Should writers focus on art or craft?

02/03/25 • 10 min

Hello friends.

After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it.

I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer them. I should warn you beforehand that a lot of what I'm about to say is how I do things. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in life, and therefore you should take all of this with a pinch of salt. This is how I do things. This is what I think. This is not a universal, "do this and you will get X result" kind of thing.

So, having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the first question that I'm going to address. The topic of this video is a question from Johnny Walker, one, two, three, four. And it goes like this:

Some say the only way to learn writing is to just write. Others say it's a proper craft to be learned. So how do you learn writing? Or rather, I think what they want to ask is how to go about writing. How much attention should you pay to people who say the only way to learn writing is to learn writing, or that the only way to learn writing is to just write?

First of all, you should be slightly suspicious of anyone who starts any piece of advice by saying "the only way," because it's probably the only way they have used, and it worked for them. I'm happy for them. But people should not give advice by saying, "This is the only way to do X," because life is a little more complicated than that. Art definitely is a lot more complicated than that.

So let us focus on the two elements of this question. One is craft—the craft of learning how to write—and then there is just writing. Obviously, you have to do both of these things. You have to learn the craft of writing, and you have to just write the way a writer does. But perhaps it would be good if I started with the difference between art and craft.

What is more important for you as a writer to focus on? Should you focus on the craft of writing, or should you focus on your art? Before I start, let me put it this way. If you announce that your intention is to go to Bhagalpur and you are going to do this on a bicycle, and you tell people, "Look here, I'm about to pick up this bicycle and go all the way to Bhagalpur," then people will come and check you out. People will come and see if you can do it.

Craft is the ability to ride the bicycle. Art is making the journey and getting to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you pedal, and they see you go at least a few meters, then they know that you can get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the ability to get to Bhagalpur. They know that you have the skills required to get all the way to Bhagalpur. If you pick up the bicycle and you cannot pedal and you fall down, it doesn't matter if you have the map to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you know how to get to Bhagalpur. It doesn't matter if you have the strength to get to Bhagalpur. You are not going to get to Bhagalpur because you can't cycle.

Craft is the first step. Art is the rest of the journey. So when someone says that you need to know the craft to create your art, they're not wrong. You do need to know how to ride a bicycle in order to get to Bhagalpur. But getting to Bhagalpur is going to require much more than simply cycling because everyone can get to Bhagalpur.

There are other people who will walk to Bhagalpur, there are people who will take the bus—and by bus, I mean AI writing, that infernal thing that is going around right now. And some people are naturally, you know, they live in Bhagalpur. They don't have to cycle to Bhagalpur. So when someone says that the craft of writing is important, what they're really telling you is that the ability to frame your art using the traditions of writing is important, and they're not wrong.

But when they say that the only way to write is by being a good craftsman, then they're probably not right because there have been many great writers who were not great craftsmen, and they have still left great works of art. They created their own craft. There have been writers who created their own ways of writing, who created their own genres. There are writers whose work cannot be classified into a genre. There have been writers who have deliberately broken the rules of craft. There have been writers who have invented new ways of exercising the craft. That’s all possible.

But for the most part, if you're a professional writer and you want to send your manuscript to a publisher, one of the first things the publisher will look at is if you know the craft. When your manuscript gets to a publisher, the editor picks it up, reads t...

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Previous Episode

Losing followers isn't always a bad thing

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

And today I want to talk about followers, especially I, as you may already have seen in the title to this episode, I want to talk about losing followers.

And when I say how to lose followers, it might seem like I'm trying to warn you about what not to do. Like I'm being ironical somehow. I'm being sarcastic. I'm telling you by saying how to lose followers. What I want you to think is that you shouldn't lose followers. But I'm actually being serious and sincere. I really am going to tell you how to lose followers.

Because believe it or not, sometimes... that is a good thing. We all create in social media and we are given to understand that having a lot of followers or having a huge platform is a good thing. And that's not entirely incorrect. But while a lot of us create content and talk and write, etc. online, thinking that we are giving people something, that we are bringing change in people's lives, what we remain unaware of is the fact that our followers also change us. And this happens more and more as time passes.

So let me explain to you what I mean by that first. What I mean is that your name is Raju and you start a YouTube channel. You start putting out videos about what you think is good with the world, what you believe in, what you enjoy, et cetera. You talk about your passions and your interests. And you convey information and ideas about the things that you think are important.

And then time passes and you begin to get an audience which is interested in the kind of thing that you're talking about. Some more time passes and you reach a wall. You hit a wall where the number of people who are likely to be interested in the kind of thing that you're talking about is limited. And therefore, you kind of got into where you can be. If you're talking about your interests and not some generic topic that is trending, then you will eventually hit a wall of some sort unless you diversify.

So in order to change things, in order to make sure that your audience, your rate of growth does not plateau, you diversify. You start talking about other things. You start talking about a thing that happened once and got you a lot of views. So you come to the conclusion that if I talk about this more... then more people will come and watch and it works. So you keep doing that. You keep diversifying, you keep changing, you keep making new things, you keep getting more followers.

