I’ve been reading a lot of trip reports lately. Trip reports are accounts people write about their experiences doing drugs, for the benefit of other people who might do those same drugs. I don’t take illegal drugs myself, but I like learning about other people’s intense experiences, and trip reports are little peeks into the extremes of human consciousness.
In some of these, people are really trying to communicate the power and revelation they had on a trip. They’re trying to share what might be the most meaningful experience of their entire life.
Here’s another thing: almost all trip reports are kind of mediocre writing.
This is wildly judgmental but I stand by it. Here are some common things you see in them:
Focusing on details specific to the situation that don’t matter to the reader. (Lengthy accounting of logistics, who the person was with at what time even when they’re not mentioned again, etc.)
Sort of basic descriptions of phenomena and emotions: “I was very scared”. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
Cliches: “I was glad to be alive.” “It felt like I was in hell.” “It was an epic struggle.”
Insights described in sort of classically-high-sounding abstractions. “I realized that the universe is made of love.” “Everything was nothing and time didn’t exist.” These statements are not explained, even if they clearly still mean a lot to the writer, and do not really communicate the force of whatever was going on there.
It’s not, like, a crime to write a mediocre trip report. It’s not necessarily even a problem. They’re not necessarily trying to convince you of anything. A lot of them are just what it says on the tin: recording some stuff that happened. I can’t criticize these for being bland, because that seems like trying to critique a cookbook for being insufficiently whimsical: they’re just sharing information.
(...Though you can still take that as a personal challenge; “is this the best prose it can be?” For instance, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Chao Yang Buwei is a really well-written cookbook with a whimsical-yet-practical style. There’s always room to grow.)
But some of these trip reports very much do have an agenda, like “communicating crucial insights received from machine elves” or “convincing you not to take drug X because it will ruin your life”. In these cases, the goal would be better served if the writing were good, and boy howdy, my friends: the writing is not good.
Which is a little counter-intuitive, right? You’d think these intense and mind-blowing experiences would automatically give you rich psychic grist for sharing with others, but it turns out, no, accounts of the sublime and life-altering can still be astonishingly mid.
Now certain readers may be thinking, not unreasonably, “that’s because drug-induced revelations aren’t real revelations. The drug’s effects makes some thoughts feel important – a trip report can’t explain why a particular ‘realization’ is important, because there’s nothing behind it.”
But you know who has something new and important to say AND knows why it’s important? Academic researchers publishing their latest work.
But alas, academic writing is also, too frequently, not good.
And if good ideas made for good writing, you’d expect scientific literature to be the prime case for it. Academic scientists are experts: they know why they made all the decisions they did, they know what the steps do, they know why their findings are important. But that’s also not enough.
Ignore academic publishing and the scientific process itself, let’s just look at the writing. It’s very dense, denser than it needs to be. It does not start with simple ideas and build up, it’s practically designed to tax the reader. It’s just boring, it’s not pleasant to read. The rationale behind specific methods or statistical tests aren’t explained. (See The Journal of Actually Well-Written Science by Etienne Fortier-Dubois for more critique of the standard scientific style.) There’s a whole career field of explaining academic studies to laypeople, which is also, famously, often misleading and bad.
This is true for a few reasons:
First, there’s a floor of how “approachable” or “easy” you can make technical topics. A lot of jargon serves useful purposes, and what’s the point in a field of expertise if you can’t assume your reader is caught up on at least the basics? A description of synthesizing alkylated estradiol derivatives, or a study on the genome replication method of a particular virus, is simply very difficult to make layperson-accessible.
Second, academic publishing and the scientific edifice as it currently stands encourage uniformity of many aspects of research output, including style and structure. Some places like Seeds of Science are pushing back on this, but they’re in the minority.
But third, and this is what trips up the trip-reporters and the scientists alike, writing well is hard. Explaining complicated or abstract or powerful ideas is really difficult. Just having the insight isn’t enough—you have to communicate it well, and that is its own, separate skill.
I don’t really believe in esoterica or the innately unexplainable. “One day,” wrote Jack Kerouac, “I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Better communication is possible. There are great descriptions of being zonked out of one’s gourd and there is great, informative, readable science writing.
So here’s my suggestion: Learn to write well before you have something you really need to tell people about. Practice it on its own. Write early and often. Write a variety of different things and borrow techniques from writing you like. And once you have a message you actually need to share, you’ll actually be able to express it.
(A more thorough discussion of how to actually write well is beyond the scope of this blog post – my point here is just that it’s worth improving. if you’re interested, let me know and I might do a follow-up.)
Thank you Kelardry for reviewing a draft of this post.
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Crossposted to: [EukaryoteWritesBlog.com – Substack – LessWrong]
For those interested in writing better trip reports there is a “Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness” at https://qri.org/blog/rigorous-reports
A trip report is an especially hard case of something one can write about:
english does not have a well-developed vocabulary for exotic states of consciousness
even if we made up new words, they might not make much sense to people that have not experienced what they point at, just like it’s hard to describe color to blind people or to project a high-dimensional thing to a lower dimensional space.
