Pretty much sums up today’s cultural landscape, I thought to myself. That’s what we’re being served. That’s what we think we want.

I felt ill. We’re not just “consuming content” anymore. We’re vaping it.

Are you familiar with verticals? These “serialized one- to three-minute dramas are basically movies chopped into tiny bits.” Why “vertical”? “Because they're shot to be watched on a phone held vertically, just like your typical social media content.” I’m exhausted just thinking about them. One-minute dramas? From gorgeous, moving, three-and-a-half-hour black-and-white epics like Seven Samurai to the cinematic equivalent of nicotine-laced steam with a hint of pineapple.

Verticals are popular. They’re where many aspiring film actors are getting their first jobs these days. And demand continues to grow. Verticals are a “product,” as McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski would put it, that many young people are consuming (in between glances at their casino apps).

As an author, it would be tempting to follow the logic here. To write shorter, snappier, easier to digest books to match today’s tastes. But in an era of accelerating speed and brevity, books must become more bookish, not less. Insistently bookish. Instead of chasing smoke and convenience with shorter books and one-sentence paragraphs, authors must lean into everything that distinguishes a book from a tweetstorm or Substack note. Length, depth, complexity. The greater the challenge, the greater the reward.

Verticals are narrow, literally and metaphorically. As an author, your challenge is to go wide, deep, subterranean.

It pays to sit with things.

“[Slow television] runs not at the warp speed of narrative drama but at the rate of actual experience,” writes Nathan Heller in the New Yorker. “It is not scripted or heavily edited; it is more concerned with movement than with tension, contrast, or character.” As a paradigmatic example, Heller points to a seven-and-a-half-hour show of a train journey, shot in real time, mostly as exterior footage. Slow TV isn’t something you “binge,” like McDonald’s hamburgers. It’s something you sit with.

Yesterday, an agent friend told me about his renewed appreciation for vinyl. He and his daughter put on Nilsson Schmilsson, featuring Harry Nilsson classics like “Coconut” and “Gotta Get Up.” As they listened, they discovered the album also features several less immediately enjoyable songs. On a smokily convenient Spotify mix like “This Is Harry Nilsson,” those songs don’t make the cut. Even listening to the album on Spotify, skipping ahead is so trivially easy that he would have jumped ahead to the “good bits” without conscious deliberation. Thanks to the stubborn, analog friction of vinyl, however, he and his daughter let the album play and, given the time and space to do so, found new things to appreciate about each song they heard.

Why would we want anything other than smoke and convenience? It’s an easy question to answer for yourself with a short experiment. Spend fifteen minutes scrolling through verticals on TikTok. Then, spend fifteen minutes reading a hardcover book. At the end of each period of time, ask yourself how you feel. Gauge your energy level. Pay attention to the lived quality of your conscious experience.

The same goes for writing. Spend fifteen convenient, smoky minutes “generating content” at a breakneck pace with heavy use of AI. Churn that copy as fast as you possibly can. Then, spend fifteen minutes in a quiet room without devices and write down something you think with a pen on a piece of paper.

Forget the difference in output. How do you feel after each experience? And if it feels better to do it one way than another, shouldn’t that be just as important as how quickly you generated so much awesome “content”?

“For all his talents,” writes John Hendrickson in a profile of Tom Junod, “Tom has never been able to do a ‘surgical pass’ on a story—fix a line there, move a paragraph here. When Granger would send back notes and revisions, Tom would throw the whole thing out and start from scratch. He still does this. There’s an abandoned 230,000-word draft of his book somewhere on his computer.”

The more I read about and experience AI, the more this approach to the craft of writing makes sense to me.

There’s a reason “Gen Z Is Using A.I., but Doesn’t Feel Great About It,” according to The New York Times. We feel extraordinary pressure to “keep up” through unsustainable rates of cultural production and cultural consumption. Neither satisfies. Neither scratches the itch. Only sitting with things does. That’s the reward. That’s why we do it. Don’t let people tell you otherwise.

Richard Feynman saw nothing fundamentally unusual about his work as a physicist:

The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do.

In other words, we’re all curious. If you consider “the kind of thinking that scientists do,” you’ll realize you spend most of your time figuring things out, testing ideas, and solving problems. That makes all of us creative in the qualitative sense. If that’s the case, why was it Feynman who won that Nobel Prize?

Really all [scientists] do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing [emphasis mine] that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don’t work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it’s just that scientists do more of it. What isn’t ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject.

Time, effort, and focus. “Creativity is done by everybody,” but most of us are creative everywhere and all the time, too. We shine with creative effort throughout the day as we navigate life, a diffuse glow. When a scientist—or artist, or poet—settles on a lens, a “limited subject,” and directs creative effort through that lens for an extended period of time, ants start sizzling.

The confusing bit for many writers can be defining the nature of this required effort. Feynman compares scientists to bodybuilders who have big muscles because they “they work and they work and they work on it.” It would be easy to conclude that the path to a great book involves many hours spent at a desk. It does! But creative effort involves much more than heavy lifting alone.

Feynman would be the first to agree that half the work, more than half, comes down to observation. Looking, listening, thinking, and, for any writer, lots of reading. (I shouldn’t have to say this, but the contents of my slush pile suggest I should: read each day for at least as long as you plan to spend writing.)

“Sensitivity is the gauge,” Eddie Murphy says, “not how much talent you have. The most sensitive one will be the artist that’s most in tune [emphasis mine].”

Reading about the most creative people, comparisons to antennae come up again and again. They’re receptive. Open. Sure, they “work and they work and they work on it,” but from the outside that effort always seems directed from within, like a release of pressure built up from everything they’ve absorbed. Not something squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube.

“I don’t force anything,” Murphy continues. “I’m not rowing a boat. It’s not a rowboat. It’s a sailboat…Let me catch this breeze and go this way. I’m not trying to be or trying to get to. I just am.”

Great work demands hard work, but remember to spend half your time up in the rigging. If all you do is pull an oar, you might miss the next breeze, which can come from anywhere. As novelist Haruki Murakami says:

Every time I write fiction, I go into another world — maybe you can call it subconsciousness — and anything can happen in that world … I see so many things there, then I come back to this real world and I write it down.

In other words, he goes away before he comes back with more words.

If you’re disappointed by the results of your creative efforts, keep putting in those hours, but consider shipping the oars and listening to the wind for a while. Stop trying to be or get to. Just be.

In the documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra (Netflix), we meet Orin O’Brien, the first female member of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, joining the organization under Leonard Bernstein and retiring only recently after a 55-year career.

A double bassist of international renown, O’Brien resists the filmmaker’s every effort to lionize her: “It’s been very accidental,” she insists about her accomplishments. “It’s completely accidental.”

“It’s not,” the director replies.

