The Cultural Tutor: Two Kinds of Writing (Which One Are You?)
01:16:24 Share

If there's one thing human beings cannot handle, it is being bored. Minimalism is a lack of personality, a lack of edge. How do you define minimalism and maximalism? Maximalism is high Victorian, florid. Minimalism, short, sharp, choppy prose. The transition that we've had as a society from maximalism into minimalism.

It's the words we use, it's the way we speak, it's the way we think. And it feels like the sharp edges of humanity have been sanded down. What happened when we went from the typewriter to the word processor is it's almost made things too perfect. I copy and pasted a bit of Shakespeare into Microsoft Word. What do you think happened when I did that?

The Cultural Tutor, the very first repeat guest that we've had on How I Write. And I've been his patron for a few years now. And in that time, he has exploded on Twitter. He's now got 1.7 million Twitter followers, millions of people reading his writing every month. But this conversation, the first one was all about his story, his process. This one is different. It's all around a single theme. It's about minimalism and maximalism. Because here's the thing.

We're living in an age of minimalist writing. There's a lot of writing that gets right to the point, but the problem is it just lacks voice. It lacks the voice that was so popular in the 18th and the 19th centuries. So what we said is, how can we take the best from maximalism and minimalism, and how can we teach people to write in a way that combines both of them? And this is one of the things that we talk about in Write a Passage.

What do you do to inject personality and life and a sense of vibrancy in your writing while also keeping the things that I love about minimalism? Clarity, simplicity, directness. So those are the things that we talk about in Write a Passage. You got to join us if that's something you want to do. And it's also the theme of this episode with The Cultural Tutor.

Shiget, what I want to do is I want to spend this entire conversation talking about one thing. And what it is, is it's the transition that we've had as a society from maximalism into minimalism. And this is my thesis, that we live in this world of minimalism and minimalism.

So maximalism is good for the kind of personality that it brings, for the kind of energy and texture that it infuses into writing. But minimalism is really good because it's clear and it's understandable and it allows for writing to even be efficient. But my question, and this is where I want to get to by the end of the conversation, is how can minimalism

people develop a style that incorporates the very best of maximalism and the very best of minimalism. So that's where we're going to go. But before any of that, let's talk about why this is so important. Why is this question, this balance of minimalism and maximalism, why is it of crucial significance? Sure. It's a hell of a question. I'm excited for this quest we're about to embark on. But in short, minimalism and maximalism is almost like this

You can put on glasses when you start to see them. And once you start to see them, you see them in literally everything. I mean, the clothes you're wearing, shoes you're wearing, the chairs we're sitting in, this table, all of these things, how they look and how they've been designed are influenced by that spectrum. On the one side, maximalism, on the other side, minimalism. And not just the objects in the world around us, the buildings and the cars, it's graphic design, it's the words we use, it's the way we speak, it's the way we think.

And for that reason, I guess, you know, as soon as you can zoom in on one particular point about minimalism versus maximalism, and you're only 10 paces away from talking about global problems and challenges, essentially. Like writing has fluctuated a lot, but, you know, sometimes it's clearer. So sometimes it's more maximalist. Sometimes it's more minimalist.

And I think what you're referring to, we're essentially now, and this is true not just for writing, it's true for architecture and graphic design and art generally, and even music itself. We're currently in a minimalist era coming out of a maximalist one, right? So you had the 19th century, early 20th century, think of the Victorians and Victorian maximalism. And, you know, like even my grandparents' house when I was a kid was covered in flowery wallpaper. Right now, all the walls in every single house are

It's just plain white or gray or some sort of very neutral color. So we're essentially coming out of this era of maximalism. So we have this view that, oh, the entire past must have been like the era we're just coming out of, which ended in the middle of the last century. But it's not true. So if you... It's certainly true of the Victorians. But anyway, go back to the 17th century.

Milton can be very hard to read his prose, probably the best example of a 17th century writer. But then look at the King James Bible, right? 1611. That stuff, even now, I mean, there's a few archaicisms in there. You can read that book. That is extremely clear language and extremely minimalist, to be honest. I mean, how many times do they just use the word and? You know, I wish I could quote the Bible by heart, but I can't. But you must have read the King James Bible, right? No, I actually haven't. You must be familiar with how it's written. Yeah.

The point being, it's actually incredibly simple and we can read it now and that's way clearer. You'd understand the King James Bible, which was written by a committee of 49 translators. The best thing ever written by a committee, so to say. It's a miracle that ever happened, these translators. That stuff is beautifully clear. And then also, I think if you read 16th century stuff, Elizabethan, around the time of Shakespeare,

Talking prose rather than, you know, poetry or drama. Read prose from that time. You know, these guys are fairly obscure now, but Thomas Eliot and Roger Asham or Thomas Decker, or Thomas Brown as well, actually. He's brilliant.

The 16th century prose is easier to understand than 18th or 19th century prose. So I was saying you have a bit of Carlyle as this beautiful example of the kind of writing which now would just be utterly unpublishable. I mean, Carlyle was a fairly unusual man anyway. We may talk about him later and the way he essentially created his own style. But anyway, what I'm trying to say to you is,

It has changed. The pendulum has swung back and forth. And 500 years ago, it was relatively simple. Look at Chaucer, man. Have you read any Chaucer? So Chaucer, if you read him in the original, it can be quite hard because he's essentially writing in quite an old fashioned version of English with a spelling. But if you modernize the spelling, Chaucer is as clear as daylight. You wouldn't miss a single thing. And he was writing when?

Sure, it's the 14th century. We're going back six or seven centuries, man, a long, long time. So the pendulum does swing back and forth as the years go on. But yes, right now we're clearly in a minimalist age. How do you define minimalism and maximalism?

There are different ways to approach this. I mean, I feel like there's a very easy way, which is a bit of a caricature. And the caricature of maximalism is that high Victorian, florid sentences running to a page long, filled with just insane verbiage, where instead of door, they'll say portal, and instead of loud, they'll say vociferous or something. This is kind of stuff, and you're just going on and on and on. That's the caricature of maximalism. The caricature of minimalism

is, I guess, Hemingway, Hemingway, Hemingway, just short, sharp, choppy prose. The $1 words versus the $10 words, as Hemingway said. They're the two caricatures. I think in reality, it's a bit more complicated than that, and it can get a bit blurry because both of them have got, if you like, a virtuous side and a harmful side to them. I'll send you a bit of Carlyle. You try and read through

You know, maybe you pick up one of these books here. I don't actually know when they were published and you'll be lost. Like you won't, you won't have finished the first sentence of the first page and you won't know what the hell is going on. Right. That's the bad side of maximalism. But then the virtuous side is, and I think this is probably what you really want to talk about.

when you write in a maximalist way, which I think means being willing to risk using those big words, being willing to risk using slightly more heightened diction, maybe using more punctuation, using some semicolons, let's say. It's greater than the sum of its parts. And I think there are some things you can say

in a maximalist manner, which you can't get at in a minimalist way. And let me put it this way. How many words do you think there are in the English language? 500,000. Close. So I think it's something like 750,000. I think about 150,000 are regarded as being in infrequent use. That's a lot of words, right? 750,000 words. And the sort of malignant side of minimalism

is this belief that the simple standard word always suffices.

