Writing

Marking alone isn’t enough for me; I also need to write things out in longer form, either by hand in a journal or digitally in a notes app. This process can take the shape of bullet points capturing raw ideas or full paragraphs reflecting on what I’ve just learned. I leave ample white space on the page when writing in my journal so I can see my thoughts at a glance. Doing this regularly creates a personal “database” of insights I can return to whenever needed.

Writing is thinking. If you read and occasionally mark but stop there, you literally halt the formation of ideas. Writing reflections on passages forces you to synthesize what you’ve read, enabling you to explain the author’s concepts.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines. 

Secret third option: The middle class creative. 
I went to the Substack summer party in London a week ago. I looked around at all the writers and I thought, this is fucking it. This is the creative class. Not everyone would’ve been a full time writer there, but many of us were, and I would dare say everyone made some money with their art. We were not Stephen King. We were not George R R Martin. It was Amie! It was Claire Venus ✨ ! It was David Larbi , it was Jess Pan and Emma Gannon — all of us doing what we love with our life. None of us needing to be in the top 0.001% of writers in order to do this professionally. Probably making as much as our friends who became accountants or bankers.
Hamish McKenzie, one of the co-founders of Substack, who is a fucking delight, spoke about the middle class creator the other day. It is what platforms like Substack and Patreon are helping to build. It is what I have been doing on Squarespace for years. It is the additional 100,000 self published authors who make at least 5k a month on KDP who would never have been given a traditional publishing contract.4 It’s Alexis Rakun selling her art on Shopify.5

Donna Tartt writes the way a person breathes when they’re trying not to cry: carefully, but with so much inside. Her sentences are not efficient. They are tender. Unapologetically heavy with thought and memory. She lets her characters spiral. She lets beauty and despair live side by side. She doesn’t rush. And neither did I.

Why writing can help you become a better learner
Writing enhances your memory
When you learn something new, your brain begins to restructure, otherwise known as neuroplasticity. 
Once information is received, it is sent to different parts of the brain for various functions (ex, the hippocampus for memory formation, the prefrontal cortex for decision-making). The information you learn forms new neurons and synaptic connections in your brain, communicating with each other via chemical signals.
If you continue to repeat the information learned, you strengthen the synapses between the neurons, which increases your memory and makes the information easier to remember. 
If you don’t repeat the information learned, the synapses begin to prune (otherwise known as synaptic pruning), and you eventually eliminate the unused neural connections to make room for new ones. In other words, you slowly forget what you just learned. 
This is where writing can be an effective tool to solidify our learning. 
Let’s say you finished reading a book. You can either immediately jump into a new book or you can take the time to reflect and write about the one you just read.
If you start a new book immediately, without reflecting on the book you just read, you begin to form new neuron and synaptic connections. Consequently, the information from the previous book begins to fade (synaptic pruning).
On the other hand, by writing about what you’ve learned, you’re strengthening the existing neural connections in your brain. The more you repeat what you’ve learned, the stronger those neural connections become, making it easier to recall that exact information.

For me, deep study is about making space for reading in multiple domains, allowing ideas to cross-pollinate. While I may do small bits of reading or note-taking for certain tasks, the bulk of my learning comes from immersing myself in a topic so thoroughly that it sparks offshoots of curiosity.

Think of it as going underground into the “root system” of an idea—once you’re down there, you notice all these hidden connections that lead to new territory.

But a good sentence floating around your head is worth approximately nothing without the ability to write that sentence down, to gird it with other, slightly lesser sentences, to write not just the one sentence that sings to you but all the other ones, too, the ones that are ultimately necessary to turn what we call an “idea” into what we might call an “essay”. An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure. The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental condition of the writer, and it is precisely through that friction that we discover what it is we actually have to say. 

The act of writing forces you to organize your thoughts and break down complex ideas into simpler, more digestible parts. This process not only helps others understand your ideas better but also deepens your own comprehension of the subject matter.

Most people treat books like delicate objects. They keep them clean, pristine, and absolutely unmarked. A creased spine feels like a wound. A note in the margin? Unthinkable.
But in 1940, a man named Mortimer Adler said this attitude was nonsense. His short essay entitled How to Mark a Book argued that writing in your books isn’t defacement — it’s a sign of life. The only way to really understand a book is to engage with it, argue with it, and respond to it.

