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to speak is human
one of the most defiant ways that we can assert our power—our not-duplicable, non-algorithmic, dangerous, and history-altering power—is to write.
yes you can feed your prompts into a generative AI chatGPT butthole and it will produce a precise and perfect and appropriate piece of text — but that isn't you!
it isn't you to have apple intelligence or google fartelligence rewrite your emails or text messages or essays or love letters
It is you to drag your pen across paper, or cursor blinking on screen—to discover, question, argue alone, to know yourself.
It is you to write what you shouldn't write—what you aren't allowed to say. To consider the impossible, the illegal or immoral, to wrestle with those things that others would censor or suppress.
It is you to yearn, love, grieve through writing: to gift yourself, and maybe others too, that record of your pain and beauty and dynamism.
Oct 5, 2024
Related Recs
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there is something deeply cleansing about writing in the midst of a psychotic episode. ripping at the frayed seams of my brain feels generative. it is generative—something is created.
tips if you are interested in trying this:
1. do not reread as you go. that is something called ruminating and it is not the same as writing.
2. learn to identify what can be rehabilitated and what should be gratefully acknowledged and then discarded. don’t force your thoughts to stand the test of time.
3. do not write within the horrors if it can be avoided. let them stay beside you. they can watch and listen as you reach for something more.
4. remember to eat periodically.
5. you don’t have to polish to a shine before sharing unless you want to. but know that you are not holding a masterpiece. that is fine. you are holding something, and it fits within your palms.
Jan 15, 2025
🖋
“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers the insult like another curiosity, spreads it afterward on his desk and fights then, alone. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is a weakness in a man is the glory of an artist, his quality. What I spill in talk or acts rarely is restituted in writing. What is preserved, collected, is what explodes later in propitious solitude. That is why the artist is the loneliest man in the world: because he lives, fights, wars, dies, is reborn alone, and always alone.“
— Anaïs Nin
“I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.”
— Gore Vidal
Mar 22, 2025
😃
even in the most stressful situations there are some strings of words which jump to our attention and make us dream. if you manage to hold on to this feeling, writing becomes almost a necessity.
take something someone else said that excites your imagination and continue the thought in paper. you don’t have to bookend it with quotation marks, nor mention the author, nor follow the path laid out by the text it originally belonged to.
even though this is the best way to start writing, nothing good will come out of it right away. but don’t despair, remember the first approximation is almost entirely subconscious and you haven’t started writing, or putting your best skill to good use, until you’ve started rewriting.
if you’re writing for school and don’t want to be accused of plagiarism you can rewrite it without the words that you took.
if by the end of this you don’t have enough to fill a postcard, implement more related citations. if you end up with too much, why are you imposing such limits upon yourself? if you aren’t the one who’s imposing them, then you’ve become their butcher and i don’t have advice for butchers.
3d ago
Top Recs from @mattshawsome
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this is worthy of celebration: the lack of video—autoplay video, noisy inane video, panicky video, algorithmic, dumb video, rabbit hole video, any video—on pi.fyi is a good thing
Oct 5, 2024
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this is going to hurt — A LOT — but it's getting to the point where there's no other option
Mar 11, 2025