Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to our new subscribers this week! If you don’t remember why you’re here, this is your weekly edition of the Practical Polymath. Every Friday, I publish a palm-sized piece, three links and a quote.
This week, I found myself wandering around New York again. It was the perfect opportunity to update my minimalist guide to New York city. It’s a list of keywords, no descriptions. I guess you’ll just have to trust me. If you enjoy it let me know, I might do one for other cities I’ve lived in.
Until next week,
Florian
Knausgaard on Writing
“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops”.
Before I purchase a book, I open it and read the first line. When I read this one, I knew I was in for something special.
Most of us move through the world barely paying attention. Karl Ove Knausgaard, on the other hand, wrote 3,600 pages about the banalities of his life. It sold over half a million copies.
His writing is a magnifying glass exposing every particle of our existence down to the most uncomfortable atom.
How does he write like that?
In his short essay “Inadvertent”, the Norwegian author takes us for a tour of his creative process. Here’s Karl’s contrarian guide to writing.
Write before you think
Think about what you want to say. Put together an outline. Get feedback from others. All common sense writing advice, right? Too late, says Knausgaard, you’ve left overthinking and the opinion of others corrupt the authenticity of your writing.
In his own words:
“Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks of whether something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate or to pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessible as itself but only as we have made it into.”
I’ve been keeping a diary for seven years now. I’ve noticed that I never think before I write in it. I let my fingers lead the way. When I write something I’ll publish on the other hand, I’m quickly drowning in my own thoughts. Somehow, Knausgaard has managed to erase that frontier between the personal diary and the public word.
Not everyone wants to expose the entrails of their life for everyone to peer through. But perhaps it’s worth asking, what would I say if no one was watching?
Meander your way to the point
Sometimes I find that it takes a whole piece to come up with one good sentence. Karl Ove says it’s ok. He describes the act of writing as “creating the space in which something can be said.”
In an interview with the Atlantic he shared that it sometimes takes him 400 pages to say something significant. “I need space to express simple, banal truths”, he says.
Remember that next time you feel bad about the low idea-to-word ratio in your piece.
Pick topics you know nothing about
Should we write about things that we know a lot about? Not according to Karl Ove.
“It is one thing to know something, it is another to write about it, and often knowing stands in the way of writing.”
Granted he writes autobiographical novels, not astrophysics textbooks. But how many times do we feel like we just don’t know enough about a topic to dig in?
Weekly Wisdom
📚 Book(s) of the Week: I don’t read a lot of fiction but “Bewilderment” was a good reminder of how much I’m missing out on. The book tells the story of an astrobiologist who is raising his son after the death of his wife. Both are in their own way trying to grapple with the question of our place in the universe and our responsibility to preserve the natural world. For something (much) lighter, I recommend “The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America”. No interest in ornithology required.
🏃 Reading for busy people: I like books. But let’s be honest, books are a serious time investment. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse through a list of short books? Goodreads compiled a list of most influential books under 200 pages.
🧘 Philosophy 101: When I was in high school, philosophy was my favorite subject. I’ve been feeling the urge to get back to it lately and started watching these lectures on YouTube. If you ignore that 1980s look and feel, this professor does a fantastic job at making the history of Western philosophy entertaining.
Lateral Thought
“What makes life worth living?
No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?”
Karl Ove Knausgaard