I have these vignette ideas I wanna string into a series of short stories that are threaded together thematically but I’m super stuck on POV. I’d love some lessons/deep dives/youtube videos from you showing the literary giants and the POV they chose and why it works - some insight on how POV makes or breaks the story you’re trying to tell and why. Very broad, I know. I can watch other booktubers talk about POV and I have but you’re better than them, can you school us on any of your thoughts on POV?
Specially for me, my series is following 3 characters who seem normie/vanilla to their family and friends but secretly chase stimulation in the extreme (a cuck, a shaman, an arsonist). I think of the narration between Breaking Bad and Gossip Girl for some reason lmao, and I want to switch gears to think about some um, more elevated literary narrative voices to help me get inspired with framing these stories - figuring out which angle would be best.
*update, just noticed you made a 30 min video titled ‘how to find the right POV for your story’ so gonna watch that lmao
Met my wife in an English class at university, got married within a few months, and were married for about five years before consciously trying to conceive.
Not a vegan, but I used to be and am into hunting and not eating factory-farmed meat as much.
Not really, but I have an autistic friend who has been trying to read that since high school, fifteen years ago. He finishes a few pages a year, lol.
Brownsville Ka, Cambatta John Mahavishnu, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Midnite
6'2
Righties had the world made for them. We had to create our way through life
Yes, there are more left-handed creative people. I get a lot of data from students.
Wife named the cat.
Can't answer that
Marry DFW, Kill Mishima (unless I want to trad wife, lol) and fuck McCarthy
1. Nature poetry: How do you feel about poetry divorced from the human ego (i.e. the chinese wilderness poets) vs nature poetry that centers around it (i.e. some of Mishima’s poetry). Feel any particular bias toward either? Would like to hear your thoughts on each.
2. On the literary renaissance: I saw somewhere below you mentioned there are no core tenants of the movement. I get that, but ideally, what should those in the movement be doing, other than writing and reading everyday and grinding in substack or whatever site of their choice?
3. Do you think the modern western, post scarcity society that we live in has made it more difficult for great literature to emerge? With most real suffering mostly eliminated and more and more people becoming increasingly atomized and neurotic, is there really any way that we can not only cultivate great writers to develop in such an environment, but also for a suitable readership to await them when they do come? Feels like there are a dearth of great millennial and gen z authors for these reasons and probably more.
1. I love both, and when you look deep into most authors' bibliography, you'll see that they do both.
2. Maintaining a baseline and hopefully growing in spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental aptitude by doing the best ROI tasks to set yourself up for a quantum leap in one of those categories.
3. I feel like most authors are really close to being ready to emerge. I know people who, with a couple thousand hours of writing and figuring out a way to get their writing out, could be full-time authors. But, so many people get stuck at 80% and fall victim to the thousand traps that await writers in the modern world. I think we have more traps than any other artistic medium right now. I'm not worried about audiences. People are ready to be activated.
I am new to Substack and I just want to slowly release content to generate interest: parts of a novella I've written and some poetry. I'm wondering if you might have some tips on how might be the best way to go about that.
Complex books like Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest can take me up to 15 minutes to read one page. For books that aren’t as complex, it can take me 5-10 minutes to read a page.
Since it was taking me 15 minutes a page to read Infinite Jest, it took me 1 1/2 hours to finish 6 pages. I’m still reading it but not at a rate of 6 pages a day, currently. It took me 8 hours to read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. What may take someone the length of a movie to finish a book takes me the length of a TV mini-series to finish. What may take someone the length of a TV mini-series to finish a book takes me length of a TV series to finish.
Furthermore, there are times when, while I am reading something I find interesting, I read something in the text/book that causes me to think about something else which causes me to look off the page or drift my eyes off the text - I may not even realize this - which then takes me more time to read what I am reading.
I also notice this happening at times when I come across a word that I don’t know the meaning to, or a part of the text that I couldn’t comprehend, and I may not even realize myself drifting away in thought before re-reading the text/picking up where I left off. These instances might not be long, but together they can add up.