I tried to learn to write before I had important things to say and it basically didn’t work. I had to go through the work of coming up with genuinely valuable ideas and then wreck the presentation of those ideas via bad writing. My more recent publications, I’m actually very happy with the writing.
The first couple times a surgeon does an operation, patient outcomes suck. Alas, there’s no other way to make experienced surgeons. My guess is that writing is similar, and I’m very glad that important experiences and ideas are way less valuable than patients: I would emotionally struggle with becoming a surgeon.
A stupid question, maybe, but:
I assume that if I want to get better at writing, I’ll have to get better at editing and revising.
However, how do I get better at writing if I don’t have anything to say?
Do I — and this task is likely underspecified/underdescribed — spend hours polishing turds?
I’d suggest writing about stuff you’re interested in but that don’t feel crucial to get right, if that makes sense. A hobby, fiction, stories from your life, about your day, funny observations...
If you don’t have any other interests and just have to write about unimportant boring stuff—hey, yeah, sure, polish turds. I’m reading Ulysses right now and it’s, like, mythologizing some guys going around their everyday lives and drinking and being casually rude. And it’s one of the most beloved novels ever. Writing about boring everyday bullshit in ways that sound cool is a time-honored tradition.
Well, okay, you can also start writing about things you really care about—but I feel like there’s a kind of person who might read this who, like, has a thing they really care about—“we need to develop more mRNA vaccines”, maybe—and is going to write a mid essay about mRNA vaccines, and then they’ll sadly think “well, nobody liked that essay,” and never go back to it—and that would be sad. So if you’re going to practice via writing things that are very important to you, you might have to be willing to write on the same topic/thesis a few times.
(Also, if a person in your audience reads one essay from you and doesn’t like it, they might not be willing to read a second essay from you on the same topic even if it’s better now—so you might also want to show different iterations to different audiences, if your potential audience isn’t large. YMMV.)
The title reads ambiguous to me; I can’t tell if you mean “learn to [write well] before” or “learn to write [well before]”.
😅 You know, I was thinking of calling it “Learn to write good BEFORE you have something worth saying”, but figured I’d get some people rolling their eyes at the grammar of “write good” in a post purporting to offer writing advice. This would however have disambiguated the point you mentioned, which I hadn’t thought about. Really goes to show you something or other.
“Gain writing skills BEFORE...”
I’d like you to expand how the “how bit”.
I write very often. Thousands of words every single day. But I’m a terrible writer. I’ve tried writing using all sorts of different stylistic devices, and even using Dionysian Imitatio, specifically metathesis exercises. Yet I find it virtually impossible when I have something I need to express, like a request, or an idea about aesthetic theory to convert that into something which is well written.
Are you dedicating as much time to reading good writing as you are practicing?
What’s the causal mechanism behind “read good writing, and you’ll be able to write better”?
I assume I’m already used to reading good writing, and I’m not going to pick up any additional techniques by mere passive osmosis anymore.
Yeah, so I bet passive osmosis has in fact gotten you somewhere, but to go a bit beyond that -
Can you identify when you’re reading writing you like vs. writing you don’t like?
What’s the difference?
What kind of properties does writing you like have, compared to other writing? (Especially compared to writing that’s “just okay”, as opposed to actively bad)
Can you recreate these in your own writing?
What effect does good writing have on you? (This is sort of an art more than a science, but like—do you understand the thing better? Do certain sentences just like really hit you? What’s going on there?)
Excellent question but the answer is “No”. I read a fair amount but also are most translations of Aristotle good writing? Probably not—Aristotle is famously obtuse. Is Wittgenstein good writing? I have no idea but also his writing is probably idiomatically suited to the content of the ideas he’s trying to express. I was recently reading Seneca, is he a good writer?
I used to read a lot of Nabokov who is certainly a good writer but that clearly did me no good.
Hm, let me think if I can come up with advice for you. What kind of problems do you run into when you start trying to express these things? (Or if more applicable, what’s wrong with the finished product?)
I’ve written so many drafts of this, so this may end up making no sense.
Frequently when someone responds to something I’ve posted online I do not feel they understood me because their responses feel to me like reading mail intended for someone else. This sensation is heightened if I ask a question—people seem to use my questions as launching points for questions they’ve hallucinated. This leads me to believe I’m a terrible writer since this pattern is so pervasive. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing an essay, or asking a specific question with plenty of context, people seem to not be interested and reply with their own tangentially related topic.
As far as I can see there is nothing wrong with the final product. I can’t see why my writing is terrible but it must be because people don’t respond to it as I intended. Evidently, they see something that my biased eyes are missing.
One frequent feedback I get about my writing is “it’s too all over the place” or if they’re being nice they might say “there’s a lot of points which are dispensed with too quickly, and I would have like you to explore them each in more depth”.