which is it's essentially saying that there's not that much of a difference between different words they all more or less mean the same thing it's like describing love as just you know a state of affection between two people yeah that's not love is it right and they're so good i know i you know i don't love you i have affection for you i see exactly what you're driving at and you use the word green which i think kind of gets at what we're going that's a good example of where minimalism and maximalism what each of them could look like so you could say oh the the

the table was green, but you could say emerald green, which implies something very different from the green of a sunshine leaf. Now we have something very optimistic, or you could have his face looked green, you know, and all of a sudden you're like, Ooh, you know, something bad is going on there. And the point is that what maximalism does when it gets well, is it captures the nuance and the texture of life. And to your point,

A lot of what's happened is we're saying that any words that appear close, oh no, let's just have green because the distinction is almost irrelevant. It's, you know, we don't need to go that deep. No, exactly. I think that's part of my, as you say, the loss is this texture, this breadth. And the best example I can probably give you is the first time I read John Ruskin. So the great 19th century, you know, critic, historian,

John Ruskin, maybe I would like to think, and I would certainly argue with anybody, probably the greatest prose writer there's ever been in English, in my view. I mean, I love the guy, so maybe I'm biased. The first time I read him talking about architecture, right, this is a guy who speaks very precisely. He doesn't just have a big, long sentence, and you know at every single point what he's saying, but he is constructing these beautiful, long sentences and using words, some of which I had to look up in the dictionary, I suppose.

But the way he wrote about it, I was getting emotional reading about him describing the different parts of a wall. Like he's describing how to build a wall and what the ideal wall looks like and these various other pretty dry technical stuff you'd think. But it was making me emotional because he was writing with this breadth of imagination and vocabulary and spirit. And if he'd been writing as people, I suppose, right now, I would have,

It wouldn't have, as strange as it sounds, it wouldn't have got my emotions. What's an example of that? So this is volume one of the Stones of Venice, his seminal work about, notionally, about Venetian architecture. Really, it's almost like this sort of beautiful encyclopedic synthesis of architecture itself. And it was one of the most influential books of the 19th century. I mean, the way this book...

changed the appearance of the streets around us. We're in London now. These streets would not look the same if not for the Stones of Venice. Anyway, this is how it begins, this great big three-volume treatise. A lot of it's very technical. Some of it's essentially literally just like a manual textbook guide to architecture. So the Stones of Venice, Chapter 1, The Quarry. "'Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones of mark beyond all others have been set upon its sands.'"

My immediate reaction is, I need to reread that. And also, I felt a sense of grandeur and magnificence. The words felt like they had a weightiness and an aliveness to them. Okay, great. Man, we've got some material here. So,

First point, you feel like you need to read it again. Now, this may be the thorn in our sides during this conversation. You said you felt like you need to read it again, and you said it like that was a bad thing. Yes, I feel that way. Why? It's this obsession with efficiency. You're reading it. Come on, let's get through it. Let's get through it. Yeah, man. Exactly. And if I could pick one

defining quality of modernity. And again, I'm not here to crap on the modern world whatsoever, but just on this specific point, I would say convenience. It's your guys, it's the Americans. You invented convenience. No, but I mean, it's like, if I can't get it now and I can't get it straight away, why bother? And this is what I mean by the kind of, there's so much going on here. There's a bit of the anti-elitism, a bit of reverse snobbery. There's also, we can go into the whole, we can go all the way back to the first world war and where this came from.

But equally, in fact, majorly, probably is just this convenience. Like if I have to read it again, it's crap. Like what's the point? That's bad writing. I don't know. Is it bad writing if you have to read it again? Is something bad just because it takes time to understand it? I mean, have you ever been in love? You don't just meet someone and think, either I love you or I don't. It takes time to get to know somebody. And I think treating literature and prose and writing in that way

I mean, admittedly, in that case, if you had read it yourself, you may have understood it more quickly versus me reading it out. I'm not the best elocutor of words. But you know what maximalism does? Mm-hmm. Is it creates an environment that you can live in for a little while. Yeah.

It's not just information delivery. It is actually creating a vibe, an environment, almost like personality, right? Like when you're hanging out with somebody, this isn't just an exchange of words. This is an exchange of, this is the energy that cultural tutor brings, the vibe. And two people in a conversation are bringing that onto the page, which is very different from what do you think? I think this, I think that.

But that's not what conversation is. But a lot of writing has a lot of modern writing to get the efficiency, to get the convenience, I think gives up on a lot of the vibe. Yes, I completely agree. And there's something to jump into there as well. But it's like, you know, with like a complicated idea, you wouldn't just, you wouldn't think if I don't understand this idea the first time it's explained to me, then I'm not going to bother. Like some things take a while to understand. And with writing,

Ruskin's prose as an example, this is the funny thing. Once you get used to it, that kind of writing,

It bothers you less and less and less and less. Okay, but the first time I started reading Ruskin, in fairness, at that point, I'd already been reading far too many dusty old books. But once you get used to that stuff, man, it does not bother you in the slightest. And I'm not saying, oh, I'm this sort of expert scholar who can pass the complex prose of old writers. It's just style, right? And Carlyle, right? This guy seems indecipherable when you first pick him up. You bear with it.

and you read a few of the Victorian writers, a few of the 19th century, 18th century writers, suddenly you could pick up, you know, any old book and it would make perfect sense to you. And essentially you're just training yourself to understand it, right? Um,

And this goes back to what I was saying. When all we read is this minimalistic stuff, okay, you see that and you think, oh, it's way too complicated. But it's not. If you just read a bit more of it and have a bit of patience, suddenly it's going to be like a whole new world of literature is open to you just because of a little bit of training. One of the things that I think is going to show up throughout this conversation is the

That writing can kind of be hard to visualize, but if we can look at design, if we can look at architecture, we can begin to see a lot of the trends that are happening in society. And we could say that same thing is happening in writing. And I'll put the image on the screen, but there's this image of tech logos and how companies like Burberry and Yves Saint Laurent, they used to have these vibrant logos that had a bunch of depth and a lot of subtlety. And now they're just flat.

very easy to read, super simple, and they've lost a lot of the distinctiveness. What's going on there? I guess a great visualization of the problem whereby, okay, minimalism can be great. Simplifying can be good, but simplification is not itself a virtue. Just because it's simpler does not mean it's better. This is not a valid judgment. It's a descriptive word. And

What happens when you simplify all the logos? You keep simplifying, you keep simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. They all look exactly the same and the personality is gone. And this is the perfect example, I suppose, the perfect visualisation of what happens to writing when we're obsessed with speed and convenience, simplicity, simplicity. So it all just starts sounding the same and you go to a bookshop, as I said, you pick up

10 different books and you feel like they could have all been written by the same person, which is a catastrophe. You mentioned World War I and you mentioned Hemingway. And it seems like minimalism is born out of some kind of combination of those two. And then also there's an influence of the mass production line and the industrial revolution.

Those are three places that I would look. Okay. Before we get to that, actually, just one point I want to go back to. You mentioned when I read it, you said, I want to hear it again, but I got a sense of grandeur. Yeah. I just want to touch on that second point because this is really important. And that is what maximalism brings, I think. And this is what I think you're interested in, right? You don't get that when it's a stripped back, plain, easily legible conversational prose. You don't get that sense of weight, right? And gravity, right?