With time, you eventually get to a point where you are no longer talking about the thing that you wanted to talk about when you started your channel. You're no longer talking about the thing that you are passionate about, and you're now talking about things that people want to hear from you. You got followers because that is what you aimed for. You got more followers than you needed. And that is why you can no longer break free from the cycle that requires you to continuously feed that follower machine.

Not all your followers are the same follower. They're not all good for you. Some of your followers are actually good for you. They want to follow you for the reasons that you want to be followed. But some others will follow you because they want you to do what they want. And that's not necessarily something hard to understand. That is how the online ecosystem works. That is how the algorithm works.

I recently wrote an essay in which I gave the rather insensitive example of someone's family member dying. Suppose your name is Kaju and a family member dies and you make a video about it and that video gets a lot of traffic. Now, conventional wisdom will have you thinking, hmm, this is what people like. Maybe I should do more of it. How will you do more of it? How will you make more videos about the death of your family member without looking cheap, without looking like a sellout, without looking like someone who's fleecing the algorithm for all it's worth by making money using a personal tragedy? You can't. Unless you're shameless. In which case, congratulations!

And the weirdest thing about all this is that these days followers don't even matter that much. Followers, subscribers, whatever you want to call them on social media, they don't really matter much. There are channels with millions of subscribers who get 10 people watching when they live stream. There are channels with small subscriber bases, which are much more loyal and much more regularly viewing their content. There are Instagram accounts with millions of followers. And you'll find that the only people who comment on their posts are those 10 people who followed them since the beginning or worse bots.

These days when you log on to your social media feed, the thing that you see is what the algorithm has decided you should see. It is not based on who you follow, who you subscribe to, etc. The algorithm is now feeding you what it thinks you will watch. And it is...

Next Episode

Welcome to the marketplace of secrets

In our time, political propaganda and conspiracy theories are kissing cousins. One opens the gates and the other drags you in. The way they do this is not very imaginative and so it is possible to squitn and see how the process works.

Below is a full transcript of the episode.

Hi, and welcome to another video on this channel.

My name is Vimoh and here we talk about atheism, Indian culture, popular misinformation, that sort of stuff. And I want to talk today, not about any specific creator or any specific bit of misinformation, but about something slightly meta.

If you, if you zoom out and you look at this entire circus, what becomes apparent, a larger trend or a rather a larger pattern of behavior that becomes apparent when you zoom out and look at this. And we're going to call it the marketplace of secrets. Like, sounds very Harry Potter-ish, no? It's a market where you go and you find secrets everywhere being sold.

My question has to do with the fact that the people who are selling you these secrets, where are they getting those secrets from? Imagine you're scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find a number of YouTube videos. One video says, secret meeting between political leaders that you need to know about right now. And you click on it and find out that there was actually no secret meeting. Somebody is just giving their opinion. And the reason you clicked on the thumbnail is because you thought there was something in this video that you could not find elsewhere. It turns out there is nothing in the video.

The person who made the video and made the thumbnail knows that you are looking on YouTube for things that you cannot find elsewhere. And if they can appear to be the person who can give you those things, then they have your attention.

You keep scrolling and you find someone saying, secrets of ancient Indian history that are being hidden from you according to some conspiracy by liberals. Now, in addition to finding information that you could not find elsewhere, you are actually being provided information. You are actually being offered information that someone does not want you to see. Someone is actively suppressing so that you may not find out about it.

You are, by the way, in the dark about many things. You don't know many things and the reason you don't know them is because you really don't care about it. There are facts all over the world that you never looked into and that's all right because the world is quite large and you are one person and you have a set of interests and it is not your job to go look and find everything. So you are only going to look at things that are of interest to you. Right.

So then you keep scrolling down your YouTube feed and you find another thumbnail. This one says secrets of ancient Indian history, culture, something, something that are being hidden from you by people that you don't like. Now it's become even more personal. Now, A, it's secret information that you don't know. B, it has been hidden from you and specifically hidden from you by the people who you don't like. Now, in addition to lack of knowledge, there is also anger. How dare these people keep this valuable information from me?

The people who are keeping this information from me must be my enemies. In fact, I already think they're my enemies. This just reinforces it. And now when you click on this video and you watch something, you may still be disappointed with the content, but something else has happened. Something else has been triggered in your head. The bias, which you already had against certain people has been reinforced. And this reinforcement works on a subconscious level. You're not always aware of it. It's not as if you would have stopped disliking those people if you had not seen this video, but watching this video reinforced that and made you trust this person more because sure, maybe their video doesn't contain much good content, but at least they're on your side. They are working to help you. Sure, they got some facts wrong and they got some information wrong and they lied about some things, but they want what is good for you because they agree with you with regard to who your enemy is.

Now, let me point out something else. Think about this from the point of view of the people who create these videos. What do they know about you? They know that you are a large chunk of the population, as in your religious background, your cultural background, your political biases make you a prime candidate for a certain kind of content. They want to give this content to you. But they also need to make sure that you will be interested in the content that they're giving you. So they create a box and they put stuff in this box.

What is this box? This box, if you want to put a label on this box, this box will be labeled things you don't know or things they don't want you to know or things that are being kept secret from you...