What advice do you have to help me read faster and to focus more on the text/books that I read that intrigue me? Thank you.
Hey man greetings from Chile, i have learned a lot with you in the depths of writing, my question is, how do you see participating in other efforts besides writing to have a bigger reach? like maybe doing a script for an indie film to gain traction, in this time audiovisual media has such a hard grasp on all of us that i dont see like the traditional way having some success, keeping the renaissance in the end of the world here! Good wishes
I see infinite possibilities. Strategies like that are divergent thinking and subjective reality framing 101. You still need to put in the groundwork with writing and building an audience, but you need fun and divergent pathways, too, that most of the time are the catalyst for quantum leaps. Then you can go back to more mundane things like building an audience or locking yourself away for six months to write a novel or collection of poems/essays/stories, and have a new perspective and skill set to kill it with. So yeah, I love random artistic sidequests, but I always have the transcendent ideal in mind!
Hi Ian. I’ve been a fan for 9 months and I now have three months of essentially nothing (other than quotidian family stuff) to do until I go off to university to study french and german.
I have a lot of classics lined up and I’ve started writing book reviews. I’ve published some, but I also plan to release YouTube videos to learn a new skill. I also want to write more fiction and improve sentence structure. So essentially, do everything, but with no structure to my days I am finding it hard. What are some realistic targets I should set myself in terms of numbers, so I can plan my weeks out (although I will be without wifi for a month abroad lol)
Sorry for the long question, but many thanks for all of the work you have done. I am looking forward to your poetry translations !
I would say that with unlimited time, you could complete a fiction piece, a YouTube video, a non-fiction piece, and still have a ton of free time in a week. If you sleep 8 hours a night and do a couple hours of family stuff a day, you'll still have 70 hours or more a week.
So, post one of each category a week, or at the very least, one of any of them once a week.
1) Would you ever consider allowing some voting for the book club? Maybe 1 slot of 8 being chosen by subsciber votes towards a fixed set of options or something.
2) In your experience making videos about the writing and reading space, are there any big no no's? Like anything that just tanks a video? Could be a specific topic, aspect, or whatever comes to mind.
We can do some voting for the next round of books for Q4.
I would say if you're not doing a high-quality, scripted video that's relatable, it's better to focus on something more narrow than broad. You have to be good (which is hard at the start) to break through with videos like "10 writing tips for ficiton authors" or broad videos like that. I see people in the book/writing tube graveyard who've made 100+ broad videos and have nothing to show for it, but if they did 100 more narrow videos with the same effort/quality they'd have thousands of subs.
Hey Ian. Any advice on how to have energy/time for all the reading/writing projects without sacrificing life? I’m really impressed how you’re able to host book clubs, film videos, read a ton of difficult books, write something on your own, and at the same time work as a teacher full time and be a father and husband. Wow! I also have a full time job and a wife, and I often find myself incapable of writing or even reading at the end of the day. I feel like I just inherently have less energy than you lol
If you feel it's an energy thing, then start to clean up your diet and exercise more. More Florida sunshine. Additionally, reduce mental fatigue by making fewer choices throughout the day and minimizing friction. It's a process that can take months or years, but I know that this year, I made it a big goal at my job. They've conducted studies, and teachers make 150 decisions an hour, so I set a goal to create a system for everything and reduce that to 50. My energy skyrocketed!
Cool, thanks a lot for the reply. For me it’s sometimes hard to set the priorities and decide what to do first. For example, should I spend this free hour of time after work on writing, reading infinite jest or some other book or maybe go do some workout.
Gonna hit you with some books/authors that stuck with me. curious if you know them, like them, hate them, think they’re worthwhile:
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
anything by Borges
VS Naipaul The Mimic Men
Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke
Martin Amis The Information
Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Dave Eggars Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Any primary or secondary Taoist texts
james Dickey’s Deliverance
Any of william gaddis’s 4 monsters
Franzen’s The Corrections
i haven’t read gaddis or franzen or dave eggars but ive been curious if i should in your estimation. still have plenty of ian-approved homework to do either way. and that concludes a cursory tour of my
bookshelves’ standouts.
oh oh Have you read Sapolsky’s Determined (thesis: we have no free will) i think he’s right but we still have to try
if you answer nothing else im really curious about your thoughts on sapolsky
he’s a stanford neuroscientist. free will doesn’t exist. logical deductions are punishment and reward are equally useless and nonsensical. best you can do is know you’re lucky enough to know how lucky you are. gotta live like you have free will but no one else does. my takeaways anyway.