Think about the Lord's Prayer, right? How do you... I don't know. This is a question. How do you say it? Just the first line. Our Father, art thou in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. Sorry, is that a sin to interrupt the Lord's Prayer? I don't know. But I did it. Anyway, God forgive me. That language, okay? Now, I have some friends who are biblical scholars who are going to probably get annoyed at me for what I'm about to say. But...

because of some obscure stuff. But that language is archaic, right? It's elevated. And in a sense, it's maximalist. Imagine if you were to tweet tomorrow or write a post on X saying, you know, art and thou and thy. You know, you get laughed off the platform, right? But that language in the Lord's Prayer elevates, it brings gravity.

Would you agree with that or not? Let me add one to you. I memorize a lot of scripture. There's no other verse that I have memorized like that. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's what it says. Back to Ruskin. That's what maximalism brings you, that maybe we are missing. And that's why I love this guy so much, because when it came to architecture, I found a lot of, you know,

obviously of later that in the past few years, I've only been reading old books. It's kind of a rule of mine. Don't read any books published, you know, in the last 50 years. Five, zero. Yeah. Five, five, zero. I mean, there are always going to be little exceptions and I do try and read some, some more recent things where it's relevant or important, or even just get a sense. And, and, and that sense of grandeur, you just, you, you literally, if you went into Waterstones now, that's a British bookshop for, for, for your viewers. And, and went to the architecture section, picked up a book,

Some of it, no doubt, would be wonderfully informative and elucidating, but that sense of grandeur and meaning and gravity would be absent from it because you can't write like that now. You couldn't start a book with that sentence written in that all quasi-biblical language. So I think in our quest to discover what's good about maximalism and how to try and draw out those beneficial qualities and apply them for modern day,

That is something to seek. It is the grandeur. That is one thing maximalism can bring that minimalism can never quite get to. And what do you make of the Industrial Revolution and Hemingway? Nice. I think the best way to think about the Industrial Revolution as it relates to the arts and to writing as well is that there had been a way of doing things for the entirety of human history.

which is you do it with your hands. You make it with your hands. I mean, there are exceptions, of course. There were elements of mass production in the Middle Ages, but nothing like the scale of having a factory where things just get produced in factories. And suddenly, rather than making things by hand, everything is machine-made. And the effect that that had on the arts themselves is almost...

So it's almost, I mean, this is what, you know, actually a lot of the early modernists, Le Corbusier and whatever, spoke about. This is a lot of their motivation. They're saying this is a machine age now. Ornament, very nice. Well, they didn't say that, but they said it was for savages, I think, and barbarians. But they said ornament is for savages.

well, yeah, they said it's a medieval peasants who make things with their hands. This is now an age of machines. Machines, it doesn't make any sense. Why would you use a machine to ornament something, right? Decoration fundamentally is just a natural instinct. Think about whenever you make anything with your hands, you'll decorate it. Think of like you have a notebook, presumably. I imagine there are doodles in it, right? You just doodle, right? And even if when people make a

You know, you make a pie and put it... Do you eat pies in America? I don't know. Thanksgiving. You know what a pie is, right? Yeah, yeah. Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie. Yeah, and you make a pattern on the top, right? Maybe you just make a nice little... Some cross-hatching with an eye off, you use a fork. We can't help it. When we make something with our hands, we just decorate it. Our instinct is to decorate, and that's why everything old is decorated. And you get to the 19th century, even once things do start getting machine-made, there's a bit of a hangover because people expect things to be ornamented. Curious what you think about this. Yeah.

And this touches on the Industrial Revolution. Like, what does a book mean to you? When I say the word, do you read books or are you an e-book reader, would you say? Um...

Probably 50-50. 50-50, sure. Whenever I want to dip into something, I read a Kindle. Whenever I want to live in something, I read a physical book. Do you buy new books? I don't know what the big bookstores do. I usually just do Amazon. Sure, yeah, exactly. And how would you describe the book you get? I'm not asking for a value judgment, just how would you describe it? The hardcover I'd sort of describe as sleek. It's almost like an advertisement. And I can flip through and there's...

it's a bit weighty. And then what I would say is, but it does feel very modern and there's not a lot of ornamentation for sure. The pages are very, are very simple. They're nothing like these pages, right? Look at this book, nothing like this. And then the paperback is just what I love about paperback books is they're light. They're easy to share. You can bring them around easily and they're quite cheap to print on a relative basis. So, so, so,

Perfect. Everyone can have a book because we have paperbacks. So the beauty of paperbacks, and this is the whole point, this is the joy of them, is that they democratised literature and prose and writing. Anyone could get any book. But it's funny you mention it because I actually brought a little book with me to kind of make a point about this.

because when you think of the modern paperback and then you compare it to a book like this, this is just, it's a copy of Walter Scott's poetry. I don't know if you want to show it on the camera or not. I actually got a bloody ring. Wow, like a leather. It was only six pounds from a local, but you see, it's got this beautiful sort of cushioned leather. The pages are gilded. Even on the front, there's a gilding of Walter Scott's initials. And you look inside it and the way it's printed. This is like a very maximalist book, right? Yeah.

But that's not really the point here. When you hold that book in your hands, it seems to lend itself to a certain kind of writing. When you have a leather-bound, gilded book,

Right. You know, the slightly more conversational, very clear style of modern writing doesn't really seem to fit with that book. Whereas the old fashioned maximalist writing seems suited to a book like that. Right. And I know, I think there's this beautiful, and again, this is kind of chicken or the egg story. I don't mean to say that the fact we're now generally printing cheaper, lower quality books, which as on the whole is a, is a,

blessing for humankind but it's got to have some influence on on how we conceive of books and writing itself like imagine if i if i gave that book and i told you to and it was blank and i said you've got to fill that you i want you to write you want you to write in it or i gave you just like a plain white notepad surely that is gonna is gonna just even even slightly encourage you to write in a maybe a slightly weightier dignified more elevated way

Maybe or not, I don't know. What do you think of that? It's just a little thought of mine. 100%? That the books themselves, the physical books themselves, have an impact on the way we're writing. The difference we have now, the X factor, as it were, is the internet. And maybe this is something which is...

Surely, if anything could, the internet would restrict the growth of a new maximalism because of the way it works, the attention economy. This is something you've written about very eloquently yourself. You might imagine, I don't know, the way Ruskin writes, if you try to write like that online, would it get traction?

No, I mean, we see it on Twitter every single day, the simpler, the catchier. If you can hook somebody in two seconds, it's not going to win. Yeah. And another important caveat, this is one of my favorite past times, is pointing out similarities between the past and the present. You know, we think we've got this unique modern problem, but it's not modern at all. Like, there's this great line from

a guy called Lucian of Samosata, I think, or Lucian of Samosata. He's a second century Greco-Syrian writer, I think, during the time of the Roman Empire, of course. Really funny guy. He wrote this great book, which I would recommend. Well, it's actually a letter, in fact. It's an extended letter, which is usually called How to Write History. Really funny. Some of the best writing advice you'll ever read. I would advise all your listeners to read it. How to Write History by Lucian. Anyway.

He's got this other line where I remember reading and I was like, man, this sounds like he's describing clickbait. What Lucien says is like, he can't believe that people are tricked into reading and believing things which even the slightest inquiry would prove unfounded. He says something like that.

Which is essentially this, you know, clickbait that, you know, what he's describing is someone just saying something outrageous and everyone just going for that. When if you just stop and think for 20, 30 seconds, it's obvious nonsense. And you've got to be brave if you're working online to slow down and say, actually, I'm going to write something more, with more gravity. I'm going to write something a bit more complicated because...

