VOICES IN IN YOUR FINGERTIPS To write strategically, you have to find a voice. I

VOICES IN IN YOUR FINGERTIPS

To write strategically, you have to find a voice.

I tried the conciliatory voice (which in politics is foolhardy). The romantic voice. (Which I adore but is very hard to do in analytic language, and sometimes ruins the argument.) The antagonistic voice (which I’m good at but depresses me). The contrarian voice (which I still use now and then because it captures attention.) The ridicule voice (which doesn’t really suit me because ridicule requires lateral thinking that is really unavailable to me as an aspie – and I see ridicule, correctly, as dishonest). And finally settled on the scientific voice with a mix of tactically romantic, heroic and critical positioning.

I’ve been writing long form since I was six years old. I still don’t think I’m a very good writer. Mixing the communicative, the romantic and the analytic is terribly hard, and I haven’t figured out how to do it. Hayek does it best of any modern thinker.

So the trick is that I couldn’t have figured this all out in advance. The point of writing is to write. You can get better at it. But it takes more writing that’s just one word better than the last, than it does trying to write to an abstract model.

One last thing that I can’t emphasize enough. Americans tend to believe in the nonsense of talent. Yes, smarter people are better at most everything, and less so people less good at nearly everything. But extraordinary practice narrows that gap significantly even if cannot narrow it completely. You may possess talent but anything worthwhile to others is obtained by marginally different skill and marginally different skill is obtained through practice and lots of it.

To develop that level of skill, you must love what you do. I would rather write than do almost anything else except maybe drive roadsters on backroads in summer, sing Nirvana or something similar, make an aesthetically interesting dinner for ten, and enjoy good sex. And I”m not sure about the last three. 🙂 But writing used to give me headaches, and I used to struggle so hard with it. Until I understood that the typewriter was my enemy – I was afraid of mistakes. And my handwriting is all but unreadable even to me. Computers changed that for me.

The point being that you have to find the tools that help you master your craft. I”m still amazed at the people who write books by hand -there are plenty of them really. But the old saw that an artist is only as good as his tools, applies to every single discipline.

And the illusion that you’re looking for ways to express your talent is a dangerous idea.

Instead:

1) Work on something that is both rare and fascinates you. Pop nonsense just means you’re too ignorant to find something uncommon but still interesting.

2) Master the subject matter through repetition and investigation and collection of every possible example and detail. Keep a database. I keep an enormous glossary of terms that I try to restate in propertarian language.

3) Play by reorganizing those details into multiple types of organization. This is where you’ll come up with something creative.

4) Find tools that help you overcome your weaknesses, not ‘express your talents’.

5) Then go through and just try test yourself. Now if you’re a nuclear physicist then it’s expensive to run tests. The reason I like philosophy is that my only cost is food, water, and an internet connection. It’s cheap to run tests consisting of arguments.

What I’ve found is that I am not so much a good writer: because good writing requires a lot of empathy for the reader. But I am good at figuring stuff out.

And in politics, the problem we face is figuring stuff out so that we can win arguments and defeat the opposition.

Cheers.