But before we all black out from overstimulation, a moment of silence for the newest shiny toy: her music channel.
Which, I’m just gonna say it, it’s weird.

To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

But Adler flips this notion on its head by saying books are tools for thinking — and tools are meant to be used.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction by Mairead Small Staid

These were such simple things, almost embarrassing in their obviousness.

A brief pet peeve: When I come across writing, whether by an author of a general nonfiction book or an academic work (thesis, article, or book), I cringe at the sight of pages filled with block quotes. This signals to me that the author doesn’t fully grasp what they’re trying to communicate. I seek writing that engages with thinkers while synthesizing their ideas and presenting the author’s own thoughts on the topic.

As you write, don’t just copy quotes into your journal. Synthesize what you’re reading. Explain it back to yourself. Ask questions about it. Challenge it. This will sharpen your own thinking on the topic, and you’ll be surprised at how, by doing this, you spark new ideas and illuminate new avenues of study you want to explore. 

He is not on social platforms; he told El País in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano. His aura of offlineness—we craven online people might be tempted to call it a personal brand—seems to confirm that he has access to some wisdom that the rest of us lack.

Finishing is a skill—a skill that’s distinct from the more specific, obvious skills of writing, designing, drawing, painting, building, producing. It’s a skill that seems to envelope my experience of these other practices. Every essay I finish makes me incrementally better as a writer.

Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas…It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly.” William Zinsser
Writing can help you organize your thoughts, taking the intangible and making it tangible. It forces you to structure your information and ideas in a linear format that makes the most sense. When you write, you’re laying out all your existing information and confronting it, leaving room to dissect, synthesize, and challenge what’s presented.

writing doesn’t always have to be useful or wise or polished. Sometimes it can just be felt. Sometimes it can just be honest.

Small is very very beautiful. And small, I believe can also be sustainable. Meaningful. A way of life. 
My ‘been on the internet for over a decade’ spidey senses are tingling. I forsee this comment: “But it’s still so hard to get 1000 true fans!’ You’re right! It is hard; it’s also a fuck-tonne easier than trying to get Paramount to consider your script, let alone make it. But let’s talk about how we go about creating the small beautiful life of an artist. How do we grow the middle class of creators, how do we become one ourself

David Foster Wallace had a similar piece of advice for writers: “the reader cannot read your mind.” You don’t get to live in the margins and clarify confusion or expand on your implicit intentions.

Think of all the times someone else’s phrasing helped you finally name something you’d only felt vaguely. As if their words handed you the scaffolding to climb into a new version of yourself (what the best art does!), because language sculpts thought. Every conversation subtly alters the brain’s architecture. Every sentence is a small act of rewiring.
That’s why some conversations change you even if you barely speak through what’s transferred. Emotion, belief, subtle permission. You begin to see yourself as someone capable of softness, of insight, of love.
Words also have a mirrored quality. In conversation, the brain syncs through listening. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson, PhD, a pioneer in neural mirroring (also known as brain coupling), examined brain scans of subjects in conversation. What he found was surprising, Fredrickson writes:

Today, I’d like to share the next stage of that journey: how I study. This isn’t about short bursts of research for a single project but rather a focused, multi-layered approach I often call deep study.

This way of savoring applies to everything you consume: essays, articles, even learning a new skill. You don’t have to chase what's new. If an essay resonates, reread it. Try to understand why you like it. If you’re watching videos for inspiration to create your own, don’t just scan for surface aesthetics, look for the intention behind them.
When you stay with something long enough, you begin to see its inner structure, you start noticing what others overlook, and you have your unique point of view about it. That’s when curiosity begins to bloom, not because you’re trying to be interesting, but because the books/music/pieces of art have touched you, and you want to learn as much as possible about it.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

It reminded me that a book can ruin you softly and still leave you grateful. That art doesn’t have to be explained to be important. That sometimes we write not because we know what we’re saying, but because we’re trying to find out.

As Adler puts it, "Full ownership comes only when you have made [the book you’re reading] a part of yourself." This process isn’t passive — it only occurs when you focus, reflect, and write down your thoughts.

In the process, it paradoxically devalues the intangible “magic” of writing by alienating the artist from their own creative process. It ignores the fact that writing is the hard part, and that the struggle for language or structure is a precious and necessary part of forming a real idea. In a way, these AI writing tools feel like the reverse of my first writing job: rather than requiring pure work with no meaningful end product, the tools promise the production of a meaningful product without work. 