We've all seen how long the listener or reader spends, how far they get through. The more complicated it gets, the less time the average reader spends. So how do you work this out in your own writing? You're writing Twitter threads. You want to have a sense of soul and personality in your writing, but you also have to deal with the constraints of the platform. What are you doing? Let me say this.

With Twitter or X, I obviously, I try and keep things simple. But again, saying keeping it simple, simple does not equate to like bad minimalism or even to good minimalism. Maximalism can be simple as well. Simple is a really beautiful but really dangerous word. Again, this is why we need to use more words, right? Because simple just, it's almost useless because it describes many things. On X, I keep things pretty simple.

As simple as I can. I mean, I don't know. I use sub clauses and hyphens. I don't know if that's considered maximalist. But the newsletter, right? Here's an example, I suppose, of maximalist writing. The advice for the Areopagus, the advice I got from everybody when I started was keep it short, man. Just keep it short. You've got to keep it short. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Keep it short. Everyone was telling me.

And I kind of bought that at first, but as time went on, I was like, there's more here. Like I just got more to say. And I think the reader is going to like it more if we can look at this thing from a few different angles and it's grows and grows and grows. And then some, some of my, the volumes of the Areopagus have been six or 7,000 words long.

You know, and the writing, I really relax. And my mood, say if I've been reading somebody like, you know, it depends on the talent. I was reading Thomas Decker, who I mentioned earlier. Decker is a really, really funny writer. He's so funny. And Stephen Gossam, he's another 16th century writer.

Really funny guy. And he uses, it gets clear, but it's very, very like, it's very colourful. And he uses this really strange, vivid imagery. And when I've been reading that sometimes, I'll be like, yeah, I'm just going to try and write like Stephen Gosselin for a bit. And I go, I would never, I would never tweet that stuff. But I put it in the newsletter and it seems to work. And, you know, touch wood, fingers crossed, my readers do seem to enjoy it when I write that way. So I've tried to carve out a bit of a space for some more

some more slower, maybe, you know, more maximalist writing. A little research project that I want to do is I want to look at what happened when we went from the typewriter to the word processor. So if I'm talking right now and I say, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that doesn't quite come out right, I kind of need to keep rolling with it. But if I'm typing that same thing, I can go delete, delete, delete, delete. And then I can go back to sort of where I began to stutter or stumble a little bit. And then I can write from there.

And it seems that one of the things that the word processor has done with computing is it's almost made things too perfect, where then it loses a sense of personality or style. Yes. This is, I think, one of these invisible changes, which has had sort of just...

earth-shattering consequences for the way we act and think as human beings. Before I get into this word processing thing, because it is fascinating, there's an important caveat here. Well, not a caveat, it's sort of a qualifier about what we mean by minimalism. And I think what you mean and what I mean by minimalism in its bad form isn't just that it's simple, or that it's stripped back prose. It's not that. It feels like there's no personality, and it feels like

the sharp edges of humanity have been sanded down and you pick up 10 books and they're all kind of got the same conversational tone. There's no risk, there's no jeopardy there. It's slightly dramatic language, but I think you know what I mean. Minimalism isn't just about simplicity, it's also about a lack of personality, a lack of edge and a lack of variation, a lack of experimentation, a lack of

Yeah. Minimalism at its worst is very standardizing. It's almost like the way we all write has all come out of the same factory. You know, you put a different, you know, all serial, you know, just with different names or whatever. That's a terrible analogy. Anyway, with that being said, word processing. I don't think I've told you about this, but there was a moment six months ago, and I don't know why it had never happened to me before, but it was genuinely...

It kind of frightened me. And essentially all I did, I copy and pasted a bit of Shakespeare. Sorry, it was Edmund Spencer. But let's say Shakespeare. Edmund Spencer, I guess, isn't that one of the 16th century poets, the Prince of Poets, Edmund Spencer was called. I copy and pasted a bit of Shakespeare into Microsoft Word. What happens when you do that? What do you think happened when I did that? You got a bunch of squiggly lines. It said typo, syntax error, all that stuff. All that stuff, right? Yeah.

So that in itself is fairly shocking, right? We're told Shakespeare's the greatest writer, the greatest dramatist, certainly the greatest English dramatist of all time. And you put his words that William Shakespeare wrote, who spelled his own name six different ways, by the way, into Word, which is used by over a billion people. I think Microsoft has something like 95% of the world's word processing market.

And yeah, there are jagged red lines between Shakespeare. Not only saying, you know, spelling, you can kind of get that maybe, although we should talk about spelling. We should definitely talk about spelling. They're not only saying that he's spelt words wrong and his grammar's wrong, there's suggested improvements as well. Because, you know, where they say, you know, words say, do you want to try writing in a different way? Here's a better synonym. Like, is that not frightening? That this programme that's been designed in Silicon Valley is...

apparently knows how to write better than Shakespeare. You put it into word and that's what happened. And suddenly I was like, holy crap, how have I not ever read artists before that? The whole time in my life, you know, look at the age we are. We grew up using word processors. There's been an invisible hand

There's been invisible guardrails my whole life when I've been writing. I think, oh, it's just me. It's me and the words. It's not. There's me, there's the words, and then there's this machine, this algorithm telling me suddenly what I can and can't do. And this is another cause, obviously, for standardization when we all use the same word processor and it tells you to spell in a certain way, it suggests certain things. There are only so many fonts, there are only so many templates. All these factors combined

Obviously, you're going to make us all write in a very similar way, homogenise style.

It couldn't be any other way. And after that moment, I was quite, yeah, I don't know. How did that change your writing? I think, fortunately enough, I'd already been, got past the point of caring what the... Do you write in Google Docs, Microsoft Word? No, so, well, it varies, but mostly I use Word. Have you turned off Spellchecker? No, I keep it on, but what I like doing is I like adding you worth the dictionary. Because I often...

Again, I don't know if this sounds silly or obnoxious, but it's quite good fun to spell words in a slightly archaic way or a little bit incorrectly. Sometimes just for the fun of it, sometimes to make a point. So that's where we all right now, we've all got this word processor. I don't know if you use Word or not or Google Docs, but it's the same thing, man. It is not just you and the words. We think it is, but it's not. There's something else there. How did people used to write when John Ruskin wrote The Stones of Venice?

After he'd been to Venice and climbed up on the ladders and investigated all the capitals, he went home.

and it was him and a sheet of paper and his inkstand and his pen. And it was him and the paper and the word, and that was it. And obviously in that environment, when thousands of people all around the world who are all writing are genuinely on their own, in their room, at their desk writing, there's influence and there's fashions, but there's a lot more immediacy there. And there's going to be more variation, I think, of style and more willingness to experiment because essentially you're allowed to, the shackles are off. You can be yourself and

as a writer more truly, when you're not writing into a system which is programmed to push you down a particular style of

of writing and look at something like Grammarly now, which is hugely popular. As far as like, I don't know, I see ads for it all the time. I don't use it. I'm some sort of, I used to, you know, always correct people when they pronounce words wrongly or spell them wrongly when I was an obnoxious teenager. You know, like the word facade. Someone say facade, whatever, you know, actually it's facade. You talk about minimalism, about maximalism.

about personality in writing.

Thomas Carlyle, a good example of someone who has more personality in writing than anybody you will ever read. This guy, back in the 1820s, 1830s, when he was a young man, he very consciously decided to try and create a new style for his work. He wanted to be a historian, and he said, the way people write now isn't big enough, isn't powerful enough for the kind of history I want to write. So he spent years mastering a whole new style of English prose.

which ended up being very influential. And you read it and the personality is just bursting through. And to give one very small example of something he does, it's not just unique to him, of course. He'll often capitalise words, surprising words. And he's clearly just making a point about that word and he capitalises it. That's something he decided to do at his desk with his pen and paper.

