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Something people don't talk about so much these days is that in post-WW2 America, people took Freudian psychoanalysis very seriously for some reason.

"We've been homogenizing writing since long before AI." Ocean Vuong says: "It coincided with the rise of the newspaper. The newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War because it was completely reckless. Exclamation marks were everywhere. Sure it was beautiful but for information delivery, it was terrible. So the English started to become tamed. It became efficient. It went for clarity. It had to have enough brevity to keep room for advertising. And this comes from the newspaper model. There are plenty of works that are written beautifully from that but it's done incredible damage to young writers' imaginations because the sentence has now been so timid."

"We've been homogenizing writing since long before AI." Ocean Vuong says: "It coincided with the rise of the newspaper. The newspaper needed to be standardized after the Civil War because it was completely reckless. Exclamation marks were everywhere. Sure it was beautiful but for information delivery, it was terrible. So the English started to become tamed. It became efficient. It went for clarity. It had to have enough brevity to keep room for advertising. And this comes from the newspaper model. There are plenty of works that are written beautifully from that but it's done incredible damage to young writers' imaginations because the sentence has now been so timid."

Ocean Vuong is a poet, novelist, and professor at NYU. This is the anti writing with AI conversation. It's about breaking free from technology and convention in order to see the world fresh again, and then make beautiful art about what you see. Some highlights: 1) "We're out here to write sentences the species has never encountered, and it's possible in this lifetime." 2) "Eighty percent of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax." 3) "When you have a sentence, what you really have is consciousness filtered through syntax. For every single person, it's different." And below are all the things we talked about, in the form of timestamps: 1:40 Writing metaphors 4:52 The problem with writing workshops 13:02 How AI changed writing 23:32 Why did writing get so rigid? 28:04 Rescue the cliche! 32:06 Seeing vs. recognizing 34:37 80% of writing isn't writing 41:31 What makes sentences memorable 50:31 Poetry as a testing ground for writers 1:02:30 Synchronic vs diachronic reading 1:09:03 Daringness and disobedience 1:14:27 The limits of language I've shared the full interview with Ocean below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.