a retrospective on creative writing, 2026

Welcome to Rambletown!

I think the core problem I have when I am creative writing, is that sometimes I feel like I wax poetic too much, or I feel the pressure to wax poetic too much, and then I am not driven by the whims of the mind but instead a ghoul on my shoulder constantly nudging my hands off the wheel to pull a fucking Gymkhana maneuver.

I wonder why I like creative writing. I know for a fact I have fun writing interesting sentences; it’s a definite thought I’ve had, where I just chain a bunch of alliteration together with a clever idea bootstrapped to the side and I chuckle. An example of this is the sentence “It goes over a series of essays and stories wherein Jim Holt collates curious chronicles of central chaps in the world of math, the sciences, and technology” from my book review of When Einstein Walked With Gödel.

That’s just a really hilariously fun sentence to read, and I remember enjoying how much it was to write. That day, in India, I had decided to review all the books I’d enjoyed over the last few weeks, and since I was nearing the end of the list, I was getting tired. It also didn’t help that the books I’d reviewed before this one were more “serious”, and thus I’d felt they deserved a more serious tone to match that energy. Turning to this book and remembering all of the interesting stories, some truly odd ones in there, I decided to let loose and have some fun with it! It was a good time.

Of the six creative writing pieces under my “writings” tag, five are what I would consider reactions to my life and experiences I’ve had (some more explicitly about my life than others), and only one (“tuesday”) I’d consider likely isolated from my own life in some way. It’s also possible that isn’t true — maybe I really was having a mundane sort of day. The others are, in chronological order:

Untitled 1: About my writing process, and the fleeting nature of my ideas, as well as the challenge of grasping them with both hands and nurturing them so they finally take root in some form. Written when I was frustrated at my lack of writing, heh.
Attention: A reaction to Elon’s Nazi salute and the Twitter takeover and social media and the attention economy and… taking a step back. Being able to breathe. Focus. Silence.
talking: A discussion of how art is a conversation, followed by an admittedly one-sided conversation with Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a Swiss Dadaist, about one of her pieces. Written soon after I’d gone to the MoMA and felt like I didn’t know anything about art, despite enjoying museums.
I don’t want to be optimal: A reaction to a podcast episode someone sent me about being the most optimized version of themselves, further spurred on by The Almanack of Naval Ravikant in some ways. Enjoying the mundanity of life.
Immutability: Motivated by reaching my grandparents house in India and feeling the sheer bliss of everything feeling the same, the familiarity bringing in waves of comfort after a long bout of travel. I feel like this is the least “creative”, but reading it I can sense that it is, a firm internal judgement telling me so.

I also like creative writing because there are times when the techniques it affords, or perhaps normalizes, can help enhance a thought or make it more impactful to the audience. In Attention, the cadence - and choices I made to change it - significantly aided the impact of the piece, the feeling of the ever-increasing rush, the push to consume more, juxtaposed with the formatting of the breaks. The line certainly blurs when the topic is less abstract and more personal, as was the case with my last few blog posts.

More recently, my writing reactions to my life have been less creative and more analytical, more explicitly about the subject matter instead of... not prose? Some other thing? I’ve had “bigger feelings”, perhaps, and certainly I’ve been in the kick of codifying many aspects of my life, so this level of organizing my thoughts lends itself nicely to prose rather than my somewhat natural tendency to meander in my creative pursuits. What you’re currently reading is a rather poignant example of that idea.

It feels lofty, for lack of a better term, to begin describing things in flowery ways when the reality is typically much more calm. I guess sometimes it feels like a heavy handed choice — sure, there are times when it really does feel like how I describe it, and I get swept up in the heyday of it all, but other times, especially on a second read, things feel a bit weird. Immutability feels at first nice and then ever so slightly jarring at the end, with how I try to force a neat little bow on the end.

I think Attention and talking are my favorites of the rest.

So then what new stuff should I creatively write? That is, what new pieces of creative writing should I make, instead of the new norm word tsunamis I have going on at the moment? I’ve been inspired to write about my own thinking, I guess; perhaps writing about my thinking abstractly could be interesting. I think a commentary on AI and its use in software, or the production of code artifacts as goods, and the overall psychosis surrounding that is both very topical and something I have strong opinions on. It runs the risk of being too preachy or prescriptive (see my previous post for some brief thoughts on that), and perhaps the risk of sounding too similar to Attention. I guess it could work as well, confidence!

Beyond the general fact that creative writing affords me some leeway and some wings with which to swoop about, enabling some more interesting approaches to broaching certain topics, I don’t know what else I truly enjoy about creative writing. Even with poetry, a subset of creative writing which I do also enjoy (I just usually don’t put it on here), I trend towards having fun with poems of specific structure simply because the inclusion of a box of some sort inspires creativity. It is a unique and fun matter to create within the box, and that small bit of wisdom has shown up in advice from my research advisors of the past, in my music teachers, band directors, and inadvertently my soccer coaches. Limits breed creativity. That being said, even with poetry we fall back to the form of the words, the shape they take and the subsequent decisions to be made regarding the litany of literary devices we can use or, at times, abuse.

It’s like a program synthesis task with holes a la Armando Solar-Lezama, or more colloquially, MadLibs.

I don’t know if there’s anything else I like about creative writing, but it’s enough for me to want to do it, and that’s probably enough for now. It oscillates between a hobby and a passion, but it means I care, and putting things out into the world is, I think, a good thing. Scary place I swear, but it’s fun to be yourself in your own corner of the internet – sometimes people say hi.

(All em-dashes in this piece were human-generated, for more context please consult this ICM talk by Terrence Tao)

Update: In reviewing what I had written in the past with regards to creative writing, I stumbled upon two pieces of mine that were languishing in my GDrive; the first was a short and sweet poem about my bike seat getting wet, and the other was a piece on purpose and hope, entitled “hope? maybe”. I really like it. I like it so much, I did such a great job and I’m very proud of myself for writing it, and reading it now gives me hope. I was losing it day by day, listening to economic forecasts and talk of the bubble and job security and the nervousness that comes with new beginnings (so many new things, all the time).

So now I have some hope.

The optimism I had a year ago, when I was in the thick of it and really just coming into summer break after finals, is infectious. Hope has been and continues to be central to me, even as I feel it ebbing away at times, and I grasp at it. Some days it’s good. I’ll try to have conscious thoughts to be more optimistic, more hopeful.

Additional note because why not: along with my tone sometimes feeling lofty, or the choice of my words making it seem so, I think that I am also sometimes too preachy during my writing, creative or otherwise. It is my blog, and that does mean it provides a home for my biases, perspectives, and so on, but I think at times I lean too far into the notion of “Everyone should really start thinking like this, it's only logical”, which has caused problems for me in the past. A page from “The Art of Cruelty” discussed an artist choosing Newsweek clippings and juxtaposing them with other reports of a genocide, the goal being to highlight how Newsweek’s priorities were flawed, and there were more important things to focus on. This takes agency away from the audience, and I wonder how to navigate the balance between trusting an audience and being a forcing function for one’s ideological change. It's all always on a spectrum, I guess.