If Thomas Carlyle was writing now in the 2020s and he decided to do that, he'd find it much harder because Word would be telling him, no, this is wrong. Grammarly would be telling him, no, this is wrong. Everyone else would be telling him, no, this is wrong. The spell checker has said, the machine has told me it's wrong. So these word processors, these systems which correct our spelling and...

guard our use of the English language, or any language for that matter, seem like they're helping us to write more accurately, which is true up to a point. But I think more than we realize, they're actually holding us back from using language in all the different ways that it can be used. What do you make of mass media and the decline of regional dialects? So if you look at the American accent, it's...

becoming more and more homogenous. So classically, the South...

Southerners spoke very differently from people in the Northeast, from Californians. That differentiation is going down and down. I went to go visit Cezanne's atelier in Southern France. I couldn't believe he went to Paris and people were just like, who is this guy? He's so different. He was from the South of France and people were like, what is going on with you? And then I was just talking to a friend who grew up in India and he said that there were years of people coming to India and trying to change this, colonize the country that. His words, not mine.

I don't know, but he said, you know what had a bigger impact than anybody trying to conquer India? Mass media. Mass media has done more to dilute Indian culture than any foreigners coming into the land.

Yeah, of course it has. And this touches on what we were saying. The past 150 years, especially, although it goes back for that, have been just one long process of global homogenisation. Everything gets quicker, therefore everything gets closer, therefore everything gets more similar. Regional dialects disappear, regional architectures disappear, everything regional disappears, everything becomes one increasingly global standard. And writing is a great example of this. When you look at old

old poems going back even a thousand years to stuff in the Dark Ages. Scholars can essentially figure out things about a poem based on the dialect it's written in. They can tell where in the... I could just give you a poem written in the 12th century, say, and you'd be able to tell where in England it was written because of the way they've written it based on their dialect. You couldn't do that now, right? Yeah.

Unless someone had very consciously, I suppose, decided to try and incorporate it. But the point is, again, it's how the dialect influences the way you write. That's disappearing as well. So this is clearly contributing to the standardization and the minimalism of the modern writing environment. We were talking about the influence of...

the typewriter, keyboard, and how the shifts in how we've communicated have changed writing. But you've also said to me, we're actually less literate now than we were 150 years ago. Is that right? In a sense, yes. So I should be very clear about what I mean. Of course, on average, we're far more literate, which is beautiful, as in the rates of literacy have skyrocketed.

150 years ago, let's say, plenty of people were not literate. So when I say we, I don't mean the average literacy or the literacy level. I mean people who are, say, writing, writers, people who want to write. I think we have this idea that

that literacy, as in being able to write and read, it's binary. It's like either you can or you can't. And if you can read, that's fine. If you can write, then you've got it. And then after that, it's all the same. But this is simply not true.

So the reason I say we're potentially less literate, right? When I read a bit of Ruskin, you said, can you read that again? Maybe if this was 150 years ago, you would not have had any trouble. I mean, read any speech, for example, by a US president. Every decade you go further back, they get more and more, I don't want to say articulate, but certainly more complex. Even if you go back and read a speech by JFK,

No president, no politician would ever speak like that now. And there are reasons for that to do with mass media, but I don't want to go into that right now, as in for why that change has occurred.

The point being in the past, generally speaking, people were more, things were more complicated. Why? Well, imagine, how do you spend most of your days? When you have a spare five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, what do you do? Maybe you put on a podcast. Maybe you call a friend. Maybe you watch something. You watch a YouTube video. You play a mobile game.

The options for the things we can spend our time doing is this incredible range. No one I know spends, well, a couple of people maybe, but even then, no one I know spends all their time reading. Go back to the days of John Ruskin when he was in his study in the 1850s. There was no internet. There was no radio. He wasn't the kind of guy to read newspapers particularly. So what do you do all day? You just read and you just write, literally all day.

And so, of course, like any skill, the more you do it, the reading and the writing, the better you get at it. And as far as I can tell, in the 21st century, we, on average, literally spend far less time reading and writing, you know, practicing the art and the craft of reading and writing than people back in the, than scholars and writers back in the 19th century did. Because what else were they going to do? I think, I want to add a layer to this, that I think we spend more time

for writing and less time doing the art of writing. I think we spend more time reading, but less time doing the art of reading. I spend a bunch of time reading, but when you talk about the art of reading, I spend very little time doing that. And I think these are totally separate things. There's a big difference between I'm reading something, I'm getting information, and I'm really deconstructing a text. And when I read, for example, I've been reading East

East of Eden by Steinbeck. And I'll go through and I'll read it and I'll underline things and I'll really take note of who is this character? What's going on? Why at the very beginning of the book, why is he describing the Salinas Valley like this? And how does it relate to the book of Genesis? And then you think about it, you walk a bit. That's not how I read Twitter. I scroll Twitter, right? I sort of look at, hey, that's funny. But they're the same activities. Normally, I'm

looking at words on a page, looking at them with my eyes and processing them. But actually, they're completely different activities. And I spend very little time doing the art of reading because frankly, I don't quite have the attention span for it anymore. Yeah. Well, this is a good distinction there. When I say we spend less time reading, in some senses, we spend more time reading, but we're reading the news or reading social media feeds. I

As you say, that's very different to actually reading something and engaging with it. And to my point, so we don't do that as much now. As far as I'm aware, it's just a fact. So you said you're reading East of Eden. How long have you been reading it for?

A few months. I've been reading it very slowly. A few months. Yeah, exactly. And maybe that's, you know, there could be reasons for that. But generally speaking, it takes people. It's not like I read bloody 10 books a week or anything. I'm a relatively slow reader. That's because I spend a lot of time doing other things. And honestly, if you sat down and you put on a timer and see how long it takes you, rather put on a timer for one hour and see how much you can read in an hour, you'll be amazed how much you can read in one solid hour of reading.

And obviously, go back in time and these riders...

they were just reading all the time and also writing more. And I'll get to the point about writing in a minute, but the more you read, you get better at reading. And with something like General Skin, and you said, oh, I need to hear that again, you know, you wouldn't have had to do that. So you're kind of swimming in this maximalist environment because you're better at the craft of reading itself. So, yeah.

In that sense, I think we're actually less illiterate than we realize. People now really struggle to read Victorian stuff, right? Were Victorians struggling to read Victorian stuff? I mean, for someone who's illiterate and has some unfortunate soul living in the slums of London, you couldn't read. Of course not. But for someone who considered themselves a writer or a reader...

I'm sure that have had no more trouble reading your typical Florida Victorian prose than we would reading, you know, BBC News headlines or whatever. On the writing tack, there's a popular modern writer who I think is really good. His name is Venkatesh Rao. And a little more than a decade ago, he published an answer to the question, how do I get better at writing?

