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There is always an origin to writing something (or aptly, a citation.)

"I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thank God, i have company. I used to think I had early onset dementia.
I get it but really, we eat food to retain its nutrients while we read books to retain knowledge(sometimes).
Biochemist and complexity science fan here.

We assimilate into ourselves different forms of structure from each, whether biological or semiotic. Each structure, biomolecules or language, equip us to model and navigate our environment, and persist a bit longer.

Life thrives when its cellular membranes (and bodily boundaries to an extent) are awash in structural microdiversity of friendly chemicals (aka nutrients). More access to structural microdiversity means more ability to navigate complex environments, more ability to choose from the surrounding otherness and decide what gets to cross inside your boundary and become tomorrow's you, tomorrows self.

Minds thrive similarly when immersed in diversity of thought and experience. (See Alex Pentland's Social Physics book) These things aren't as different as they might seem, if you cross your eyes and look at it abstractly like a universe might.

The universe doesn't really quibble between the information that my body "knows" through its structure, and the information my mind "knows" through language. Everything is made of information, and the structures of information that best prepare us for futures will persist :)

Do we? As examined in The Little Prince, people can get nutritions from pills and powders, factually humanity has made a culture out of food, much more than just getting nutritious
I read to be moved by a story, to feel with the characters, to get a sense of a different country or time or culture, to get a sense of possible futures, a sense of what it might mean to live another life, be bound by different constraints and experiences than my own, to experience another mind viewing the same world or imagining a totally different one, seldom to retain knowledge.
Yes, knowledge is just a different form of nutrition.
The interesting part about this quote is not the quote itself, which is blatantly false but feels good (how would it sound: "I cannot remember the tiktoks/tv series/comic books I have watched/read...: even so, they have made me"), but how much we succumb to authority.

If the patron of the local pub had delivered the quote in question, we would tell him to put down his tenth beer. But since it was said by an intellectual, who has nothing more to say on the matter than the patron mentioned above could say, we take it at face value.

". . . 'art' is about appropriation. Among its tenets, postmodernism suggests that no work of art or text is anything other than a reassembly of citations; thus, if all art is citations, all art is fair game to be cited."

- An author on a popular product who is questioning copyright.

How is the quote false?
> More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of Several Short Sentences About Writing, calls these “volunteer sentences.” You don’t follow them, you tame them. Take control of your writing.

This is a common experience for writers, the sense of sentences appearing or almost completing themselves...it just occurred to me that reminds me of something that is asserted by Julian Jaynes in his controversial "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." He claims that prior to the Bronze Age, human beings did not recognize their thoughts as belonging or originating with themselves; instead, they perceived thoughts as emanating externally, from Gods. I have no idea if there are merits to Jaynes theory, but it's fun to consider if the writer's inner voice, this sense of automaticity while writing, might recruit the same mechanisms of which Jaynes is speaking.
Where else could language really come from besides appearing more or less spontaneously in the mind? All thought is like this.

Is there a level of consciousness prior to language that willfully assembles the next word out of more subtle mind stuff? There would be an infinite regress here.

Exactly. In order to say a thought *wasn’t spontaneous* would mean that you thought something BEFORE you thought it.
You could even go further -- all actions are spontaneous...life is spontaneous.
Interestingly, it was this line of thinking that once upon a time led to the rejection of the idea of free will: a thought is caused by another, and that by another yet, and so on, so there is no free thought or deliberation.

From that perspective, it was mentioned in this Russell Ackoff talk that recently emerged on HN: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGN5DBpW93g

I agree. In different traditions, it's this realization that there is no separate assembler of thoughts/words (to your point, the problem of who is the assembler of the assembler?) that is a key insight.
> Is there a level of consciousness prior to language that willfully assembles the next word out of more subtle mind stuff? There would be an infinite regress here.

What? No, it's not infinite. Thoughts are more fundamental than language, you can absolutely have a thought and then struggle to express it in language (indeed this is a pretty common experience). For an experienced writer or speaker the translation from thought to language may be so smooth as to almost disappear (to the point they may not even be conscious of it), but it's still happening.

Ok great! So where does the pre-language thought come from? Does that one spontaneously appear, or is it too assembled from even more subtle mind stuff by a conscious agent?

Once in possession of a pre-language thought, how does a conscious agent craft it into language? Does it open an internal dictionary and find the best fit? Are the dictionary entries appearing spontaneously or are they too conjured agentically somehow?

You can't keep going asserting a conscious, agentic process at every level. At some point you have to concede that what is available to a conscious agent is being offered by totally unconscious, "spontaneous" processes

Thoughts appear spontaneously (at least some of the time) as far as one's consciousness is concerned, sure. But language and sentences don't. That's all I'm claiming.
Love it. I also really enjoyed the book "First You Write a Sentence" by Joe Moran

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607260/first-you-wr...

Thanks for sharing. That was my favorite piece of reading in a while.
Writing is an interesting process, it seems different for everyone. There are lots of tools and techniques so that is not a surprise. For me sometimes it's putting together LEGOs, other times it's crafting a puzzle or panning for gold. And a rare few times its felt like hooking into the great creative currents of the universe to bring something to fruition.
That's a good summary. It's worth pointing out that there's technical writing and literary writing. They are related but different enough that it's worth calling out the difference.

