I thought it would be fun to do an advice column thing. I solicited some questions from people on Twitter. I might do this again, I don’t know.
What are some obviously true things about writing? -Loopy
All the writing advice you usually hear is deletion-focused. Like, omit unnecessary words, be concise, don’t use adverbs, stuff like that. This is absolute nonsense, issued by gimlet-eyed vampires who want to sound authoritative at the cost of instructing you to strip all joy and character from your work.
Sure, it sounds good: just pare stuff away and that’s how it’s done. There’s a clean simplicity to that. But taking concision as the absolute value results in blandness, or weird stilted put-on sobriety, like you’re trying to talk like a Mamet character who did a bunch of un-fun cocaine. That is the writing beloved by the algorithm and nobody else, the kind of shit that unfortunate souls have to churn out for affiliate marketing blogs.
And this advice is suspiciously flattering to the tragic anxiety around exposure that we all bring to writing. What we don’t want to do, what we want to avoid at all costs, is expose ourselves, sound chaotic, be vulnerable, risk being misinterpreted, sound like we’re frothing at the mouth. If concision is the goal, how convenient is that! We’ve been instructed to avoid the very thing we’re generally most afraid of.
But we should go in the opposite direction. Because the only single fucking thing I can think of that consistently makes writing memorable is human presence. The sense that we are encountering emissions from a real quivering consciousness somewhere out there. The way that a taste of someone’s genuine voice gives us a sense of their whole phenomenology, their condition, the temperature in their head and heart and flanks. If you need a star to steer by, that’s the one. People are starved for actual human presence. It is always in short supply.
You could break it down and get into the manual details of what human presence is, like, what sort of cadences seem most ‘human.’ But that would be entirely beside the point, which is to sound like you, the you that comes out in the most intimate moments, the cool sound of you not wondering whether you’re acceptable on this earth. If you can make that come out, that’s when you’ll start sounding great—sometime after that is when you should begin diddling around with your prose to bring some variety of finery to your diction if you so choose. And I say ‘make that come out,’ but it’s precisely not making it come out, it’s allowing it to exist. To further elaborate, perhaps you think that ‘good writing’ is what happens when you start filtering out the particularities of your consciousness—but try not doing that next time.
This is not to say concision is bad, or anything. Cut some sentences out sometimes. But if concision is the motivating principle, you’re going to produce emotion-starved gruel and then try to make it tastier by lessening the portion.
How do I live my best life? -Tasshin F.
It has something to do with ambition. But also avoiding ambition. Be both profoundly ambitious and also totally unambitious at the same time.
I’ve always liked the Greek concept of Arete, as I understand it, which I don’t think I do, because I don’t read Greek, so I guess what I’m saying is that I like my version of Arete. This goes as follows: in every situation, in every being, there is a latent excellence, an ideal form, the way things want to be. But this excellence is precisely not some universal sort of acceptability. It’s the flowering of the implicit possibility of that little part of the universe, which you’re going to miss if you adopt some other standard of rightness. You’re butchering your own Arete if you’re going after a standard of aspiration cloned from someone else. Ultimately you have to start with somebody else’s form of ambition, but you also have to notice when it’s cleaving off the important local details.
This is what’s missed in the usual advice to be ambitious, which is like, Peter Thiel telling you that if you discover a precious secret, you can get a pile of funding and eventually fret over where to put your helicopter pad. Directionally, I like positive ambition a lot, in that I think glorifying God, increasing the total amount of love and beauty, and decreasing the total amount of cruelty, is pretty good, and you should put some effort in there. But for a given being, the most pursue that ambition could be to create a sculpture garden in the town square. Or cultivate an incredible group of friends. Or, to begin with, it could just involve clearing the cobwebs of self-hatred in your mind so you can encounter another human being without shuddering all over. Trying to parent well seems like an exceptionally likely possibility for a lot of people, which is commonly thought of as unambitious by people whose emotional life has been replaced by metrics.
This requires flexibility and sensitivity, testing out a hypothesis about what the good life is, watching it explode, finding another one, responding to nearby conditions, knowing your own capabilities and voids without shame, dancing on the frontier of possibility occasionally wearing dogma as a mask but speaking through it in funny voices, and a lot of walking around and wondering what the fuck is going on.
In other words, the best life is found by ceaselessly refusing to have a final answer to this question.
How can I improve my sense of smell and/or improve my ability to identify the scents I am smelling? -Ryan L
Olfaction is ethereal and complex. A lot of smell is down to noticing what’s there, untangling the multitudinous bundle. And you can do this with language better than you’d think.
