I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
From the Preface to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness:
This comes straight from the gut; it is a personal essay primarily discussing its author’s thoughts, struggles, and observations connected to the practice of risk taking, not exactly a treatise, and certainly, god forbid, not a piece of scientific reporting. It was written for fun and it aims to be read (principally) for, and with, pleasure. Much has been written about our biases (acquired or genetic) in dealing with randomness over the past decade. The rules while writing the first edition of this book had been to avoid discussing (a) anything that I did not either personally witness on the topic or develop independently, and (b) anything that I have not distilled well enough to be able to write on the subject with only the slightest effort. Everything that remotely felt like work was out. I had to purge from the text passages that seemed to come from a visit to the library, including the scientific name dropping. I tried to use no quote that did not naturally spring from my memory and did not come from a writer whom I had intimately frequented over the years (I detest the practice of random use of borrowed wisdom—much on that later). Aut tace aut loquere meliora silencio (only when the words outperform silence). [emphasis mine]
I am obviously not averse to borrowed wisdom, as one of the main practices here on my 1000-day project blog is sharing ideas and direct quotes from others, and then applying those to my life. In fact, I’m doing exactly that here.
Still, I really like this as a way to write a book, and maybe if I ever write a midlife reinvention / disintegration / de-invention book I will follow this approach.
Importantly, this way of writing a book eliminates any dependence on or even use of gen AI, and that’s a good thing.