“[I] don’t feel so very special,” O’Brien continues. “If you compare my life with somebody else.”

“People want to celebrate you, Orin.”

“That makes me laugh,” she replies. “[I] don’t feel I’m an artist. I don’t feel I’m good enough. I’ve never felt that I’ve been good enough. [You’re] trying to make me more important and I’m not comfortable with that.”

It’s a powerful and revealing moment. At first, my instinct was to feel sorry for O’Brien, someone who has performed at the very highest levels for such a remarkable length of time and seems to doubt her own worth. But then I questioned that interpration.

The film reveals some of the many hurdles O’Brien overcame throughout her career. In one representative newspaper clipping from her early days with the Philharmonic, a music critic insists that, while O’Brien might be competent now, she will never have the creative longevity of a male musician. (Ha!)

Maybe O’Brien’s attitude isn’t a matter of self-esteem but one of self-preservation. Is it possible that O’Brien persevered not by “proving the critics wrong” but by negating her own ego so completely that the barbs became, though painful, largely irrelevant to her work as an artist? The documentary makes clear that O’Brien’s great joy is to blend into the orchestra and operate as a cog in one massive, seamless machine. Even her choice of instrument—the double bass—was deliberately selected to place her as far from the spotlight as possible (even if in one of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras).

Feedback is the lifeblood of an artist—every book on creativity tells you to develop your own taste and forge your own path, but without an audience to close the creative loop, it’s impossible to achieve your potential. Even so-called outsider artists who lack formal training share their work, pay attention to the response, and tailor their work based on what they learn.

There are two edges here: while artist and audience collaborate to make art, artists are intensely vulnerable to toxic feedback loops. Think of all the young creators warped to near-madness by the perverse incentives and distorted metrics of social media. Orin O’Brien, in strategically erasing herself as an artist—and I’d argue this was conscious on some level—protected her art in an environment where fair judgement—accurate feedback—was essentially impossible. Sure, Bernstein saw her talent clearly, but the classical music world in general simply couldn’t. In 2000, 34 years after O’Brien joined the New York Phil, economists Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse published a seminal paper about symphony orchestra auditions indicating that blind auditions, with a screen hiding the identity of the musician, dramatically increased the proportion of women hired.

The challenge in this fractured media landscape is learning how to solicit healthy, useful, unbiased feedback from an audience without subjecting yourself to the toxic stew that threatens to overwhelm every online creator. Bigots and bad-faith actors pose a very real danger to authentic creative development.

That may be impossible. It isn’t always feasible to “never read the comments.” We absolutely need data—some sort of human response flow—to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. Maybe the best we can do is O’Brien’s approach, systemically separating our identities from our work. Erasing ourselves from the equation to see the data with clear eyes.

Some feedback shapes the creation. Other feedback shapes the creator. Be wary of the latter. The internet is no place for an unguarded ego.

Recently, I saw and enjoyed What We Did Before Our Moth Days, the latest of many wonderful collaborations over the decades between director André Gregory and playwright Wallace Shawn. (If you’re in the NYC area, do yourself a favor and see the show. If you’re as lucky as I was, Gregory and Shawn will be in the audience kibitzing together. If so, invite them to dinner after the show.)

I’m curious about both creative longevity and collaboration, so I read their Vulture interview with interest. These two have been making great work together for almost six decades. Here’s Gregory on one aspect of their approach:

We’ve seen so many movies. We’ve seen so many plays. So over time, like taking away from a piece of marble in a sculpture, you are getting rid of the cliché.

(For more of Gregory, I recommend This is Not My Memoir, his memoir.)

This advice is common: cut away the cliché, obvious, and predictable, and you’ll be left with the truth. How? Consume voraciously until your ear is so precisely tuned to the familiar that you can spot and excise it with a surgeon’s precision.

What gets left out is the excruciating process of quarrying that block of flawed marble in the first place. Trying to avoid clichés as you write is the process also known as Crippling Writer’s Block.

Willem Defoe, another veteran of the downtown theater scene, offers a useful corollary to Gregory’s advice:

I always like this idea of trying to fail … Just think about that. Try to make a bad painting. Try to act badly. Try to be lousy in that scene. It’s interesting … It does something. You’ve got to find ways to let you not worry and be free.

What I loved most about Moth Days was its simplicity. Four seated characters, very little movement. It’s essentially a series of extended monologues. No fancy or contrived language, and a simple plot, if you can even call it that. Yet all three hours felt fresh and surprising.

Also, effortless: The dialogue never sounded “worked over.” Every line landed as nothing more than the most direct and straightforward way to say that particular thing out loud. But experience has taught me that effortless-sounding writing is the hardest to achieve. The effort of effortlessness, that striving impulse toward perfection can be detrimental. Here’s Defoe again:

You need enough to get you in movement and get you trying things, but you don’t need so much that it suffocates you, that you’re uptight. So sometimes I flirt with ideas of fucking things up or not being hard on myself. Also, you put yourself in situations where you can’t control things. And that’s why people say, ‘Oh, that’s so risky.’ It’s only risky if it’s not risky.

If you’re familiar with Dafoe’s work, you know he is absolutely fearless on stage and in front of the camera. That’s because he considers avoiding risk the only real danger to his work. It’s only risky if it’s not risky.

If you don’t give yourself room to fail, nothing happens, which is deadly to any work of art: “If it’s a real risk,” Defoe says, “you’re trying something. Something will happen. Something will be learned.”

People tell me they want to make an impact.

“Why do you want to write a book?” I (always) ask.

“Impact.” First answer, every single time.

“Sure,” I reply, “but if you wanted to spread your idea as far as it’ll go, and that was all you wanted to do, you’d put it online. Post it on social media and ask all your friends to share. Upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing as a free e-book. Do a podcast version. You wouldn’t need an agent like me. You wouldn’t need Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster. So now, for real, I’m not judging you, and I know you also want to help people: why are you writing this book?”

Then, if they’re being honest with me—and themselves—they tell me the other reasons:

• Build professional credibility.

• Grow my following.

• Boost my business.

• Promised myself I would before I die.

• Make money. (Ha!)

• Become a New York Times bestselling author. (Double ha!)

• Etc.

And, almost inevitably, beneath all the other reasons, make Mom happy. Nine times out of ten, Mom plays a role.

Unsurprisingly, no one ever takes the bait. No one ever says, “Hey, this hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe I should put my book online for everyone to read. Today! Then, maybe I should take all the vast effort and money and time I would have invested in developing a book proposal, finding a literary agent, getting a traditional book publishing deal, and then jumping through all the marketing and publicity hoops involved in that laborious process, and invest ALL OF IT in getting people to click a link and read what I have to say. Just put every inch of wood behind that arrow because hey, the message is the thing.”