Thank you for the support and everything that you do, Ian! I hope this comment finds you and all who read it well!
Here is my question: Ever since December I have been working primarily on a short story that is now looking to very likely be about 9,000 words. I have also worked on some other projects along the way including several poems that are finished. And since January I told myself that I will not post anything else on Substack until this short story I started in December is finished.
I estimated then that I would have it done by April, but it still is not complete. I also planned to share multiple notes on Substack sharing my writing process for this short story well ahead of time. That way I can have a nice countdown promoting the short story so I can get as many people looking at the piece when it is finally published while also helping writers with their own projects by sharing my writing process through notes.
So my question is, do you think this is a good idea that I am not posting anything until this post is finished, or is it better for me to post other works along the way, such as the poems I wrote along the way, and not be so obsessed with posting this short story in particular?
You do say in a recent Substack video that there is no reason that people shouldn’t post one thing a month. So a part of me also wants to get more posts out.
The reason why I am so obsessed with posting this short story next is because it shares a similar theme that several of the poems I posted in January, the last things I posted, have. And I thought it would be interesting to post this short story next to continue that theme.
(Edit: I’m also aware that reading other people’s works that I genuinely find interesting and becoming friends with the authors is a good idea too. And posting notes [unrelated to the short story] along the way is a good idea too.)
I don't exactly understand the question, but I assume you already have a good vocabulary but it just sounds weird in your story. Look at Cormac, you sometimes need just to make your story more epic or detached, and then it just works. Or add a character to go on a crazy rant, lol. If you look at even his most mainstream works like The Counselor, No Country for Old Men, or All the Pretty Horses, he uses nature, other characters telling stories, or flashbacks/day dreams to go crazy with vocab.
Do you have any tips for someone who wants to become a "better reader" but cannot organize his thoughts enough to comprehend basic themes (not to mention complex ones)? Is there some kind of synesthesia that allows for you to read deeper and shape meaning? Because for me it is all just thematic chaos.
Spend more time in the game (read more) and become symbol-literate. I would first read a ton of books and keep a journal with quotes that you look at, along with a multiple-page wrap-up by you after each book, exploring your ideas about it. Then, after you do that for 100-200 books, start reading harder classic novels with a ton of secondary literature breaking down the themes/symbolism in the book, and start studying stuff from a more formal/academic lens. Add studying mythology, the bible, the occult and other main symbol texts to become more symbol-literate. Then, after you do that you'll be ready, lol.
I have these vignette ideas I wanna string into a series of short stories that are threaded together thematically but I’m super stuck on POV. I’d love some lessons/deep dives/youtube videos from you showing the literary giants and the POV they chose and why it works - some insight on how POV makes or breaks the story you’re trying to tell and why. Very broad, I know. I can watch other booktubers talk about POV and I have but you’re better than them, can you school us on any of your thoughts on POV?
Specially for me, my series is following 3 characters who seem normie/vanilla to their family and friends but secretly chase stimulation in the extreme (a cuck, a shaman, an arsonist). I think of the narration between Breaking Bad and Gossip Girl for some reason lmao, and I want to switch gears to think about some um, more elevated literary narrative voices to help me get inspired with framing these stories - figuring out which angle would be best.
*update, just noticed you made a 30 min video titled ‘how to find the right POV for your story’ so gonna watch that lmao
Lol, let me know if that video was good enough to answer this!