There’s a wonderful fragrance by the house Etat Libre D’Orange called Vierges et Toreros, which a friend gave me a sample of. It’s highly unusual in that it’s unisex, but it goes about the gender dilemma in a completely different way than most other unisex fragrances, which usually lean towards a muddy middle, avoiding the prominence of aspects that are strongly gender-coded in one way or another. Vierges et Toreros, rather than being neither masculine or feminine is both, loudly, at the same time: it has a deep muddy patchouli/vetiver, a dank earthy richness, below a great vivid streak of tuberose, the most bubblegummy flower in all of perfumery.
If I sprayed some of it on your wrist, and told you to focus on the dark deep earthy aspects of it, you would primarily smell a muddy, musky fragrance. If, on the other hand, I told you to go the other way, and focus on the typically feminine elements of it, you would experience the embrace of a trilling gracious thing. I’ve done this to people and the experience is surreal; they’re stunned at how a little linguistic cue can transform olfaction, can direct the mind to one or another aspect of what’s going on.
So while I don’t know how to increase your sense of smell in an absolute sense, I can tell you that verbalizing your nose can provide sensory clarity to a surprising degree. Develop an inner taxonomy, get some language. Get samples of three or four rose fragrances, maybe, from perhaps from Surrender to Chance. Smell them, think “rose.” But also notice the other elements; is it a rose with oud? A rose with leather? The internet will tell you. Use those words as you smell them. Smell how they complement each other. Describe it, however crudely you can. You’ll notice that rose is in a lot of fragrances, but it sits differently in different chairs, and you’ll detect these variations more precisely with a little bit of language to focus the nostrils.
This will accustom you to the larger activity of mapping out different scents, which is a little art of itself. Is there something grassy in that particular stinky French cheese, something of the pasture? Is this hotel lobby attaining a certain gravitas thanks to a shade of frankincense, or is there some orris-like grounding binding the atmosphere? If you’re like me, this is endlessly fun. If you’re not, at least this will give you a sense of what your senses can do when nurtured, something you ought to explore while you possess them, in my opinion.
When you fall off of the deep okayness wagon, how do you get back on? -Ben W
For those who aren’t following my every activity, I wrote about something called Deep Okayness recently. This is a kind of persistent self-love it turns out you can achieve where you’re no longer convinced that there could be anything transcendently bad about you. When you get there, though you can still criticize things you’ve done, there’s no touching what you are, which, depending on your metaphysical background, you can now regard as a part of God, a manifestation of the universal awareness, or just one of the waveforms bouncing around spacetime.
Here is my experience so far: once you get to one important point of the process, there is no going back. The idea that anything about you is essentially unlovable is just unavailable. It’s not that you feel warm and fuzzy about yourself forever. it’s just that you stop guarding yourself against potential reminders of the corruptness you’re sure is in your center.
Since my Deep Okayness experience, I have, as always, experienced some doubts about what I’m doing here on earth, my capabilities, whether I’m executing my duties well enough. But while these worries used to be pollution dumped in the ocean of me, now they’re just wind on the water. This is partially sensory. It’s just a feeling that there’s nothing attackable. I think there’s no falling off that wagon; it’s something you can’t un-see.
But the way there is complex, and there are tons of weird switchbacks. Like, you don’t just go from thinking you’re a piece of shit to regarding yourself as beyond judgments of quality. There are all these steps of highly conditional self-love first, where you basically like yourself, unless you remember that one thing you did, or perpetrate a behavior you despise. And the hilarious thing is that during this, at some point, self-love becomes something to judge yourself about. Just how compassionate are you being, you motherfucker? Are you offering yourself some kind of lazy off-brand conditional self-compassion?
I only have my own journey through this to observe, so I don’t know if this is universally applicable advice. But I think I got a lot of mileage out of regarding this difficulty as something else lovable, another tragicomic part of my over-engineered mind, also something I don’t need to reject. This is where you’re starkly presented with the difference between love as a feeling—the warm fuzzies—and love as an existential mode—the simple decision to encounter the moreness of whatever as-is. (For more on this, see the preamble to this guided meditation.) And somehow once you notice the subtle tension of struggling to relax and love yourself, you can let that go too.
I will say that to my surprise, I too am finding this core element of my self-regard resilient to disturbances in the last few weeks. There have been many things I feel ashamed about, and some sharp moments of malice towards myself, but then I let myself notice how honestly rich I find the complexity of my mind and how intriguing the challenges for me to get out of my own way. I'm legitimately excited to be a spectator for that! It does seem like no matter how tied up in knots I get, I have the new ability to take a step back one more level and to say, it's kind of cool the knot I've tied myself in.