No one ever says that. But sometimes people do it. Sometimes, people put their (very valid) desires for credibility, authority, and professional success aside and just invest a ton of effort into solving a problem for others that they’ve already solved for themselves.

What does that look like?

Abby Covert, an expert in information architecture, wrote How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a book that “outlines a step-by-step process for making sense of messes made of information (and people).” Then, she made it into a clean and elegant online resource here.

Yes, you can buy the physical book. But you don’t have to. It’s all there on the site, easy to navigate and easy to read. Joyful in its simple abundance.

It’s a cool book. If Abby needed an agent, I’d happily be Abby’s agent. But she doesn’t need an agent. She only wants to help people, and she’s making it as easy for those people to get her help as she possibly can. And sure, I’m sure she enjoys some reputational benefits, but she was OK dispensing with the idea of “Publishing a Book!” in the bucket-list sense to achieve her admirable pro-social goal.

Likewise, there’s Derek Sivers, King of the Givers. Derek wrote me and the rest of his list this morning:

Hi David - For ONE WEEK ONLY (now til October 18) I’m giving away ALL MY BOOKS FOR FREE, here: (my special link). That includes all audiobooks and ebook formats too. Why? Because I want you to read them (or hear them) and gift them. I get emails from people saying my writing has changed the way they see the world, but I know that the $75 price ($15 x 5 books) has kept some people from getting them. Since I don’t care about the money, and I do care about sharing what I’ve learned before I die, I’m happy to lose money this week to get you to read them or hear them. Use the link before it expires. Just a single click once you’re in. No catch.

Coming from someone else, you’d call it a marketing gimmick, but this is pure Derek. It’s a beautiful impulse. I love to see people with a desire to share their ideas so pure they don’t let themselves get in the way.

Of course, there are good reasons to publish a book traditionally, and some of them even have to do with spreading the message farther and wider than you could do on your own. But I’ve written about those reasons here many times. It’s also important to keep in mind the possibility that some ideas deserve to be free.

Sure, most of us will chase the ego rewards, as well we should. But that only helps the pure givers stand out even more.

In the Times, NYU professor Clay Shirky, one of my favorite experts on the intersection of tech and humanity, weighs in on the effect of LLMs on university learning:

We cannot simply redesign our assignments to prevent lazy A.I. use. (We’ve tried.) If you ask students to use A.I. but critique what it spits out, they can generate the critique with A.I. If you give them A.I. tutors trained only to guide them, they can still use tools that just supply the answers. And detectors are too prone to false accusations of cheating and too poor at catching lightly edited output for professors to rely on them.

Once you accept that the fight against LLM abuse by students is already lost, the only path forward for academic learning becomes clear:

Now that most mental effort tied to writing is optional, we need new ways to require the work necessary for learning. That means moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward in-class blue book essays, oral examinations, required office hours and other assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.

Not a perfect solution but a necessary one. From now on, students will do their learning on the spot, live, with a pen and at a desk. Scribbling in a blue notebook like it’s 1980 all over again. Learning as collaborative, site-specific performance art.

Obviously, what applies to college students applies equally, if not more so, to us grown-ups, for whom learning absolutely must remain a lifelong pursuit. Use it or lose it. Just as our tendons and muscles weaken in zero gravity, it’s inevitable that relying on LLMs to do the hard work of manufacturing sentences will leave us with soft, gooey minds. The comfort crisis now extends to how we think.

Since this isn’t going to happen automatically anymore—LLMs are super convenient—we require a deliberate approach to remembering how to write. We can’t let our ability to think out loud or on paper wane. You can debate the essential human value of other lost skills, from touch-typing to penmanship, but not so the ability wrestle with ideas and form them into words sentence by painful sentence.

If the kids are going to write in blue books, so must we.

Bluebooking: Write something completely on your own. Do it regularly. Make it public. For me, it’s this newsletter, which I’m going to continue writing without LLM support and, sigh, even without Grammarly and spell-check.

The constraints are excruciating but hey, no pain, no gain. Writing is thinking. Experience has taught me that I never know what I think about a given subject if I don’t go to the trouble of explaining it, to another person or in words on a page. If I abandon this crucial part of my identity, the part that knows how to develop ideas, write and revise text, and push through self-doubt to hit publish, I wouldn’t have much confidence in the person left behind. Frankly, I need to remember how to find definitions in a dictionary and synonyms in a thesaurus.

Frank Herbert warned us about this insidious danger back in the 1960s with Dune and its sequels. In Herbert’s universe, humanity relied on machines, became enslaved by them, and only won its freedom by re-learning these crucial mental skills. That’s how you get Mentats, human calculators who replace computers in Herbert’s imagined universe.

Go and do likewise, Mentat. Bluebook with short stories, Substack essays, LinkedIn posts, or even TikTok or YouTube scripts. The requirement is that you do it alone, without that comfy and convenient second brain. It’s common sense, isn’t it? You go to the gym to train physically. You may even meditate to train emotionally. Bluebooking is the third leg of that foundational tripod, the mental training that keeps your brain fit for active duty.

Are you old enough to remember blowing on your cartridges?

Every now and then, a game wouldn’t load properly on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The screen would flash, there’d be static, no game.

Whenever this happened, you’d dutifully pop Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda out of the machine and blow into the slot on the game cartridge. Then, you’d slide it back in again. Sometimes the game loaded after that, and sometimes it didn’t.

(I miss the excitement of physical media.)

Were we blowing dust out of there? Maybe! Didn’t give it much thought. I blew because I’d seen others do it, never inspecting the tiny gold contacts or otherwise checking for damage. And hey, often it worked when you tried again. Or a few more times, anyway.

I was a science kid, but I never broke out a lab notebook to A/B test blowing versus not blowing. (It wouldn’t have taken much effort to conclusively confirm that blowing makes no difference to whether an NES game loads the next time.)

In the sense that this was an unexamined, unreliable, but comforting practice, blowing on the cartridge was more of a ritual than a repair. An offering to the Nintendo gods, along the lines of burning incense or making an offering of dried fruit. And eventually, if I kept trying, the gods took pity, the game loaded, and I could go save the princess. Or go save the other princess.

Just as I assumed blowing into a cartridge was somehow relevant to getting my Nintendo to work, we all have rituals we consider essential for doing our creative work, usually based on a tiny data set. In fact, usually because “I had a pretty good writing session the first time I tried it.”

Ritual blooms in every area of uncertainty. When we don’t see a big cause-and-effect between the actions we take and external results, rituals accumulate like barnacles on a hull. And nowhere is the correlation between cause and effect harder to spot than in the realm of creativity. You have good days and bad days, and that’s all you’re ever going to know about that. There’s a reason “writing routines” are such social media catnip.