And he said that the time that you spend writing first drafts, that's not what makes you better. What makes you better isn't writing, but rewriting, shaping the sentences, asking, how can I make this better and better? Because if it was just writing that would make us better, then everybody who writes

50 to 100,000 emails in their career would ever be Shakespeare. But that's actually not the case. It is the rewriting and really trying to work on the precision and the articulation of what you're saying. That's what makes you a better writer. Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I think this is relevant to something I wanted to say, which tacks onto the whole minimalism versus maximalism thing almost perfectly. If you read the biography of any historical figure,

going back sort of more than 50 years ago, you'll find that their letters are quoted liberally in those volumes, right? You read, you know, for example, if I, when I was a kid or a teenager, I read, I used to love T. Lawrence, Lawrence Arabia. And I bought a, you know, I actually bought his letters. The biographies, like where was he? What was he doing? It all comes from letters. There's more than that. Also, there's a lot, there's a lot of other stuff in there. Hold that thought for a second. In,

In a hundred years when you're dead and they write your biography, the biography of David Perel, what are they going to draw on? If they could draw on the letters of T. Lawrence or the letters of Erasmus, these copious, copious volumes of letters, thousands of letters, what will they draw on for you? They'd be emails that I fired off while I was on the subway or something. Yeah, exactly. Or your texts, you know, when I text you like, hey man, do you want to join us for a bite? Whatever. Or, you know, whatever.

texts, which is how we all communicate now, generally are extremely short, brief, episodic, and to the point that there's no elaboration, there's no introspection. Emails, email, it's a lovely skeuomorphic term there, do to some extent hold that position. But I don't know about you, I've got to say, I don't have any sort of deep email correspondence with anybody.

Right. Okay. And this is another change where we think it's just natural. We used to write letters and now we write texts, but it's not just, it's not just a change of form. It's like a cat. We're literally doing very different things. You read those letters of T. Lawrence or Erasmus is actually probably my favorite example.

And often like a lot of quotes, a lot of quotes from famous people, you assume it's in the book that they've published or it's some poem they wrote or some speech they gave. No, the quotes come from the letters writing between them and their friends and their colleagues. And imagine if you and I, we couldn't call each other, we couldn't text, and I had to sit down in a room on my own and write you a letter knowing, you know, letters to be fair in the past sometimes arrived quicker than we imagined.

But knowing if you were bloody on the other side of the Atlantic, it would take a hell of a long time. Imagine if I had to sit down and just write out all the things I wanted to tell you. So it's me, the pen, the paper, thinking about what I want David to know, or even the things we're discussing now. I'm going to be sat there playing with those ideas, and then I'm going to talk about how I'm feeling in my relationship with my family, and my feelings about God, whatever the hell it is. And it's just you in the letter, and you're introspecting hard and really drawing it out of yourself. And it's going to you, a good friend,

And you're going to do the same again. That's what those letters are from Erasmus. I keep going back to those two examples because they're two that I'm particularly fond of. But it's true for any historical figure. You can go and read their letters. And now that whole art, the art of letter writing is just gone. And does that matter? Well, maybe not, but it's clearly had an impact. It must have had an impact on the way we think and the way we write. Again, this is what I mean when I say we're less literate. Seemingly, people then were far more

I say people then, that's incredibly general, but someone like Erasmus was seemingly far more able to articulate and understand his own feelings and thoughts, far more able to do that than people today, generally speaking, are. Not because we're any different or because we're any worse, just because we have less practice doing it. So honestly, I think letter writing is just about one of the best things anybody who wants to be a writer could do because it's a very specific thing

of writing. I mean, it doesn't really fit into any other category. It's not an article. It's not prose. It's not fiction. It's not poetry. It's not a blog post. It's not analysis. It's not news letter writing. You know, there's something here where if somebody were to say, David, what's the point of writing? Like, why should I do it? I can talk. I can do whatever. I would say that the point of writing is you put ideas, words onto the page, and now they're still. And

And now that they're still, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And what you get with writing is you get depth. You don't realize the depth of whatever you were thinking about or that you could even get to that depth.

Unless you've poured over ideas, stepped away from them, come back, stepped away, come back. Whereas when we're texting, when we're just writing emails, it's all stuff that's top of mind. And you hear it in the way that the analogy that people use, it's surface level, right? Because it's all the intuitive thoughts that we have. And a lot of what we're losing by writing like this is a kind of depth that you only get with rewriting. Yeah, precisely. Exactly. I'm...

And this is the malignant side to minimalism, right? You can write minimally and like what we usually call the Hemingway. Let's just use him as the kind of metonym here. You know, you want to write in the Hemingway style. You can still do that and like, and draw out all that stuff within yourself. Obviously you can, but when we talk about minimalism and its negative form, surface level is probably actually the perfect way to describe it. It doesn't allow you, doesn't force you, doesn't ask you, um,

to engage with yourself. I mean, this is probably not the topic for today, but the knock-on consequences of that fact for the way society works, where we interact with each other and feel and behave because we're not doing that. I mean, that's got to be...

I don't know. It's got to be having some serious effect on society. Let me defend minimalism real quick. No, just do it, man. I'd love to do that as well. I think that one of the things that you get with minimalism is a kind of engineer's elegance to ideas, where what you can do is you can strip away everything that's unnecessary and you can say, how can I basically pack maximum...

effect in an idea. And I'll give you an example. What's probably the most selling, best-selling nonfiction book of the past few years, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Atomic Habits is a brilliant, brilliant title because what he's trying to do is he's basically trying to say small, tiny changes, remarkable results. That's the subtitle. What he's trying to say is these small things that you do in your life can have a big effect

And he uses the word atomic. What does atomic mean? Atomic is the atomic unit in a system. That's the first thing.

The second thing is atomic, like the atomic bomb, power, energy. And atomic is also the central thing of what you do. Just like a good habit is a central point of your life. And that is a brilliant explanation to me of what minimalism can do. It's that that word in that title, atomic habits, you can pack so much meaning. And that's the way that an engineer would think, how do I give maximum efficiency to these words?

Yeah, sure. Minimalism has its strong points. But potential tangent here, I don't know. You mentioned the word engineer. Yeah. That's a very, very interesting word. I feel like humankind, if I'm going to speak in general terms, we have more than one side. We have, if you like, an analytical, scientific, mechanical side.

Then we have a spiritual, passionate, emotional, imaginative side. They're related, but they are kind of distinct. And I feel like we're in the midst of a very scientific era

analytical, mechanical age. And we touched on spelling earlier. I think that's a good example. Shakespeare could spell the same word two different ways in his own play and no one cared. Now to make a typo is considered this like severe fault. You know, if you're reading a book that's typo, you think it would actually make you doubt the quality of the book you're reading, which is, yeah, right. It's obviously silly as if being able to spell words correctly had any relationship with

you know, to the quality of the writing. And I think, you know, again, we're using this word kind of broadly, I think an element of modern minimalism is, I would almost call it pedantry. You know, there's a very pedantic, almost trifling aspect to it where, I don't want to go overboard on my criticism here, but

I've mentioned a few examples today about, you know, I mentioned the whole thing about Spencer using medieval spelling, Carlyle capitalising random words, writing in this very, very unusual way. That sort of risk-taking, that sort of incredibly... Carlyle actually is a good example of a guy who wrote in a very spiritual... It feels like you're kind of reading the Bible when you read the way he writes history. To a point, I think we're in this moment where

And the reason this matters is because it's a shackle on creativity, right? As we say, oh no, you've got to spell the words correctly. It's got to be efficient. It's got to be relevant. It's got to be convenient. You've got to be able to digest it. You said you can pack a lot into small. You said it's beautiful because you can pack a lot into very little. Obviously, that is the beauty. And no one wants overriding. Overriding is the worst thing you can do. It's always been criticised. There's this great quote, Quintilian, the great Roman orator, and rhetorician rather, and teacher of rhetoric in there.

