"We only know how to value things that are scarce"

Adam Mastroianni, writer of the unmissable Experimental History newsletter, recently shared some writing wisdom in a piece called 28 slightly rude notes on writing.

Here's what I highlighted from the piece:

The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online. (It was meant for YouTube videos, but it applies just as well to writing). This is one of those annoying pieces of advice that remains applicable even after you know it. Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.

All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness. Good writing requires the consideration of other minds—after all, words only mean something when another mind decodes them. But bitterness can consider only itself. It demands sympathy but refuses to return it, sucks up oxygen and produces only carbon dioxide. It’s like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one. Other emotions—anger, fear, contentment—are deep enough to snorkel in, and if you keep swimming around in them, you’ll find all sorts of bizarre creatures that dwell in the depths and demand description. Bitterness, on the other hand, is three inches of brackish water. Nothing lives in it. You can stand in it and see the bottom.

Someone who truly feels despair wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it because they wouldn’t expect it to do anything. All text produced in despair, then, is ultimately subtext. It shouts “All is lost!” but it whispers “Please find me.”

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

We only know how to value things that are scarce.

Most writing, of course, isn’t exclusive in terms of access, but in terms of time. There’s something special about every word written by a human because they chose to do this thing instead of anything else. Something moved them, irked them, inspired them, possessed them, and then electricity shot everywhere in their brain and then—crucially—they laid fingers on keys and put that electricity inside the computer. Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.

We’ve got a once-in-the-history-of-our-species opportunity here. It used to be that our only competitors were made of carbon. Now some of our competitors are made out of silicon. New competition should make us better at competing—this is our chance to be more thoughtful about writing than we’ve ever been before. No system can optimize for everything, so what are our minds optimized for, and how can I double down on that? How can I go even deeper into the territory where the machines fear to tread, territories that I only notice because they’re treacherous for machines?

Lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.