While psychologists argue for the positive value of ritual for performance, when it comes to writing, remember there’s a line. You can go overboard with the barnacles, to mix nautical metaphors. It gets so that you’ve got so many requirements to meet and procedures to follow that you never get around to putting words on the page.

That’s why it’s worth stepping back from your desk and giving a solid think to your writing compulsions. The actions you take, the physical setup you require, the time of day—everything lumped under Ideal Working Conditions.

“I can’t write without my coffee.”

You can. You might write even better, in my experience. Good writing doesn’t always feel good while you’re writing it. Often, it feels like a pointless and painful slog; you only see its quality in retrospect. And believe me, some of my worst writing has happened in an undeniable flow state.

Rituals can help performance when introduced thoughtfully and managed with common sense, but unchecked, these “necessary” behaviors can easily slip into superstition, becoming perfectionistic obstacles to sitting down and getting to work. Any build-up to the main event is a dangerous addition. Starting is scary even for experienced writers. I’d say your best bet is to hop into the deep end without any prelude.

In “The Pez Dispenser,” a classic episode of Seinfeld, George dates Noel, a pianist. Jerry and Elaine join him to see Noel’s concert. Afterward, they can’t help but wonder:

Elaine: How do they warm up their fingers?

Jerry: They have a piano backstage they warm up on.

Elaine: No, we would have heard it.

Jerry: What, do you think, they just crack their knuckles and come out?

Later, they meet Noel:

Jerry: How do you warm up your fingers before you play?

Noel: I just crack my knuckles.

Start. No warm-up. Butt to chair, fingers to keys, go. I promise you won’t strain anything. It’s like getting into a cold hotel pool: the longer you spend “getting used to the water,” the more you’ll suffer, and the more likely you’ll be to bail and return to your room.

Stop blowing on the cartridge. Sit down and play.

After being cast as a hapless cop in Superbad, Bill Hader decided his character should wear glasses. The idea of a cop wearing glasses struck him as funny, or at least as an interesting choice.

Sharing this intention with the director, Hader soon faced an array of frames provided by the film’s costume department.

“I tried on so many glasses,” Hader recalled in an interview. Flummoxed, he turned to his movie partner, Seth Rogen, for guidance. In addition to playing Hader’s fellow cop, Rogen had co-written the film, loosely based on his high school experiences. Surely he’d have an opinion on the character’s look—he’d created the character! Yet Rogen dismissed the question scornfully: “I really don’t give a shit,” he told Hader. “You can literally wear whatever the fuck you want. It makes zero difference to me. No one cares.”

Almost two decades later, Rogen’s TV show, The Studio, would receive 23 Emmy nominations, the most for any comedy’s first season. Strikingly, one aspect of the hit show repeatedly mentioned by critics and fans would be its attention to sartorial detail. This time, Rogen, once so dismissive of the relevance of costume choices, played a substantial role.

What happened in the interim?

This may come as a surprise to those familiar with Rogen’s earlier body of work, but according to GQ, the actor and writer who built his career as a schlub in movies like Knocked Up and Pineapple Express has become “one of Hollywood’s most rakish and interesting dressers, thanks to an impressive command of color, proportions, and dress codes.”

In an interview with the New York Times, The Studio’s costumer, Kameron Lennox, gives Rogen credit for the show’s carefully curated look. When it came to what the characters would wear, Rogen believed viewers would care. These decisions mattered to the story and the way it would be interpreted.

“It was interesting when [Rogen] approached me for this project and started talking about this character,” she says. “He was very clear about how he wanted to present himself in this [suit], even about how the shoulders fit. He said, ‘It just needs to feel relaxed, I don’t want any structure, but double-breasted.’”

When Lennox pulled the right garment from the rack, Rogen said, “This is what I want it to be.”

No statement defines a fully engaged creator as thoroughly as this one: “This is what I want it to be.” Most of us create alone at a laptop. However, many, like Rogen, are tasked with steering multimillion-dollar productions involving hundreds of skilled workers and artisans while achieving a result that is consistent, coherent, and even personal. During the Hollywood era eulogized by The Studio, directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese made films so distinctive that you can identify them in a few moments of screen time. This is true even though they worked with a vast and ever-changing cast of collaborators on each one. You know a frame of Kubrick when you see one. He wanted it to be that way, and he worked tirelessly with his collaborators to achieve that goal.

Today, creators are turning to a new, digital collaborator to turn their vision into a reality. But has the essence of creation changed? In the Renaissance, artists like Michelangelo worked with large teams of assistants to make their visions real. They weren’t always holding the brush or the chisel, but experts can still spot their work at a glance. In the end, to create isn’t to generate options. It’s to discriminate between them, all of them, in a way that shapes up into a cohesive, coherent whole. To author. Creating something is to decide: “This is what I want it to be.” Then, to lead everyone forward in that direction with an air of confidence that may be entirely artificial.

This capacity does not develop accidentally. Rogen learned to decide first by learning to care—yes, the glasses matter—and next by exercising his right to choose over and over again. It isn’t easy. Making decisions is fun at first, but quickly becomes exhausting. Laughing these concerns off and letting others sweat the details is much easier and a lot more fun. But Hader was likely the last of Rogen’s collaborators to be dismissed when raising a creative quandary. If Rogen hadn’t changed his approach, he would never have built the muscle that eventually scored all those Emmys.

By making a practice of deciding over the two decades between Superbad and The Studio, Rogen developed into a different caliber of creator, one who understands how important the details are. Every great creative work is nothing more than an accumulation of the right details. That’s what makes them great.

I’m a process guy, but even process has its limits. There is no right way to write. Or, rather, the clock starts ticking the minute someone stumbles onto a viable approach: a turn of phrase, a storytelling gambit, a plot twist. That particular path to success gets narrower as soon as someone else makes it across. Why? Now we’ve seen it before.

That’s why you can only learn so much from studying yesterday’s success. Writing isn’t engineering! The arch is eternal, the lever will last forever, but the classic movie Western? It had an expiration date. With art, what starts as genius ends as trope. As creators, we must keep moving forward into the unknown.

In an interview, playwright and actor Eric Bogosian offered his take: “So much of what you do as an artist is outside your control,” he says, “and you think you know what you’re doing, but you often don’t know what you’re doing.” This isn’t a bad thing. This is how it’s supposed to feel. It’s too easy to get caught in the trap of figuring out what you’re doing instead of doing it.

For her latest album, Mayhem, Lady Gaga decided to record a modern take on grunge. How hard could that be? There are a million grunge albums from the 90s. Just listen to a bunch of them and…do what they did, right?

“I started to overthink things sometimes and get nervous,” Lady Gaga told Howard Stern. “[Then] I stopped doing that and I started just feeling and allowing myself to just be free. It’s OK to make mistakes. What does it even mean for music to be perfect?” The grunge idea went out the window. What could be more free than the album Gaga ended up recording? “Abracadabra, amor oo na na.”

