The Journey of Writing: Finding Passion and Voice

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-i-write

My experience with my recent years of writing is quite confusing — almost even dissociative. I've never felt like I was a good writer and no one really told me I was until some random point in time a year or two ago. In that time span, I didn't really change my motivation nor methods, but I reaped the simple rewards of practice. I'm still wired to be very surprised when people I respect wholeheartedly endorse me as "writing very well." Despite the disbelief, when I interrogate what I'm doing and producing it is clear that I've become a good writer.

I don't have a serious writing process. Rather, I make writing a priority. When it is time to write, when my brain is ready, I write. Most of the processing of ideas comes from discussions at work, online, and with myself. The writing is a dance of crystallizing your ideas. It is capturing a moment. This post will take me about 45 minutes on my return flight from San Francisco for a talk, after a nap and a sparkling water. This is standard and it's quite refreshing to have nothing else to do.

I'm torn on the future of writing. It's easy to think that with AI no one will learn to write well again, but at the same time the power of writing well is increasing in careers and with the perception overall impact.

The process of becoming good at writing is quite simple. It takes practice. With practice, you can get to a solid enough level to write clear and engaging prose. The path to becoming a good writer has two sequential milestones:

* Finding something you care about. Then you can write about it. The entry level to this is finding something you want to learn more about. The final level is writing about your passions.

* Finding your voice. Then you can write effortlessly.

People spend too long trying to write as an activity without thinking seriously about why they're writing and what they care about. This makes writing feel like a chore.

Finding your voice also unlocks much more powerful feedback loops and the most powerful form of writing — writing about why you write. This helps cultivate your voice, your direction, your personality, your story. When I found my voice I also unlocked style. Feeling style while writing is when it becomes intellectual play. For example, I find diversity of punctuation and aggressive sentence structure to be something that AI never does naturally. AI. Won't. Make. You. Read. Fragments. AI will draw you into long, lulling, lofty sentences that make you feel like you know what they're talking about while still conveying very little information.

Finding voice is also far harder. Writers block can be best described as when you have ideas, but you don't know how to express them. Sometimes this is forced upon you because the medium you're writing for has a required format (e.g. academic manuscripts). I'm yet to find a way to circumvent this.

When you have found your voice and your something, writing is just as much thinking a topic through as it is an action in itself. Most of my work now is just that — I'm prioritizing the times to write when I feel my thoughts coming together and I sit down to finish them off. Without prioritizing writing, it'll often feel like you're trying to put together puzzle pieces where the edges have been bent or torn. You know what you are going for, but it's just extra work to bend everything back into shape. My schedule is designed to make writing a priority. I have few meetings and I approach my workflow with consistent hard work expressed through very flexible hours.

Writing captures the essence of ideas incredibly well and we have a deep sense that can pick up on it. It's why you can read one 200 character post on X and know with conviction that the creator of it is a genius. This bar of good writing and thinking is of course rare at a personal level and fleeting throughout a day.

By doing this for multiple years my rate of output has gotten far higher along with my overall quality. Is my thinking becoming clearer or am I getting better at expressing it in the written word? In many ways the distinction doesn't matter.

This brings me back to AI. AI models are definitely getting much better at writing, but it's not easy to track. With the above sentiment, I think writing quality is one of the best judges of AI models' abilities. It's why I've stuck with GPT-4.5 for so long despite the latency and I suspect it is a reason many people love Claude 4 Opus. o3 can be quite nice as well. Still, these models are better at writing than their peers, but they’re still very mediocre overall.

AI labs are not set up to create models that are truly great at writing. A great model for writing won't have gone through heavy RLHF training or be trained to comply with a specific tone. This could get better as the base models get stronger, as post-training can get lighter as the models naturally are more capable to start with, but I think the drive to define a model's voice will appeal to more users than elegance (i.e. the same incentives that caused GPT 4o to be so sycophantic).

Without more raw intelligence better writing will feel like a lucky find from prompting rather than the nature of new models. I suspect many recent papers on creative writing are doing more of amplifying a certain style of writing that humans like than making the model have a more expansive capacity for writing.

With scaled RLVR training we're also pushing the models even further into doing rather than writing. A great test for AI progress is how the writing ability gets pulled up with all the other training foci around it.

AI helps good writing processes, but it pulls up the drawbridge for those looking to get into writing. The level of motivation it takes to learn to write while autocomplete is always available is far higher.

For the full “life” backlog of my writing, here it is in chronological order:

* July 2022: Job search out of Ph.D.

* May 2023: What it’s like to work in AI right after ChatGPT.

* November 2023: Job search post ChatGPT & RLHF.

* October 2024: Why I build open language models.

* May 2025: My path into AI.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.interconnects.ai/subscribe