sMay 19
JA Westenberg

The work you're trying to do hasn't been done yet because you haven't done it. Nobody else will do it for you. The route is through, not around.

In a few hundred years, someone might transcribe your work by hand to understand how it holds together.

That's not a bad goal, actually.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-be-inspired-without-copying/

How to be inspired without copying

In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The work was

Westenberg.
May 17 at 10:39pmBuffer
Show threadMark ReidMay 17

@Daojoan Great piece!

It reminds me lot of how often transcribing solos is strongly recommended as *the* way to learn jazz. The goal isn’t to be able to reproduce the solos note for note but to soak in them to absorb their language and logic.

Show threadJ. R. DePriest    :EA DATA. SF:May 18

@Daojoan

I really like this take.

I'm going to sit with it for a while.

Show threadIan MalcolmMay 18

@Daojoan

Great piece. I read the tag-line and clicked in, thinking about HST and his description of time spent transcribing Hemingway and Fitzgerald, just to get some of the "feel" of the process, and of course you'd referenced it. 😎

"Importance of doing the work vs instant end artefact" is an argument I have with a long-term acquaintance who is sadly all-in on GenAI, and this has given me some different framing on why LLM output just leaves me unmoved, and seems like cheap novelty at best.

Show threadMatthew SkeltonMay 18
@Daojoan "The imitators fail because they copy the wrong layer." 💥
Show threadNick RadcliffeMay 18

@Daojoan Great piece, and a good companion to Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix (https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/).

But I was confused by “The writer who reads only writers…”.

What else should the writer read? I suspect you don’t mean slop, street signs, or even dictionaries.

Watch Everything is a Remix — Everything is a Remix

Watch the legendary series that reveals how creativity happens, and all videos by Kirby Ferguson.

Everything is a Remix
Show threadRafael Pérez ☀️May 18
@Daojoan Excellent article. Thank you.
Show threadwing_of_eternityMay 19
@Daojoan Perhaps learning how to put pieces of marble stone together could help if one's a writer, hmm.

I bookmarked the article.