Speaking of forging ahead into the unknown: 50 years of musical performance on SNL, and Lady Gaga is the first to actually use the space.

Yesterday’s perfect is tomorrow’s cliché. When we try to fit our work into an established mold, we end up shaving off those elements that would have helped it stand out from everything that’s come before.

Be direct. Be free. Don’t think so much. That way, originality is inevitable.

Alabaster DePlume is a British recording artist who recites poetry and performs improvised sax riffs. He also trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In an interview with the New Yorker, DePlume draws a comparison between art and war: “When you’re rolling with someone [in jiu-jitsu], as soon as you’re trying to do a thing, you’re fucked,” he explains. “It’s like playing music. What’s the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep.”

Doesn’t matter what you’re making. Make it freely. Trust your gut. Worry about the hows and whys later or, better yet, never.

In a documentary, Willem de Kooning is asked his thoughts on Matisse.

“He has no -isms,” he says. “That’s very true. It’s just a painting.”

What’s the opposite of writing? Trying to write.

“Just paint a picture,” de Kooning says. “It’s good for me to remember that.”

Though I can’t source the anecdote, I remember it clearly: A music producer installed an antenna on the roof of his recording studio. After mixing a new song, he’d play it over an unused frequency while driving in the nearby woods. This allowed him to experience the music as listeners would. If the mix worked in a moving vehicle over a tinny car radio, it worked. Didn’t matter whether it sounded perfect when scrutinized over giant studio headphones. Why mix for a pristine audiophile setup if most record buyers didn’t own one?

In most cases, I take a similar approach to reading my clients’ work. Not with the focused concentration you’d bring to a dense academic monograph or an SAT reading comprehension question, but with the loose and relaxed attention you’d pay to a magazine article someone forwarded to you. Something you’d read on your phone during your commute.

Am I doing my clients a disservice? The readers they hope to reach expect to be grabbed, coaxed, led. Engaged. If the writing doesn’t demand my attention, it won’t demand theirs, either. So I approach each draft like an autostereogram: by relaxing my eyes and waiting for a picture to emerge.

I shouldn’t have to extract what you’re trying to say. Your ideas should arrive in my mind with little conscious effort on my part.

In college, I made some abstract shorts for a filmmaking class. The professor questioned my approach. This struck me as pure hypocrisy: he’d inundated us with baffling art films all semester. Wasn’t bafflement the goal? Isn’t that what good films do?

“I don’t get it,” I said. “David Lynch does weird stuff like this all the time.”

“You’re not David Lynch!”

Are you Thomas Pynchon? Does your reputation precede you? If we trust that careful attention will be rewarded by an exceptionally skilled author, we may go along for the ride. If you haven’t earned that trust, however, you can’t afford to write in a way that demands dedicated focus and concentration. Your words must flow into our brains without much awareness of the act of reading itself. Your writing must reward loose attention, encouraging focus but not punishing its absence.

To top the charts, it has to work on the radio.

Ironically, writing this way requires meticulous effort. You must knead the text over and over until you’ve smoothed away all the little jagged kinks that might confuse or annoy the reader. It takes time and persistence to remove the pits from every olive this way.

Bill Nighy was asked how he learns his lines:

You have your breakfast at 9, you go into the living room at 10, you start with the first line, you say it 18 times, then you attach it to the second line, and you say both of them 19 times, and you continue through the play. Then you stop at 1 o’clock and you have your lunch, and you resume at 2, and by 4 o’clock, your brain goes, and then you can have the rest of the day off. And you do that, without the phone on, and you do that for a week.

It’s a lot of work, Nighy’s approach, all to craft the illusion of a person speaking normally, naturally, off the cuff.

Academic writing doesn’t have to be hard to read—it’s hard to read because writing this way is hard, and most academics are neither naturally talented writers nor incentivized to improve the reading experience. When your ideas are easy to understand, it’s easier to see their flaws.

For the decade before his death, Cormac McCarthy served as a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, where he helped scientists such as Lisa Randall and Geoffrey West better engage and inform their readers. McCarthy loved the work, considering science far more interesting than writing. If the effort of expressing ideas that merited close attention well enough not to require close attention wasn’t beneath him, the rest of us have no excuse.

In a post about the "PhD metagame," Max Forbes, an AI researcher and indie developer who recently completed his PhD at the University of Washington, relates the experience of having an academic paper rejected, making some "mostly aesthetic revisions," and "seeing the paper accepted with dramatically higher scores."

(A "metagame," according to Wikipedia, is "a game beyond the game." In other words, stepping back and thinking about how you play the game you're playing.)

In this case, Forbes made some sensible moves: choosing a specific, memorable title, unburying the lede, and so on.

At first, this experience (same findings, different outcome) leaves Forbes cynical about the state of scientific publishing and even about science itself. After all, "the core science thing we achieved was the same—the dataset, the model, the human evaluation, and the overall task framing itself." On further reflection, Forbes realizes that these "seemingly-surface dressings actually strengthen the underlying science thing."

The primary objects of modern science are research papers. Research papers are acts of communication. Few people will actually download and use our dataset. Nobody will download and use our model—they can’t, it’s locked inside Google’s proprietary stack. Even if it were open source, let me tell you from first-hand experience that getting someone’s research code to run is no small feat, especially under even marginally different conditions. But anyone who reads our paper could learn from what we did, and all the revisions to clarity and completeness improve how much they can learn per minute spent reading. And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea.

So goes the thought leader metagame—the game beyond the game of getting your book published. When would-be authors with all the necessary components (experience, expertise, credibility, etc.) get stuck on the road to a successful book, it's usually here. It's not enough to be "more right" about your subject than everyone else who's already tackled it in book form. Better communication beats better ideas every time, no exceptions. In fact, I'd argue that the concept and the way you express the idea are inextricable. One can't exist without the other.

"Getting readers to the end ... is a necessary goal to optimize for," Forbes writes. If people aren't compelled to keep reading your stuff, why bother writing it? How you say it is just as important as what you're saying. Like the proverbial tree falling in a forest, unread material might as well never have been written in the first place.

Back in my editorial days, we'd sometimes insist on a certain minimum word count so a book's spine wouldn't vanish on a crowded shelf. The metagame around length has changed. If Chapter 8 doesn't insist upon itself, end your book at Chapter 7. Or, better yet, explore the idea space more aggressively until you can splice out a component of your material that demands chapter-length treatment. Then, when you've run out of compelling things to say, i.e., things you can say compellingly, stop.

"All creativity is an act of play," screenwriter and author Noah Hawley tells The Believer. (If only it always felt that way!) Regardless: "When an idea hits me, I'm like, Oh, I like that, and then what? There are a lot of people who go, Well, that's good, but could I do better?" That's a trap, according to Hawley. "I don't linger. I just go."

