Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most prolific American novelists of the last century. His
writing was unconventional and thought-provoking. His passages were oozing emotion and every word
was trying to communicate something more than just its direct meaning.
He wanted to inspire, to stimulate attention, to help the reader feel.
Take this simple, yet profound, dialogue between two figures in his most popular bestseller
“Slaughterhouse-Five”: “- Why me?
– That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why
anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
– Yes. – Well,
here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
Or this passage where he explicitly criticizes the American dream:
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are
urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to
be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though
America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but
extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold.
No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The
meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have
a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
He is unflinchingly and unrelentingly attempting to question the status quo and provoke thinking.
It is this lack of ordinariness that made him the writer that was and
is still admired by many. It is this lack of ordinariness that can make any writer stand out.
It was almost seven years ago when I decided to start working on my first essay. I remember that
moment quite vividly. It took me almost two hours to write 200 words. To put that in perspective,
today, whenever I manage to reach flow state, I can write around 1000 words within one hour.
So, let’s try and monitor my evolution throughout the years.
Here is a small paragraph from one of my first essays:
Efficiency. What a widely misunderstood term. I had to go through a lot of stages and career
changes in order to understand what efficiency is and how to be properly efficient in whatever I do.
Efficiency is closely related to discipline and focus. It is the process you need to undertake in
order to achieve different goals you have. These goals can range from starting your own business or
learning guitar, to mastering a specific craft. This is not a bad paragraph. The writing style
is direct and simple. Most of the sentences are well-connected and the thoughts are
clearly articulated. But one wouldn’t characterize it as great writing because
it is missing some essential ingredients that can bring one’s writing style to a whole new level.
Now, take a look at a paragraph from an essay I wrote 2 years later:
Becoming enamored with the way your brain operates can lead to a marvelous way in the way you manage
it but also in the way you evolve it. Although more information grants us access to more
knowledge, our ability to analyze this information is predicated upon our ability to understand our
cerebral makeup. Think of your brain as an uber-sensitive tool that shapes its form and
capacity in accordance with the information it gathers. Nowadays, the information torrent we
have to face has increased dramatically and our brain struggles to keep up with this novelty.
Writing well demands a degree of wholeness. That is, it needs to consist of multiple interconnected
elements that blend together beautifully. Luscious words, great syntax, almost flawless grammar,
coherent connections between sentences. That composition will result in a pleasurable
experience not only for the eyes of the reader but also for their soul.
But to reach such a result you need to be able to monitor your work and
your own evolution as a writer. Identifying points of friction and
areas that are open to improvement allows you to evolve your writing style in unprecedented ways.
Think of writing as any skill that can be learned and improved. True competence emerges when one is
capable of becoming aware of one’s control over the skill. Continuous immersion offers a level
of understanding of the constituents of the skill that an untrained eye will never be able to see.
You become the writing and the writing becomes you.
A critical tipping point in my writing career occurred when I realized that I am
the amalgamation of my biggest influencers. The writers that inspire me have had such
a strong impact on the way I perceive words and various writing styles that
they inevitably shaped the writer that I am today. It all started with the fundamentals of personal
growth. Books like “The 4-hour work week” by Tim Ferriss, “How to win friends and influence
people” by Dale Carnegie, “Mastery” by Robert Greene, “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle.
These books really paved the path to what would later become a more
refined version of myself as a writer. The writing of these authors wasn’t that simple, but it wasn’t
that complicated either. They constitute the perfect starting point for every person
who is new to self-development and can help every young writer understand how proper writing works.
Later on, I felt that I could stretch my intellectual limits and dive into the works of
people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Daniel Goleman and Peter Joseph, to name but a few.
These people examine more challenging ideas; thus, their writing illuminates a level of intellectual
depth very few people in this world have managed to reach. When one invests the time and effort
to properly construe these ideas, one also increases the probability of forming similar ones.
Eventually, I started to adopt more abstract thinking patterns and I decided to challenge
myself with what I like to call as the pinnacle of higher thought. This is composed of works produced
by the greatest thinkers and philosophers across space and time. People like Friedrich Nietzsche,
Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and so many others who devoted
their lives to analyzing the human condition and making sense of the world around us. They did so
in such a potent way that one can suggest that they transcended the limits of ordinary thought.
When you “befriend” these figures and make them your source of inspiration, you can’t help but
understand that there is so much more to writing than mere thought articulation.
Take for instance this powerful passage from Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”:
“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.
And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he
is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth,
he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it;
not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated,
and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief,
it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it.
And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!”
There is so much madness in his writing. But there is also so much truth in his madness.
Your language is your main tool for articulating thought. For instance, by adopting a plain
English way of speaking and writing, although you might sound more clear and concise, you are also
limiting your potential for more elaborate thought articulation. Life remains in a stagnant state and
every opportunity to raise your intellectual standards and understand reality better becomes
limited, because you can’t keep up with complex topics and thought-provoking ideas.