2,000 years ago, he says the worst fault in all writing and speaking is circumlocution. Circumlocution is essentially just using more words than you need. He was saying that 2,000 years ago, that it's the worst thing you can do. So I'm not advocating for that. And I would never encourage anybody to essentially just needlessly puff up their language with words that aren't adding anything and

But that's the point. Which words do add things? Okay. The problem is when someone's out there writing and they maybe want to use some particularly vivid imagery, some colourful language, a particular new word, we were speaking about words, solitude or whatever. Well, does that add anything?

and you think, "Well, no, but there's this core message that I really have to deliver to the audience, and it's got to be absolutely 100% clear and efficient and effective." When you apply that lens to your writing, it would be the same thing as applying that lens to, say, a building. And then what happens is you strip away all the ornament. And you have a building which works and can sometimes be beautiful. I'm a big fan of brutalism. But very often what you get is something which is functional,

but ugly and unpleasant to be in and be around. Okay. We've spoken a bunch, wax poetic, Mr. Sheehan, about minimalism, maximalism. What does all this mean for how we actually write? Because I want to get back to our core question, which is, there's a lot of lovely things about maximalism, the personality, the expression, the distinctiveness, the subtlety. There's a lot of great things about minimalism, the efficiency, how easy it is to understand.

What can we do to take the best things from both and put them into our writing? I don't think anyone should necessarily try to be maximalist, so to speak, or try to be minimalist. It's about writing. You'll be able to say this far more eloquently than I can, but about writing in a way that is authentic

to yourself. So when you're writing, they're your words on that page. They're not the words that have come from somebody else, from somebody you read. You're writing and your thoughts are suddenly appearing in the real world. That's the beauty of writing. And you want it to be authentic. You want it to be you. And so this whole debate, maximalism versus minimalism, is a problem in as much as in a minimalistic age.

It shackles you and it prevents you from being able to write in an authentic way. And also, you know, the worst sin of all, it makes things a bit more boring. Okay. Huh. So no, it's true. Talk about that. Yeah. Talk about that. What do you mean that it makes it more boring? It makes the world more boring when it's minimalist because everyone writes the same way. Yeah. Maybe it's truthful. Maybe it's useful. But if it's boring, man, like if there's one thing human beings don't

cannot handle. It is being bored. It's true. This is literally the one thing we're not conditioned to deal with. And I think this is the law of nature as well. If you look at any tree or plant, or I know, sorry, you look at any tree or flower, every single leaf on that tree is different. Every bit of bark is different. You know, you don't notice it, but you see it, if that makes sense. And variation is a law of the natural world. And

when everything looks identical, it's boring. And we're like biologically unprepared for that. And I think that's the greatest sin of minimalism at its worst, just to be clear, because at its best, it is gorgeous. It's beautiful. It's elegant. Yes, it's elegant. Exactly. But so I just wanted to say that at the start, that this is not about trying to be one rather than the other. It's about being able to find a way that you want to write. And my concern is that the current age inhibits people from that maximalist urge that's in them. Okay, so how to get there?

Well, as I said, this is almost the best piece of advice I can ever give, and I try and give it again and again, is just read different stuff and stop reading stuff that everyone else is reading just because they're reading it. Because what will obviously happen is that you will end up writing that way and thinking that way. When I, again, I'm, you know, well, when I read William Morris, for example, and the way he was speaking about interior design, like I just, I didn't know, I

I didn't know you were allowed to write in that way about that subject. Because if you'd never read it before, how would you have known? So if somebody feels that this language, this linguistic environment we're in, this minimalistic age, this kind of clickbait world, just go and read something else and it will open your mind. It's like if you...

If you never knew German existed and I just started speaking German to you, you'd be like, what the hell is this language you're speaking? And it sounds extreme, but that happens when you go and read books from the past. Go into a secondhand bookshop, pick up some random old book off the shelf and open it and read it. And it'll open your mind. Essentially, you're just broadening the scope of things that you're drawing from. So the bigot, by far, the most important are the things that are going into your head.

read differently, read obscurely. Don't read what everyone else is reading. I mean, if it's relevant, maybe I don't want to sound like an extremist about this, but, but I certainly find it's helpful. And I try, I don't like, as in, you know, I don't read the things that other people are writing on X. I don't read the things that other people are writing in the same space that I'm in.

One thing that comes to mind for me is the yin yang symbol. So in the black side, there's a little white dot. And in the white side, there's a little black dot. Why is this important? Because the black side is almost all black. But what do you look at? You look at the white and the white side is almost all white. But what do you look at? You look at the black.

And the point is that the opposite thing will be the minority of what you do. So if you write maximalist prose, you can emphasize a point with extreme minimalism. If you're writing minimalist point, you can emphasize what you're doing with extreme maximalism. And you can have an essay that is 95% maximalism. But when you say you have a short paragraph,

bunch of short sentences. You get right to the point. The reader's going to see that as a sign to say, focus on this. And likewise, with the opposite, you're writing all minimalism. And then now there's one paragraph that's flowery, it's vibrant, it's buzzing, it's maximalist. The reader's going to say, hey, this is important. The point being that whatever's the opposite of what you do is your tool for emphasis. I like that. That's beautiful. That's

Yeah, completely true. Some other points as well. So some other just very, very sort of semi, I don't know if this sounds odd, but some very specific points of advice. So other than to read, reading obscure and also read it, reading old and reading obscure, just show you what's possible. Second thing, um,

turn off the spell checker and don't use Grammarly. Just forget that you need to worry about spelling or syntax or grammar. Just swim in the words and let them be your guide. That's what I would advise people to do. Third thing as well,

learn more words. And I don't mean flick through a thesaurus and be like, oh, that sounds pretty. I mean, get to know what words mean because there are so many of them. And when you find words that are just, you know, these maybe slightly unusual words that explain a particular feeling or thought or idea in a way that another simpler, more generic word wouldn't be able to, that's a beautiful thing. And it can only enrich your writing. Is there a cost

Maybe, because it means a reader might not understand that word, okay? And they have to go and look it up. Fine. But in some sense, you've got to push back against this tidal wave of convenience, because what it's doing is kind of atrophying our ability to

to, to, to, it's atrophying the human imagination. So, so, so yeah, learn more words. Let me build on that. Sure. Not just learning more words, but learning the etymologies of words in etymology, in the construction of words, there's ideas that are just waiting to be found. Like people,

always ask me, and I know that this sounds heady and I do not mean this in a heady way at all, because what is one of the most common questions people ask me? Hey, how do you find ideas? Where do I find better ideas? And I'm telling you, I know that etymology sounds like your fourth grade English teacher talking to you and your eye rolling. You're like, oh my goodness. Let me give you an example.

The word passion. When you think of the word passion, what do you think? Oh, I'm so passionate. Woo, this is so exciting. You know, find your passion. This is going to be the thing that I think is fantastic. Okay, so I was talking to a friend and he said, hey, do you know where the word passion comes from? And I'm like, no. The word passion comes from suffering.