That's skill 1: the forging ahead, the lightness. Don't linger. Don't get mired in searching for possibilities. If it works, keep moving forward.

Skill 2: Amy Poehler recently interviewed Natasha Lyonne on Good Hang. As a young actress living in New York City, Lyonne, already a veteran of film and television but with no prior experience in theater or improvisation, observed SNL dress rehearsals. On the podcast, Lyonne recalls marveling at the comedic chops on display: good ideas axed without hesitation to make room for better ones.

"What is this weird, athletic sport of confidence?" Lyonne would ask herself. "This abundance, [this] idea of an endless supply...where you throw out genius ideas and just move on to the next day instead of lingering on something like a diary entry, Oh my god I wrote a sentence."

"One of the things about that training," Poehler, a former SNL castmember, replies, "is, you can't believe that your good idea is your last good idea. And, in fact, throwing it away is like a power move to remind you that the next good idea is right behind it. You cannot get too precious about anything. And you get athletic in terms of practicing coming up with an idea."

Creative athleticism. Your creativity requires conditioning, just like your heart or your lungs. This is why you don't want to lean too hard or too often on those ever-so-handy idea-generating machines now available on all our phones and laptops. Use it or lose it.

Skill 1: Pushing ahead over perfectionism and procrastination.

Skill 2: Generating ideas abundantly, holding them loosely, and letting them go fearlessly.

In both cases, you're mastering the simple act of letting go. Coming to terms, emotionally and intellectually, with the fact that ideas are fungible.

"We make the idea king," Poehler adds. "I'm much more into people and process."

New York publishers, take note. That Penguin Random House building on Broadway could can a lot of authors...

In an interview, actor and writer Eric Bogosian told the truth: “So much of what you do as an artist is outside your control, and you think you know what you’re doing, but you often don’t know what you’re doing.” Scary but liberating. You figure out a process that works, and then, one day, it stops working. Like the Romans at Cannae, you realize after the fact that your unbeatable strategy has gone obsolete. You have to find something else, but thinking isn't much help.

Lady Gaga wrote her hit song "Abracadabra" in thirty minutes: “I started to overthink things sometimes and get nervous," she explained. But creative ruts aren't something you think your way out of. Less thinking is usually the answer: "I stopped doing that and I started just feeling, and allowing myself to just be free. It’s OK to just make mistakes. What does it even mean for music to be perfect? [emphasis mine]”

Saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume studies Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and sees a parallel with this counterintuitive work: “If I try to do one of the things I’ve learned to do, it’s a symptom of my failure to be present... When you’re rolling with someone [in Jiu-Jitsu], as soon as you’re trying to do a thing, you’re fucked."

As soon as you're trying to do a thing. Lady Gaga wrote "Abracadabra" in no time, as soon as she stopped trying to do it and just did it.

"What’s the opposite of sleep?" DePlume asked. "It’s trying to sleep.”

Thinking about your writing process instead of writing is like trying to sleep. Expect creative insomnia.

In an interview, abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning was asked for his opinion of Matisse: “He has no -isms," de Kooning replied. "It’s just a painting. That’s what I like about him.” Shrugging, he added: “Just paint a picture. It’s good for me to remember that.”

Make the thing. Write the words. Can yourself if necessary. Sometimes, fermentation is the only way to get things bubbling.

In contrast to, say, rock bands. I envy the freedom enjoyed by any group of musicians looking to name their group: Toad the Wet Sprocket. Hoobastank. Do you remember ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead? That was a band! And they had some decent songs—I'm listening to them as I write this. Good luck throwing ellipses in front of your book title...

Dale Carnegie had it easy: How to Win Friends and Influence People does what it says on the tin. What happens if I have other advice about winning friends and influencing people? What if there's more to say on the subject than "interested is interesting" and all that great Carnegie stuff? Break out the Red Bull. Time to get creative.

If you find yourself in this predicament, first things first: relax. Don't let the title get ahead of the entitled. Often, a great one will emerge during the writing process. Start with a simple, descriptive phrase—"Investing Advice for Seniors"—and get to writing. If nothing sparks along the way, at least you'll have a much stronger grasp of the material you need to package than you did at the outline stage. At that point, a few pointers:

• Creative title, boring subtitle. Wordplay, alliteration, rhyme—grab the reader's attention however you can. You want your title to POP. Once you have that title, however, you've got to tell the prospective reader exactly what the book will do for them in the subtitle. You can't pair wacky title with zany subtitle. As with the mullet, party in the front, business in the back.

• Zag when they zig. Search Amazon for keywords and make a list of all the books you can find that promise to solve the same essential problem. Establishing the tone and direction of the existing titles gives you the opportunity to carve out fresh territory. If they're serious, go silly. If they're long, try short. Etc.

• Err toward clarity. There's no real A/B testing in book publishing. An author can point to their clever title as the reason the book succeeded or the reason it failed, but there's no knowing for certain. What I do know is this: if you go bananas with your title and the book fails to find its readers, you'll always wonder whether a clear, descriptive title might have saved you. This is especially true when you're a first-time author. Established authors can afford to take greater creative risks with their titles because they've established a brand. For a first book, safest to tell the reader exactly what they'll get for their money.

If it's any consolation, publishers enjoy nothing more than slapping a new title on a book, so all the sweat and tears may come to nothing.

Hm. All the Sweat and Tears. Not a bad title for a book...

Last time, I wrote about Norman Foster, the architect who doesn't hesitate to junk a good design in pursuit of a great one. Crucially, however, he only starts shredding blueprints after everyone on the team has lived and breathed the project for months. By that point, they all understand the constraints and the unexpected challenges. Only then does he feel free to let go of the first approach and start again with a fresh one.

Foster's strategy works because he's not bailing in confusion and chaos. He's stepping back and taking it all in before returning to the challenge from the beginning with a perspective fully invigorated by experience.

The cursed mirror image of this approach is what I call circling the drain.

You’ve probably been there. Things are going okay. You're 80% of the way toward a solid draft. Then, suddenly, you get a twitchy feeling: “This isn’t working.”

Cue the panic spiral. Something’s off, but you don’t know what. So instead of pushing through, you start over. Then that version starts to stink. So you rebuild again. And again.

Remember how Captain Kirk used to defeat evil computers by trapping them in a logical loop?

Kirk: This statement is false.
Computer: Does not compute. [Explodes.]

When you're stuck at 80%, it's tempting to think a fresh start will fix the problem. But you don't know what the problem is. What you’re actually doing is knocking down a perfectly fine house-in-progress because you haven't figured out how to make the laundry room big enough to fit a dryer. That's why, though each rebuild feels productive, you’re just tracing the same circle…around the same drain.