Technical writing is a skill you can learn. If you have somebody pointing out what you are doing wrong structurally, you can learn to do it right every time. I had a Ph. D. supervisor who taught me that little life hack thirty years ago. I was a bit depressed with my lack of progress when he pointed out just four or five things that I was doing wrong a lot. So, I fixed those things and it got better and developed the skill of spotting my own mistakes.

The whole process took something like six months or so to get to acceptable levels (by review committees for conferences and workshops). Learning to communicate is a big part of the process of getting a Ph. D. A master degree won't quite get you there (depending on the field). Especially computer scientists seem to have a few blind spots for this. Anyway, if you can't talk about your findings in a coherent way, nobody is going to bother listening to you.

Literary writing is more free form. Technical writing skills are merely the starting point for that. But it's like any art form where somebody that has mastered rules and skills start bending the rules in intentional ways; or even change them. Some authors I like make that look easy to the point where I wonder whether I could do that. But doing that well is not easy.

And there's also the notion that it's not just about the style and form but about the content. After a life of ignorance about Greek mythology, I read Stephen Fry's Mythos over the summer. His writing is wonderful. But it also drove home the point of how ignorant I was of Greek myths influencing basically every popular movie or book I've ever liked. I like the Matrix, for example. There's a reason Morpheus is called Morpheus (Greek god of dreams) and that whole business with the blue and red pills relates to that. That whole movie is dripping with Greek mythology references and it's not like they were subtle about it. I kind of knew of course.

Movies and books don't just come out of nowhere. They are variations of stories that have been told and retold over and over again by countless people for thousands of years. And the better authors tend to know their mythology, philosophy, work by their modern peers, etc. Learning to write involves a lot of reading so you can refer to that and be original and intentional.

As a beginner in fiction writing, it is really interesting to hear from various writers I admire how different their processes are how every single one, without fail, emphasizes that it’s deeply personal and to develop your own style.

I guess this comment proves my style is run on sentences :)

Well said
Both art and article are good. I can definitely relate. I feel like most of my writing actually happens well before I sit down to write anything. It’s thoughts and notes, then something comes out. The weirdly frustrating thing is when it doesn’t align with my notes at all, but somehow it’s better. Or at least I think it’s better. Then it’s a matter of not editing too much. Or at all sometimes. I’ve definitely written and posted things that when from brain to web.
yes!

typing is not writing

for me at least 90% of the "writing" happens away from a keyboard

mainly in my head (on walks, in the shower, when I least expect it)

then on paper & pencil, writing words, phrases, drawing lines, rinse, repeat

my goal is to finish the conceptual thinking to a degree that when I sit down in front of a keyboard, it's mainly "downloading" from my brain

If I try to do the conceptual work at a keyboard it's torture

Interesting. When I'm on a walk or in the shower, I try to avoid thinking about anything complicated, preferring to wait till I'm in front of a keyboard.
In meditation, instead of the breath you can use your thoughts as an object to observe dispassionately. I believe we all have what this author is describing, basically language based thought that we have no seeming conscious control over (I would argue all of our thoughts). We can just sit back and watch the show. My sense is that some people see this more readily than others and are more sensitive to it, probably good correlation with different types of artists. For me personally, it took a while to see this for the first time, but it was a revelation and completely changes your perspective on what/who you think you are.
In a lucid dream you know you are dreaming. Recently I discovered that just because I am aware that I am in a dream and my actions do not not have real consequences, the feelings connected to the actions in my dream remain real. In my dreams, and awake.

Weird.

“ There remains a strange relation to the poems I have already written. Though they were written to create or affirm my existence, they did not, once they were finished, continue to do so. What they suggested, when I read them afterward, was that I had once existed and had thoughts; something that had been alive and specific was now silent or vanished. So the poems became a kind of chastisement, taunting reminders of what was not.”

Looking back on previous writing can also be a positive reinforcement, though yeah sometimes you feel taunted, or that you could’ve done better. And small though it may feel, writing is action. You didn’t just let thing bounce around in your head, you wrote it out - you did something. My hot take on this this morning - I liked this read, thanks for posting.

I find the process of writing standup comedy to be the purest form of writing and public speaking. There is a constant effort to adjust words around in order to get that extra laugh. How you write something has direct effect on how the joke is told. Specially sensitive subjects. If you ever want to expand your writing skills I suggest learning how to write a standup joke. It works really well. More so if you have a sense of humor.
I cannot find the source, but I saved this quote by Douglas Hofstadter about the process of writing, rewriting, and revising:

"It is the intensity of this process of global tightening and smoothing of a huge structure that was once implicit in one's mind but is now external and has its own unanticipated shape, life, and momentum, it is the power of this process of converting a set of once-intangible intuitions into a very tangible network of interconnected crystals, that I had forgotten."

> It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started

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What a terrible article. Honestly - I'm glad I won't be able to read another

Yeah, the first sentence could have been shorted to just "All my life I wanted to write." The editor should have pruned this. The virality and popularity of this article goes to show how all those writing guides about being concise or clear are overrated. The marketplace evidently rewards verbosity.
Has anyone experimented with “writing” by speaking directly to an Ai ( ala “stream of consciousness” )

And then having it edit it down into something coherent and if possible sublime?

An extreme version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing
You can get some pretty far-out places doing this on an electronic typewriter, in the dark, with the right state of mind.

Example: https://bedaring.org/post/quarantined-thoughts/the-pursuit-o....

Thank you very much for posting this.
Coming across stuff like this is why I value the hacker news community.