To suffer the passion of the Christ. Passion is related to suffering. So now, rather than thinking of passion as this very cheery thing, find your passion. Now you can start thinking of that as, what is the thing in my career, the thing in my life that I'm passionate about? What is so important to me that I'm willing to suffer for it? And once you start seeing that, that whole thing,

I could turn that to an essay. That whole piece was lying in the etymology of a word that I'd used a thousand times. Yeah, and you'd used it unthinkingly. Yeah. I'm passionate about whatever the hell it is, and it's just I'm passionate about fishing. And what you mean is you really, really enjoy it, but you don't mean it doesn't have – yes, in a way, this is almost the perfect –

Can we say synecdoche here? I might be using the word wrong. This might be the perfect synecdoche for what we mean by maximalism, I think. What's a synecdoche? A synecdoche is an element of a thing which you use to describe the whole thing. So when people say number 10 in this country, they mean the government because it's number 10 Downing Street. So number 10 is a synecdoche for the government.

But passion, when we talk about maximalism, this is what we mean. It's not the flowery, fancy language. It's entering into the full richness that does exist there.

And, and, and, and using, using it to its fullest rather than always going with the most basic, most simple, most convenient option is rising to a slightly different level and, and, and, and expanding into, I mean, yeah, it's perfect passion. This isn't something that you ever hear people talk about it. I'm just going to go learn new words and you hear something like that. And that's a, a word that,

is describing... It's sort of like colors, right? Like, there's colors between red and orange. But when people talk about the rainbow, they say it goes...

red, orange, yellow, green, right? But there's actually more within that. And to learn a new word is to understand what's in between these very rigid boundaries. So it lets you see the world in higher resolution and understand yourself in higher resolution. You can essentially be more, I mean, this is just a fabulous contradiction that

maximalism can be more precise than minimalism, let's say, in this example. Yeah, learn more words. I mean, one of my favourite words is palimpsest. Do you know what the palimpsest means? So a palimpsest is a manuscript. So imagine like, these were back in the days when like paper or vellum, as it was, was very valuable. So you wouldn't just chuck this stuff out. Palimpsest is a manuscript, which has been, something written on it, it's been scripted off or erased and then written over. That's a palimpsest.

I think it's a beautiful way to describe so many things. I often describe buildings as palimpsests when you can see that they've been built and they've been remodeled and refurbished. I often sometimes describe people as palimpsests, you know, when the personality has changed. So there's a word there with a kind of a cool specific meaning. I'm using it in a metaphorical way, but like,

If I didn't have that word, I would actually have to use many more words in order to explain what I mean. I can just say, "Westminster Abbey is a palimpsest." If you know what the word means, then you just know immediately, "Wow, okay, that's a great way to say it." Instead, I'd say, "Well, Westminster Abbey is a building of many buildings. It has been rebuilt and modified many times." It's awkward and it's clumsy. I'm using simple words. Palimpsest is not a word that everyone will understand, but it gets to the point far more quick and far more precisely.

Maybe the reader has to go and look at a dictionary, but then they'll know the word. What am I talking about? Well,

I think it's something I've been trying to drive out without being able to say the whole time we've been talking. It's like language is there waiting for you to go and just grab it by the neck. And it's like clay. And you can just mould it. You can pick up that piece of clay. And I feel like we think we've been given a Lego box, right? Lego, the pieces come in set sizes and you can build something. And there's an instruction manual and you have to build it in that way, right?

And that can work, but it can also be so restrictive. We're talking about vibrancy, how to get it back. Got to remember that language is like clay. Shakespeare making up new words. And I think, I feel like we're in this minimalist age will be described as like a Lego box era of writing where when to get that vibrancy, to get that energy, that authenticness,

That subtlety, without you talking about that maybe people used to write in that way, maybe not. You've got to think of language like clay. Not something which is fixed, but something which can change. You can just break the rules of syntax or grammar or spelling if you want to. As long as you make it work, you know, there's the rule of cool, I suppose. What's the rule of cool?

Well, you know, when you're doing something bold or unusual or shocking, if it looks good, it works. Like all the other, you know, as in like imagine you did a tweet tomorrow and you started to capitalize certain words that wouldn't normally be capitalized in English. Like, I don't know, if it looks cool, then it works and no one questions it. And they're like, yeah, I'm on board with this. Language is clay. We need to learn to, we shouldn't forget that.

Thanks, man. That was fun. It's good to see you. That's a wrap. Pleasure. Pleasure. Winston Churchill wasn't just the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's what people know him for. But he was also a prolific writer. He wrote a novel, two biographies, memoirs, and of course, as prime minister, speeches. He'd spend roughly an hour working on them for every minute that he spoke. So if he spoke for eight minutes, he'd spend eight hours in prep.

And yes, I know he's controversial, but man, there's a lot to learn from his writing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you a short clip from a speech that he gave in 1940. And then we're going to break it down together. We shall fight on beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. So let's break this down. Like a good battle plan, the structure of Churchill's writing here is simple and strategic.

A commander-in-chief can get their squadron, their unit on the same page with repetition. And that's what Churchill's doing here. There's no mistaking the core themes here. What is he doing? He's using the word fight four different times. And then he talks about how the British military will fight in five different places. They're going to fight on the beaches. They're going to fight on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets, in the hills. So you see all the buildup there, but

The entire paragraph is building up to these words right here. We shall never surrender. That is the main point at the end. That's the climax that everything builds up to. Churchill also uses style to get his point across to writers these days. You sit in your fifth grade English class and you'll be told to only keep what's necessary. Cut the fluff, get rid of the excess. But Churchill does the opposite here.

You'll notice that rhetorically, the volume and the diversity of places mentioned, it's actually more important for him than the literal meaning of each place. And Churchill, he could have just added emphasis by ad-libbing a bunch more places with the word fight. So you'll see here, he's got fight, fight, fight, fight. He's got all this fight. But you know what he could do? He could just add

a whole row worth of stuff. We shall fight in the cities. We shall fight in the skies. We shall fight in the forest. We shall fight in the little Italian sandwich shops. I'm just kidding, right? But he could have just added stuff.

And look at this. The order of the locations is immaterial. So he could take fight the skies and he could make beaches down here, streets. We'll move it up here. Then we'll take this and we'll go over here. We're sort of like shuffling things around. And this all works. Here's what matters. All you need is right at the end. You just need we shall never surrender. This just needs to come at the end. And if it does, the whole thing works.

Now, why is this? It's because speech writing is different from the kind of writing that you usually get on paper. It's this series of phrases, these little phrases that are serving up to the punchline at the end, right? They're just building, building, building into we shall never surrender. And you could arrange any of those little phrases. You could take the first one, make it the seventh, you know, rearrange them however you want it. In the paragraph, it would still accomplish its purpose. A sense of timing is important, though. Add

adding all these little buildup phrases right here, what are they doing? They're increasing suspense right up until the point that you start losing people's interest. And the more engaged your audience is, like when you're speech writing, the more engaged your audience is, the more of these little buildup phrases you can add. So yeah, you could say the majority of what Churchill is saying here is fluff. He could have taken all this and compressed it into one thing. It looked like this. We shall fight everywhere.

and we shall never surrender.

Eight words could have had the same meaning, but that wouldn't have been memorable. We wouldn't be talking about it almost a century later. Instead, Churchill took 31 words and all of these words right here, they raise the stakes of what he's saying. They're giving his speech an element of suspense right when he wants it the most. And this drumbeat of repetition, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight. It's paving the way for his eventual climax. All of this is paving a way for what comes at the end.

We shall never surrender. Well, that was fun. Who knew that arts and crafts class would come in so clutch, huh? Well, look, I publish one of these writing examples every single week on writingexamples.com. And if you go to the site, you enter your email right at the top of the page. I'll email you the latest one whenever it goes live.