Here’s what I’ve learned: that moment—that itchy, unsatisfying, “something’s missing” feeling—is normal. It happens to everyone who’s serious about writing. As I said last time:

"You’ve got X words to tackle problems A, B, and C. Work long enough, and you’ll do it. Eventually, A, B, and C are handled and you’re under X words."

The solution usually shows up when you're least expecting it: in the shower, or halfway through unloading the dishwasher. But it only shows up if you stay in the draft. The problem is, many writers don’t know that. So they bail. They think they’ve hit an unsolvable problem, fleeing the mine when they’re a few feet from a vein of gold.

So what’s the way out of this trap?

Trust.

You’ve got to trust yourself. Even if it’s your first time. If you've made it to 80%, you’ve got what it takes to finish. You’re not stuck. A quiet part of you is hard at work on solving a problem that baffles your conscious mind. Keep moving forward, and it will deliver exactly what you need.

An artist can imagine something and sketch it as envisioned. A musician can hear a melody in their mind and then play it. But neither architects nor authors can fit an entire building or book inside their heads at once. That means they must carefully develop and refine the process they use for going back and forth between their ideas and their works-in-progress. That challenge is at the heart of writing and the focus of many of my essays.

Back to Foster. If you aren't familiar with the man, his firm, Foster + Partners, or his iconic buildings—from London's Gherkin to Berlin's Reichstag Dome, you've certainly seen an Apple Store. That's Foster's signature style: "an architecture of orderliness and long sight lines," as described in an excellent New Yorker profile.

Read the whole article, but here's what struck me: A former colleague said Foster would “always push you beyond where you thought you needed to go.” If I had to name one trait separating great artists from good ones, it's this.

Let's be honest: creating is exhausting. As many say, I hate writing but I love having written. Tackling something big and difficult—a short story, a chapter—is like solving a math problem. You've got X words to address problems A, B, and C. Work long enough, and you'll succeed. Eventually, A, B, and C are handled and you're under X words.

That's where most of us stop—with a sigh of relief.

Then there are the Fosters of the world. As Ian Parker explains in the New Yorker:

Foster understood that a good time for a radical revision (if not the most prudent time, economically) might be long after everyone had settled on a scheme. By that point, a team of architects is fully immersed in a project’s constraints and possibilities. “That’s a good time to throw everything away and start again,” Shuttleworth said.

This is how you go from good to great. And believe me, I know—it sucks. It's exhausting, frustrating, and makes me want to tear out what little hair I have left. But every time I've worked with someone who says, Yes, it works, but now that we fully understand the problem, let's try something different, the end result has been better.

This is not the same thing as circling the drain, a topic for another essay. A Foster-like only works when you first understand why the current version succeeds. You have to know it's good enough—and why—before reaching for something better. Without judgement and discernment, you're just impossible to please.

Too often, however, this is precisely what writers striving for originality attempt. Scruton continues:

The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary. . . . What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.

In short, when the audience calls something "original," what they really mean is "unexpected." And something can only be unexpected when there's an expectation to subvert. We are surprised only in context. A train whistle in a bathroom is surprising; in a rail depot, not so much.

Many of my clients worry that their book won’t be original enough. But publishers—and the readers they serve—don’t want originality in the sense of desperate attention-seeking or disruption for its own sake. As an acquiring editor, my least favorite phrase in a book proposal was: This will be a book unlike any other. No thanks. I wanted books that were very much like other books I’d enjoyed—with a twist. An improvement, a variation, a fresh angle.

Take productivity books. I still read and benefit from them. David Allen’s Getting Things Done made me more efficient, but it didn’t solve the productivity problem completely or permanently. Today, books build on Allen’s framework, adapting it to the challenges of digital tools and endless distractions—problems Allen wasn’t addressing when he wrote his book over two decades ago. What I have no interest in are productivity books whose authors, out of ignorance, reinvent the wheel Allen built in 2001.

To surprise readers, ground yourself in the expected. Years ago, I decided to publish a story in a literary magazine. Instead of blindly submitting stories, I first went to the library and gathered the latest issue of every magazine in the collection. Then, I studied both the stated submission guidelines—genre, category, etc.—and the unstated ones: the kinds of stories they actually published. As with everything in life, there’s what people say they want and what their behavior proves they do. To get published, I needed to understand both.

Once I had that understanding, my job was to meet their expectations—with a twist. I wrote four stories, mailed them out, and got one published. This wasn’t because I was an exceptional writer of literary fiction; in fact, I never attempted to publish another story. I succeeded because I did the work most aspiring writers don’t: grounding myself in the context so I could deliver something familiar yet fresh.

If you want to stand out, don’t chase originality for its own sake. Instead, learn the landscape, understand the expectations, and then—adroitly—defy them.

Why? Recently, a prospective author reached out for help with his book proposal. Pretty quickly, it became clear that he hadn't given much thought to what the word "publish" actually means.

💡 Publish (verb): 1. to make generally known (Merriam Webster)

Publishing a book involves putting yourself out there in front of others. Books aren't read in a vacuum. Before they open a book, readers want to know who you are and what you're all about. Some would-be authors imagine handing their manuscript off to a publisher and heading back to their day job while their ideas magically spread. When I explain that publishing a book successfully requires engaging with an audience—through speeches, panels discussions, podcast interviews—they balk, losing interest entirely.

On the other hand, many would-be authors embrace the public aspect. They're eager to publish precisely because they want to share their thoughts and discoveries. They're eager to join—or even start—a conversation about something meaningful. Which camp do you fall into?

Between 1968 and 1995, Dick Cavett conducted intelligent and thoughtful interviews with experts, artists, actors, and other notables on The Dick Cavett Show. No bands, no comedy sketches, and no animal trainer. Just long, uninterrupted conversations. Across its various runs—from ABC daytime in the sixties to TCM in the 2000s—Cavett maintained a vibe that was quiet, smart, and serious.

For those of us raised on the frenetic pace of late-night TV—Carson, Letterman, Conan, Leno—Cavett's style can feel uncomfortably unhurried. His pauses made me antsy at first. Wasn't he worried about losing the audience? Typically, when a late-night guest takes more than two seconds to answer, the host gets panics and cracks a joke, or leans on the sidekick to jump in with repartee. Not Cavett. He let his guests take time to think and respond if they needed it.

Take a moment to enjoy some of Cavett's interview with film legend Orson Welles. Jump to 2:16:

Notice the difference between this conversation and what you've seen on almost any episode of The Tonight Show. Cavett and Welles are having a genuine, thoughtful discussion. Welles is quick on his feet, but even with guests who were less nimble, Cavett trusted his audience to pay attention and endure a little thoughtful silence. That trust paid off.

