday for years to come.
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Love to see people discovering my little corner of the world.
If you're coming to Asia, don't miss Busan!
Sara Dietschy 🍑y@saradietschy
Busan on film 🥰
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@saradietschy @Airbnb LCT is the tallest building in Busan
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Either he's a hypocrite, or the people calling him a hypocrite don't understand stoicism. Pick one.
You asked why everyone lost respect for this seething hypocrite, and I told you. If your only rejoinder is Trump is bad—well, may you enjoy Ryan Holiday for years to come.
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That people take this and say "this is not Stoic" kinda tells me that they don't understand stoicism very well and think more of the meaning of the word rather than the philosophy with all its nuances.
Could have he phrased things better? Sure. But I don't see his detractors invoking equanimity whenever Trump speaks. So it may make him a hypocrite, but it also makes a hypocrite anyone who claims to value Stoicism and sees our current leadership as exemplary.
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Thinking is not writing. And more importantly, writing is not thinking.
Thinking happens between the period of one sentence and the beginning of the next. It happens when you're out on a walk. It happens in dreams. It doesn't adhere to the sequence that syntax requires. That's why we get writer's block: trying to force a thought before it's percolated up into language.
Writing is farther downstream. It's a matter of presenting what the writer has already seen, so that the reader can see it to. How are you going to write about a thought you haven't thought before?
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Introductions need to do more than hook the reader and make a statement.
They need to establish the value of that statement. Readers don't value hooks and metaphors; they value problems and solutions.
Here's a 3-part structure for effective introductions: x.com/WriterScience/…
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
Hooks don't work. Readers trade attention for value. And value lives not in a topic that you find interesting but in a problem that readers care about. So what should your first paragraph do, if not hook? After analyzing hundreds of essay introductions, I found three moves that work: 1) Open on a status quo, something that readers already grant. Get their head nodding in agreement. 2) Break the status quo with a destabilizing condition. Signal this with But or However. 3) Establish the cost of ignoring it. Importantly, connect this cost to your specific reader (or to someone they care about). Those three moves set up the problem. The thesis of your essay is the solution. A problem the reader cares about beats any hook. Problems earn attention by offering value. Hooks are just a cheap jolt performing novelty.
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@p_millerd It works too, I'll be doing a curiosity conversation with someone in the community later this week
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the goal of my new community was to create a hub for conversation - I didn't want to do one-to-many and endless feeds of random posts that most people engage with
I have a "curiosity convo hub" - it has 33 people with open calendar links
This week: we added 9 Curiosity Conversations ☕
Members are open to chats from 🇯🇵 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇹 🇻🇳 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇮🇳 🇰🇷
Topics include leaving corporate, creative technology, sailing/adventure, hardware + space systems, quantum computing, writing, coaching, AI learning, dance, NLP, permaculture, ecovillages, and nonfiction storytelling.
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From the opening of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?
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my goal is to be a philosopher that no one pays much attention to
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Language is, in the end, not a medium of thought; it's simply a medium of communication.
And that's a good thing.
The best language is the one that everyone speaks. x.com/WriterScience/…
William Fitzpatrick@WriterScience
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"If we lose a language, we lose a world."
The idea here—that the language you speak determines the world you perceive—is soundly debunked by this great little book.
When a language dies, have we actually lost a way of seeing the world, or just a way of speaking about it?
Andrew M. Bailey@resistancemoney
There's a great little book against Sapir-Whorf by John McWhorter, The Language Hoax. I used to keep extra copies of this on hand in my office to hand out to students caught in the grips of some very bad theory.
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