Yess I’ll do what you recommended in the video and draft it out in first and third and see what works best
why did cormac include those bullet points at the beginning of each chapter in BM? i like them they’re weird
when did you meet you wife and how long did you date before marriage and how long married before daughter conceived and were you trying to conceive
veganism?
who hurt you? just kidding
is Guns Germs and Steel still considered good? i read it so long ago
Who is on your mount rushmore
of musical artists alive or dead
are you as tall as you seem to be even tho you’re always sitting
i’m also a lefty. why are we better than normies
follow-up do you think lefties are more represented in your community than general population why or why not
who named your cat griselda
fuck marry kill dance dance revolution guitar hero wii sports
fuck marry kill dfw mishima mccarthy
this is fun thanks Ian xoxoxo
Classic technique in Western Novels.
Met my wife in an English class at university, got married within a few months, and were married for about five years before consciously trying to conceive.
Not a vegan, but I used to be and am into hunting and not eating factory-farmed meat as much.
Not really, but I have an autistic friend who has been trying to read that since high school, fifteen years ago. He finishes a few pages a year, lol.
Brownsville Ka, Cambatta John Mahavishnu, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Midnite
6'2
Righties had the world made for them. We had to create our way through life
Yes, there are more left-handed creative people. I get a lot of data from students.
Wife named the cat.
Can't answer that
Marry DFW, Kill Mishima (unless I want to trad wife, lol) and fuck McCarthy
thank you brother. i suspect more questions to come when i wake up properly
Hi Ian,
A few questions I’ve been thinking about:
1. Nature poetry: How do you feel about poetry divorced from the human ego (i.e. the chinese wilderness poets) vs nature poetry that centers around it (i.e. some of Mishima’s poetry). Feel any particular bias toward either? Would like to hear your thoughts on each.
2. On the literary renaissance: I saw somewhere below you mentioned there are no core tenants of the movement. I get that, but ideally, what should those in the movement be doing, other than writing and reading everyday and grinding in substack or whatever site of their choice?
3. Do you think the modern western, post scarcity society that we live in has made it more difficult for great literature to emerge? With most real suffering mostly eliminated and more and more people becoming increasingly atomized and neurotic, is there really any way that we can not only cultivate great writers to develop in such an environment, but also for a suitable readership to await them when they do come? Feels like there are a dearth of great millennial and gen z authors for these reasons and probably more.
4. Any intention of future community meet ups?
1. I love both, and when you look deep into most authors' bibliography, you'll see that they do both.
2. Maintaining a baseline and hopefully growing in spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental aptitude by doing the best ROI tasks to set yourself up for a quantum leap in one of those categories.
3. I feel like most authors are really close to being ready to emerge. I know people who, with a couple thousand hours of writing and figuring out a way to get their writing out, could be full-time authors. But, so many people get stuck at 80% and fall victim to the thousand traps that await writers in the modern world. I think we have more traps than any other artistic medium right now. I'm not worried about audiences. People are ready to be activated.
4. Yes!
I am new to Substack and I just want to slowly release content to generate interest: parts of a novella I've written and some poetry. I'm wondering if you might have some tips on how might be the best way to go about that.
Free course on Substack https://writeconscious.kit.com/01a6f2e61a
I really want to read faster.
Complex books like Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest can take me up to 15 minutes to read one page. For books that aren’t as complex, it can take me 5-10 minutes to read a page.
Since it was taking me 15 minutes a page to read Infinite Jest, it took me 1 1/2 hours to finish 6 pages. I’m still reading it but not at a rate of 6 pages a day, currently. It took me 8 hours to read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. What may take someone the length of a movie to finish a book takes me the length of a TV mini-series to finish. What may take someone the length of a TV mini-series to finish a book takes me length of a TV series to finish.
Furthermore, there are times when, while I am reading something I find interesting, I read something in the text/book that causes me to think about something else which causes me to look off the page or drift my eyes off the text - I may not even realize this - which then takes me more time to read what I am reading.
I also notice this happening at times when I come across a word that I don’t know the meaning to, or a part of the text that I couldn’t comprehend, and I may not even realize myself drifting away in thought before re-reading the text/picking up where I left off. These instances might not be long, but together they can add up.