This approach was rare even in 1970. Today, podcast hosts—despite fewer time constraints—are often jumpier than their TV counterparts. Many interrupt their guests just as they're getting to the heart of a point. (Looking at you, Marc Maron.) Watching Cavett, with his patient, attentive style, is a balm.

Here's the litmus test for aspiring authors: Could you sit across from Dick Cavett, fielding his incisive questions for ten minutes in front of a live audience? If the idea excites you, you're ready to publish. If not, consider other ways to express yourself—writing can still play a role, just in a different form.

Books aren’t meant to decorate shelves. They're created to crystallize and share a person’s thoughts at a specific moment in time. Their purpose is to connect authors and readers—real people navigating the same era and grappling with similar questions about life. To make that connection, you'll need to step out into the world and speak up. After all, if you can't make the case for your book's relevance, who will?

[My teacher] went into my music notebook and drew it in pencil: "Write a melody that goes like this, down, another that goes up, and a third that goes straight."

Simple enough, but Lang balked: "I don't think I have enough technique."

"You'll never have enough technique," the teacher replied. "Get to work."

In their conversation, Lang (67) and Reich (88) subsequently agree that they have yet to acquire "enough technique." They manage.

This collection of fascinating-for-any-creator conversations between Reich and other composers (Eno, Serra, Sondheim, etc.) was inspired by an earlier book of conversations between Robert Craft and the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky:

I've ... learned to distrust the future. If I have an idea, it's crucial to work it out now, while it still makes sense in my head, rather than jot a half-baked notion down to be resolved later. With this stuff, there is no later. Get it right, right now.

In other words, express your idea with whatever technique you possess—or let it die. Some ideas have staying power, but most lose their luster if you don't act on them. Not because they didn't have "potential" but because you inevitably leave something crucial out when you jot them down, some meaningful essence that stays in your head until the idea is made real. That's the piece that fades if you let the idea sit too long in a notebook.

Recently, I saw an exhibition of the work of sculptor Thomas Schütte at MoMA (closing January 18).

From a placard:

Art is hard work. It can be heavy and exacting, both physically and intellectually. Among the challenges artists face are technical failures or long periods of inertia. "If I'm stuck, I don't spend my weeks in misery," Schütte has resolved. "I change direction, switching between problems, media, or scale."

In short: momentum. To keep new ideas flowing, act on them. Make them real quickly and imperfectly. If your level of technique fails you, switch up your approach rather than lose that spark. (The only way you really level up your technique is by pushing up against its limits.)

Constraints help—Schütte's a master of these. For a series of modeling-clay sculptures, he allowed himself an hour each. Like it or not, here we go.

What can you do to turn your idea into a concrete reality in an hour? Prioritize the impulse over perfect execution.

"If it's not an experiment," Schütte writes, "why bother?"Any new work is an experiment. How can any experiment be executed perfectly? What you're about to write hasn't ever been written before, right? That means no one's ever read it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing for certain how it should be received, let alone how it will. How can you perfect your approach to making something no one's ever made before?

You'll never have enough technique. Get to work.

A regular hardcover book? $24.95. A great big fat book? The kind with the title in gold foil and/or an oil painting of a historical figure on the front? $26.95? No, $27.95! Sure, why not? (Meanwhile, I'm thinking: Are they really going to let me decide? I guess they are...)

There might have been written guidelines somewhere, but I don't recall consulting any. As I recall, I picked prices for my books based on whatever other books were lying on my desk: "That one looks close enough—$25.95 it is." As with every other business-related aspect of publishing that editors like me didn't want to figure out because they didn't go to business school for a reason, there was an element of psychology to this that elevated it above petty spreadsheets and formulae. An element of readers simply won't pay more than X for Y.

At the time I entered publishing, Amazon's rising dominance—with its heavy discounting—made all these psychological "calculations" seem impossible. Sure, maybe people balked at $27.95, but it didn't cost anywhere near that much on Amazon. Meanwhile, while genre fiction is more straightforward, apple-to-apple comparison of nonfiction books is practically impossible. What does the price of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt have to do with the price of the The Wager by David Grann? Reader aren't buying bound paper by weight here. These are just two totally different experiences that happen to be materially similar.

Physical books—with prices printed on their covers—don't lend themselves to A/B price testing. Would Eat, Pray, Love still have achieved bestsellerdom at a dollar more? Two? Meanwhile, would that ambitious micro-history not have vanished from bookshelves at a dollar less? These questions are...unpleasant to contemplate. You don't want to think that it's about the price like, you know, a product. Editors love books. As buyers ourselves, we don't make our book selections based on price. For most people, it's a factor. We had a hard time grasping that.

Pricing seemed arbitrary, sure. But so did length. How many words do you really need about the early Roman Empire, or cryptocurrency, or dog rescues? The book proposals that agents sent me often included a word count estimate, but these nearly always turned out to be complete guesses. In the end, manuscripts routinely came in well over the estimate. So what? Charge a buck or two more!

At the time, the thinking was that bigger books took up more shelf space, making them more prominent. At Barnes and Noble, you'd spot that big fat slab first and pick it up. Then, Seth Godin wisely figured that a shelf dominated by big books would make a really thin one pop. So he kept The Dip to something like 30,000 words. He was right: skinny stood out.

Today, length is often moot. Readers may get angry if you sell a super-short one on Kindle for $12.99, angry reviews, but most of the time, we buy books with no real sense of how long they are. That's an advantage for would-be authors! You can write a relatively short book—less than 40,000 words—and it still counts. It can still accomplish your goals. If writing a book sounds daunting, write a shorter one!

Montaigne claimed he had a weak memory, but credited the flaw with developing his other strengths:

Had [memory] made the ideas and opinions of others easily available to me, my wit and my intelligence would have become passive and sluggish, dependent on someone else and expending no effort of their own. Also because I am less talkative for it since memory’s storehouse is more easily filled with material than that of ideas. If my memory had been better, I would have talked my friends’ ears off.

Authors who accumulate vast amounts of information related to their topic tend to believe that readers need all of it to accept their thesis. The era of the doorstop is drawing to a close. Sure, if every anecdote entertains, include each one. Yes, if the research is memorable and makes for good cocktail-party fodder, share the highlights. But honestly, if you have something to say, say it. Get in, get out, write another book if you have so much energy.

For example: Austin Kleon pointed me to The Motern Method, a short self-published book on creativity by ultra-prolific songwriter Matt Farley. It's 131 pages, but with lots of white space, maybe 20,000 words? Regardless, it works. It's a good book about being more creative. It can't have taken Farley long to write, and it didn't take me long to finish. In short, I was more than happy with what my twenty bucks bought me.

Most important is that, successful or not, you'll learn way more by writing and publishing two or three short books in a relatively short time than grinding away for a decade at an overly ambitious one. Write the short one first, at least. You can always write the doorstop next time.