writing and instant ramen

getting all meta

dear friends,

today’s substack is a bit of a rant — I hate writing and I blame it on years of writing for a corporate audience and bureaucrats. It has to be formal, structured, risk-averse, polished, can't sound too conversational. So as a result it has become... boring and sterile.

I have an analogy — the act of writing in most modern age corporate milieus is not very different to “cooking” a packet of instant noodles (“instant ramen”). Which is to say that it doesn’t require much skill or thought. Open a packet of noodles, throw into pot of boiling water. Add seasonings. If you really want to be creative, add an egg, some spinach. Voila, you’re being creative!!! But ultimately it’s just empty calories that fill you up but don’t actually satisfy you spiritually, emotionally, physiologically, and mentally.

And so that is how my process of writing came to be. I can write reports and memos and summarise my economic analyses into digestible ‘key points’, which may seem interesting, but mostly it’s devoid of any soul or ‘nutritional value’. Literally, the death of the “author”… This is not good. You will notice that people from organisations that produce boring reports will start speaking in the same manner as those reports… robotic, monotonous, boring. Your personality is shaped by your writing and your speech, because that’s how you present yourself to the world, it’s how you engage with the world. And writing is just a form of speech… if you're made to overly polish your writing, make it too formal and avoid offense at all costs ... you will start speaking in the same way.

Castiglione, Book of the Courtier

When we say bureaucrats are divorced from reality we can tell from their writing and their speech to outsiders.... it's stilted, overly affected, lacks "sprezzatura", you can tell it's rehearsed...... and a lot of them don't even believe what they’re saying! When your writing has gone through multiple rounds of reviews, edits, polishing, legal and regulatory review, etc. it loses its personality, its character.

I think that’s partly why people were so afraid of ChatGpt initially, the machine that ultimately ends all writing, all essays… That fear isn’t the fear of AI itself, however — It’s existential anguish at the loss of our ability to write, and to think. For those who still have a few working brain cells left, ChatGpt will always be subservient to our mental faculties. The reason why people fear ChatGpt is because they don't have original ideas, the “author” in them has been dead all along. It was the NPC in them churning out words.

In my instant ramen analogy — if you want to cook well, first you have to stop eating instant noodles, which means you have to diversify into real food. Then you have to cook for others, instead of just for yourself (you wouldn’t serve people ramen at a dinner party, would you?). The reason why so much of modern non-fiction writing is so bad, is because it’s just different “flavours” of instant ramen — airport books, government reports, business insider articles, etc. It’s the same instant ramen, just with different toppings, different MSG packets. The sorts of books that could be summarised by ChatGpt into one sentence and lose no meaning…

So if you want to go beyond instant ramen — if you want your writing to be more than just paraphrased slop — you have to cook real food. Which means learning how to shop for groceries, seeking out favourite ingredients, finessing your technique, and experimenting as you go along. In writing parlance, this means just writing and figuring out what topics you like to write about, your style, your tone… following a recipe is just like imitating a writer, but eventually you get confident enough to develop your own style, your oeuvre.

Writers resemble cooks: we create imaginative dishes out of what’s in the refrigerator, or on the shelf, or acquired from a market or our own garden. We toss together disparate things and make of them something new and (we hope) unexpected. Like the cook, we are attuned to others— we do want our creations to be shared; in a sense, our creations do not exist unless they are shared.

Joyce Carol Oates, 27 Clues into Writing Your Heart Out

Then when you’re ready to show the world your writing, that’s like hosting a dinner party for your friends. The reason why bureaucratic writing is so bad is because they have nothing to show the world, all government and corporate reports are ‘authorless’ and they’re not supposed to hold any “nutritional value” for a public audience… If you want to host a dinner party for your friends, you wouldn’t want to give your friends something bland or low quality like instant ramen. You’d want something that most people would enjoy, nothing too crazy, nothing too boring… food that says something about yourself, what you like to eat, what you’ve learned to cook, your personality.

which is why i enjoy reading unhinged writing on substack… in a strange way a lot of unhinged substack writing is more aesthetic, more moral and more true than any modern non-fiction paperback…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Hope everyone has a good week ahead.

Love,

Lola.