What advice do you have to help me read faster and to focus more on the text/books that I read that intrigue me? Thank you.
Answered this question in this post
https://writeconscious.substack.com/p/what-it-really-takes-to-read-200
Hey man greetings from Chile, i have learned a lot with you in the depths of writing, my question is, how do you see participating in other efforts besides writing to have a bigger reach? like maybe doing a script for an indie film to gain traction, in this time audiovisual media has such a hard grasp on all of us that i dont see like the traditional way having some success, keeping the renaissance in the end of the world here! Good wishes
I see infinite possibilities. Strategies like that are divergent thinking and subjective reality framing 101. You still need to put in the groundwork with writing and building an audience, but you need fun and divergent pathways, too, that most of the time are the catalyst for quantum leaps. Then you can go back to more mundane things like building an audience or locking yourself away for six months to write a novel or collection of poems/essays/stories, and have a new perspective and skill set to kill it with. So yeah, I love random artistic sidequests, but I always have the transcendent ideal in mind!
Hi Ian. I’ve been a fan for 9 months and I now have three months of essentially nothing (other than quotidian family stuff) to do until I go off to university to study french and german.
I have a lot of classics lined up and I’ve started writing book reviews. I’ve published some, but I also plan to release YouTube videos to learn a new skill. I also want to write more fiction and improve sentence structure. So essentially, do everything, but with no structure to my days I am finding it hard. What are some realistic targets I should set myself in terms of numbers, so I can plan my weeks out (although I will be without wifi for a month abroad lol)
Sorry for the long question, but many thanks for all of the work you have done. I am looking forward to your poetry translations !
I would say that with unlimited time, you could complete a fiction piece, a YouTube video, a non-fiction piece, and still have a ton of free time in a week. If you sleep 8 hours a night and do a couple hours of family stuff a day, you'll still have 70 hours or more a week.
So, post one of each category a week, or at the very least, one of any of them once a week.
Thanks for the advice!
Hey Ian,
I have a couple of questions.
1) Would you ever consider allowing some voting for the book club? Maybe 1 slot of 8 being chosen by subsciber votes towards a fixed set of options or something.
2) In your experience making videos about the writing and reading space, are there any big no no's? Like anything that just tanks a video? Could be a specific topic, aspect, or whatever comes to mind.
We can do some voting for the next round of books for Q4.
I would say if you're not doing a high-quality, scripted video that's relatable, it's better to focus on something more narrow than broad. You have to be good (which is hard at the start) to break through with videos like "10 writing tips for ficiton authors" or broad videos like that. I see people in the book/writing tube graveyard who've made 100+ broad videos and have nothing to show for it, but if they did 100 more narrow videos with the same effort/quality they'd have thousands of subs.
Hey Ian. Any advice on how to have energy/time for all the reading/writing projects without sacrificing life? I’m really impressed how you’re able to host book clubs, film videos, read a ton of difficult books, write something on your own, and at the same time work as a teacher full time and be a father and husband. Wow! I also have a full time job and a wife, and I often find myself incapable of writing or even reading at the end of the day. I feel like I just inherently have less energy than you lol
If you feel it's an energy thing, then start to clean up your diet and exercise more. More Florida sunshine. Additionally, reduce mental fatigue by making fewer choices throughout the day and minimizing friction. It's a process that can take months or years, but I know that this year, I made it a big goal at my job. They've conducted studies, and teachers make 150 decisions an hour, so I set a goal to create a system for everything and reduce that to 50. My energy skyrocketed!
Cool, thanks a lot for the reply. For me it’s sometimes hard to set the priorities and decide what to do first. For example, should I spend this free hour of time after work on writing, reading infinite jest or some other book or maybe go do some workout.