When I sit down to write, I’m frequently frustrated that my writing lacks my “voice” which should be slightly silly and sardonic, with lots of visual descriptions or metaphors that glimmer and glint. I really struggle at being concise, I’m too longwinded in case you didn’t notice. Structure too is a big one, I struggle to find organic flows and arrangements. I also have an annoying tick of using the pronoun “we” whenever I make a sweeping generalization about ‘normal human behavior’ - even if it is something I don’t do myself.
Struggling with structure is not restricted to writing, I experience it when I’m editing non-verbal videos very often. It’s like trying to make a mosaic. I must be good at it though, in film school I was always told I had a “good grasp of structure.” I cannot explain why it is such a struggle for me to implement, maybe I had more organized source material?
Okay, hm, interesting. (If I do write a “how to write good” post it’ll probably be more general + kind of aimed at people with different problems than yours, like not writing enough, so I’ll give this a shot now.)
Obviously I don’t know what you’ve tried already and it seems like you have tried some things (I looked up Dionysian Imitatio and was like “I think this person already knows more about writing methods than me”, haha), so apologies if these ideas are completely off the mark -
Questions and people misinterpreting you
In addition to asking the question, add a sentence or two of why you’re asking (or what you’ll do with the answer). This might help people give you more relevant info.
If people don’t know the answer to your question, they might just say Some Stuff in hopes it helps, so maybe give an explicit out in the form of “It’s okay if you don’t know” or something in case this is the issue. (Also, ask yourself if they’re likely to know the answer to the thing you’re asking them about. If you don’t think they will, you can still ask, but expect a worse or more irrelevant result.)
In case you don’t do this already: for shorter feedback loops, write in low-stakes forms where people can and will read it—lesswrong or other forums, social media posts, chats, fanfic, comics, whatever; calibrate on people’s response to that. (Obviously the style of writing might not be what you’re ultimately aiming for, but maybe there are consistent ways you’re not coming across clearly, in which case this will help you find those and workshop correcting for them.)
Conciseness
HUGE mood re: being concise, haha. Rounds of editing helps. You might try “challenge rounds” of editing where you try to make the thing absolutely as short as possible, or go in with the intent of writing the thing very directly. (And then you can add more back in if you like, but getting it there can be a good exercise.)
Voice
I think a lot of people struggle with writing voice, and there are guides out there on this. I don’t run into this problem with nonfiction so much, but I do think about it with fiction, so maybe some of this will help:
Play around with it, try out leaning into extremes. Write something in a style that is maximally silly, or that is poetic to the point of being esoteric, etc. (Writing things that you don’t “need to” write—things that are interesting to you but don’t feel crucial to communicate—can help here, just in terms of giving you mental wiggle room.)
I find that my metaphors and like use of language change after reading or writing stuff with strong voice—so you might try, I don’t know, reading authors that have voices you like, or writing fiction or poetry that is metaphor-heavy, etc, to develop the taste for that.
If you can’t write with the voice you want in the first place, schlockily edited-in is fine. Like, write a full draft. Maybe you go “this is bad, this doesn’t have as much description as I’d like.” Bold at least 5 spots throughout the piece where you think you could add some visual description. Write em in. Reread it and see if you like that better.
Structure
Think about the reader experience.
Think about the process you want the reader to go through. FOR INSTANCE:
News article style: start with the most important thing, add more stuff in descending order of importance
Make some points of reasoning step by step. Lay out several facts/assumptions and then arrive at a conclusion.
Explain that you will be offering a list of unconnected ideas, then do that.
A story told in temporal order, giving more details in the most interesting or relevant parts.
...Or something else, a combination, etc, etc. The point is, go in with a strategy.
In most writing, the default is that people won’t read a thing. So you want to hook them and make something that’s nice to read.
Some things that help with this: on an interesting topic, phrased in an interesting way, starts with something surprising, easy-to-follow reasoning, has jokes, is short.
Also, don’t assume the reader will read to the end.
Making an outline and expanding out from it can help a lot to keep you on track, I do this especially with longer form stuff
Thank you so much, I can see you’ve put a lot of thought and effort into this reply. I’m going to come back to this later and try and internalize as much as I can.
I do like your advice about low-stakes platforms to calibrate with, ‘challenge rounds’ of editing, and leaning into extremes of a voice. Those all feel very actionable but not things I think I’ve tried yet.
That’s a good heuristic! Front load, like you say, like a newspaper article—inverted pyramid or whatever they call it.
That is definitely true and the title is being a little clickbaity about it, but my thinking is: the kind of person I’m imagining is going around thinking “I don’t need to practice writing, I’ll just wait til I figure out The Answer and it’ll be fine” and I’m trying to convince them that they’ll still want to be good at writing even once they know The Answer.
Trip reports are probably more likely to lead to bad writing than anything else. You’re basically taking a monkey wrench to your brain, twisting a few random things, and reporting the experiences. The experiences are incoherent things, except the part of your brain that detects incoherence has had a monkey wrench put to it. Of course it’s not possible to produce a good description of one.