I realized that soon enough and that’s why you will identify many so-called “big words”
in my essays and videos. I do it on purpose.
I do it in order to positively provoke both myself and my readers.
That is not an easy task, but I employed a very effective strategy to achieve that:
I read hard books. Hard books are quite rigorous
in the way the narrative is presented and the authors usually use big words in order to attach
one more layer of grandiosity to their ideas. Hard books have usually such a rare and beautiful
vocabulary that reading them allows you to reevaluate what you know and what you don’t know.
According to my experience, the most efficacious way of dealing with big words
is to keep a file on your computer with words that you like and feel comfortable using.
In my file, you can find words like self-sabotage, plausible deniability, begrudge, palatable,
connotes, adroitly, acrimonious, imbue, tirade, whimsical, extirpate, temerity, and many more.
This file is an essential companion whenever I decide to start a new essay and,
some words, just by the way they sound, can spark a new sentence or even a paragraph.
Let’s take for example the word extirpate, which means eradicate.
I could easily add in this section of the video something along the lines of, “the use of big
words could extirpate any sense of incompetence associated with your lack of a rich vocabulary.”
See how that sentence blends in nicely with the rest of the text and
clearly elevates my writing stature in the eyes of the reader.
Sometimes, a beautiful sentence is also the creative boost a writer needs to stay
dedicated to their endeavor. For people who want to kick
start their attempt to enrich their vocabulary, I suggest a great book titled “30 days to a more
powerful vocabulary.” It was recommended by Sam Harris in one of his podcasts and
I really enjoyed reading it. Stick till the end of the video for a giveaway related to the book.
Ultimately, great writing boils down not to what you write, but how you write it.
There is a myriad of topics one can draw inspiration from and
there will be many people who will assert that your topic of choice has been covered ad nauseam.
This is irrelevant and these voices shouldn’t be of any concern to you as a writer.
A topic is authentic, regardless of its content, insofar as the writer
adds his or her personal touch to it. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus, Bukowski,
they all covered topics revolving around a similar theme, that of life as struggle. No
one accused them of being banal or repeating the same intellectual patterns, despite the fact that
most were inspired by their predecessors. The choice of words, the emotion elicited,
the level of resonance evoked, and the flow created are all elements
that make a work special and unique. There is only one thing a writer needs
to fight and be constantly aware of – clichés. The battle with clichés will be an omnipresent
battle. It is a battle so tiring and difficult that, ultimately, becomes the catalyst that
differentiates good writers from great ones. As a new writer, one can logically wonder
how can one identify clichés in their writing. A typical example would be to avoid repetition
and use of conventional wisdom as the basis of your claims.
Many people, due to their constant involvement with standardized and conventional ideas,
exhibit a severe lack of innovation in the way they express themselves.
You are, more or less, what your experience and knowledge allow you to be.
You can’t expect to rely on banality in order to formulate a more advanced level of reasoning.
There is no chance that you will be able to battle clichés that way.
Take a look at this sentence from the popular book “The Secret”:
“There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it,
and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer.”
It is a beautiful sentence, that creates an emotional response when you read it, but
it is the most common motivational motif ever used. The Internet is inundated with
this type of reasoning and, although it has a degree of positivity entrenched to it,
it virtually offers zero value to the reader. In a nutshell, it epitomizes the idea of clichés.
Now take a look at this aphorism from Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”:
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long
into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This extraordinary combination of words
is simply sublime. There is so much meaning behind the words. Clichés are nowhere to be found here.
They were eradicated simply by the writer’s choice to reject the norm and think unconventionally.
There are many more things to be discussed on the topic of “how to write well,” but I decided to
limit my scope of examination to four points that I personally consider more crucial than the rest.
In the grand scheme of things, one eventually understands that good writing is predicated upon
the capacity of the individual to evolve it. This evolution is quite essential to
our own personal evolution and also quite antithetical to all things that limit us.
It is a tough process, albeit an extremely rewarding one.
Hey guys, This post is sponsored by Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators
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And I think it is a sponsorship that connects well with the topic of writing well.
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I totally agree and I can’t think of any other skill that can
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That’s why I suggest people to start writing. Anything from journaling to
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Also, I would like to announce a giveaway with this video.
I would like to give away this amazing book called “30 days to a more powerful vocabulary.”
All you need to do to enter is like this video, subscribe,
get notifications, comment below and signup for Skillshare.
The first 1000 of you to click the link in the description will get a
free trial of Skillshare premium, so act fast.
I will announce the winner in a week from now through my Instagram page, and I will contact
the winner through the comments so please stay tuned and turn on your notifications.
Again, thanks for watching.
See you soon. Adrian out.