Gonna hit you with some books/authors that stuck with me. curious if you know them, like them, hate them, think they’re worthwhile:
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
anything by Borges
VS Naipaul The Mimic Men
Awakening to the Great Sleep War by Gert Jonke
Martin Amis The Information
Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Dave Eggars Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Any primary or secondary Taoist texts
james Dickey’s Deliverance
Any of william gaddis’s 4 monsters
Franzen’s The Corrections
i haven’t read gaddis or franzen or dave eggars but ive been curious if i should in your estimation. still have plenty of ian-approved homework to do either way. and that concludes a cursory tour of my
bookshelves’ standouts.
oh oh Have you read Sapolsky’s Determined (thesis: we have no free will) i think he’s right but we still have to try
if you answer nothing else im really curious about your thoughts on sapolsky
k buddy. cheers
Will have to read Sapolsky!
he’s a stanford neuroscientist. free will doesn’t exist. logical deductions are punishment and reward are equally useless and nonsensical. best you can do is know you’re lucky enough to know how lucky you are. gotta live like you have free will but no one else does. my takeaways anyway.
Hey Man, you said you were getting into dark germanic Gnosis philosophie for a while, could you recommend some books ? Thanks.
Jakob Böhme – Aurora
Ernst Jünger – The Forest Passage
Hans Jonas – The Gnostic Religion
Friedrich Weinreb – The Roots of the Bible
Kurt Rudolph – Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism
Schelling
Thank you for the support and everything that you do, Ian! I hope this comment finds you and all who read it well!
Here is my question: Ever since December I have been working primarily on a short story that is now looking to very likely be about 9,000 words. I have also worked on some other projects along the way including several poems that are finished. And since January I told myself that I will not post anything else on Substack until this short story I started in December is finished.
I estimated then that I would have it done by April, but it still is not complete. I also planned to share multiple notes on Substack sharing my writing process for this short story well ahead of time. That way I can have a nice countdown promoting the short story so I can get as many people looking at the piece when it is finally published while also helping writers with their own projects by sharing my writing process through notes.
So my question is, do you think this is a good idea that I am not posting anything until this post is finished, or is it better for me to post other works along the way, such as the poems I wrote along the way, and not be so obsessed with posting this short story in particular?
You do say in a recent Substack video that there is no reason that people shouldn’t post one thing a month. So a part of me also wants to get more posts out.
The reason why I am so obsessed with posting this short story next is because it shares a similar theme that several of the poems I posted in January, the last things I posted, have. And I thought it would be interesting to post this short story next to continue that theme.
(Edit: I’m also aware that reading other people’s works that I genuinely find interesting and becoming friends with the authors is a good idea too. And posting notes [unrelated to the short story] along the way is a good idea too.)
Is this your story about the female hunter you submitted for the contest or a new one?
A brand new one.
Who are the worse mainstream writers that are often times hailed as great?
What is the best way to increase written vocabulary without sounding unnatural?
Ocean Vuong
I don't exactly understand the question, but I assume you already have a good vocabulary but it just sounds weird in your story. Look at Cormac, you sometimes need just to make your story more epic or detached, and then it just works. Or add a character to go on a crazy rant, lol. If you look at even his most mainstream works like The Counselor, No Country for Old Men, or All the Pretty Horses, he uses nature, other characters telling stories, or flashbacks/day dreams to go crazy with vocab.
What are some great coming of age literary novels in the vein of books like - Musashi, War & Peace, The Count of Montecristo?
Spring Snow and Runaway Horses by Mishima
Do you have any tips for someone who wants to become a "better reader" but cannot organize his thoughts enough to comprehend basic themes (not to mention complex ones)? Is there some kind of synesthesia that allows for you to read deeper and shape meaning? Because for me it is all just thematic chaos.
Spend more time in the game (read more) and become symbol-literate. I would first read a ton of books and keep a journal with quotes that you look at, along with a multiple-page wrap-up by you after each book, exploring your ideas about it. Then, after you do that for 100-200 books, start reading harder classic novels with a ton of secondary literature breaking down the themes/symbolism in the book, and start studying stuff from a more formal/academic lens. Add studying mythology, the bible, the occult and other main symbol texts to become more symbol-literate. Then, after you do that you'll be ready, lol.
Ian, ch' ch' changes, check this out /mark
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/capitalism-and-other-kids-stuff/