How to have an original thought

Bypassing the internet; bypassing the UK education system

This is an actual message I got months ago from an anonymous ex-classmate:

I have reason to believe that the ‘thought daughter’ internet is creating a form of anomie, a bit like when everyone is broke and simultaneously surrounded by consumer goods. At every turn you are beset by photos of Sontag and Didion, everyone everywhere is starting a Substack or becoming a YouTube ‘cultural critic’, everyone is journalling nonstop and reading ‘hot girl books’ (usually novels with oil paintings on the cover). Everyone harbours a dream life where they are the sort of woman who can occasionally bust out an ‘original thought,’ but nobody actually knows how to do it.

My thesis: everyone has ‘original thoughts,’ but they’re usually ‘unprocessed’ - they might initially seem like instincts or ‘vibes.’ ‘This guy gives me the creeps’ is an original thought. You need to be confident enough in your own instincts to take a ‘vibe’ and flesh it out into an entire argument, which is then supported by relevant evidence. This evidence comes from what I am going to call your ‘personal context,’ ie. any knowledge you have at hand to use in your writing, whether of your own life or of the world at large. The size of your personal context will roughly correspond to your confidence in deploying it; your educational and family background will have an impact on both measures, but you can also make deliberate attempts to improve them.

I didn’t really know how it felt to acquire a personal context until I started doing it. You probably don’t know either. If we were at school at the same time, you may well have spent more time at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy (doing creative tasks, like making posters) than at the bottom (learning historical facts). You probably studied just three very disparate full-length texts for GCSE English and there was probably more emphasis on writing PEEL paragraphs about very small sections of writing than situating things in larger literary and cultural history.

The teachers at my state sixth-form were well-intentioned but a a lot of them also had absolutely no sense for this. We were encouraged to read outside of class but they only really mentioned fiction, even though almost everyone applied to university and independent non-fiction reading is sort of the entire point of doing a degree. When I was in Year 13, some senior teachers got wind of reports of very low general knowledge among undergraduates. To preemptively improve our general knowledge, we had to do a big Kahoot and then they drafted the winners into a mock league of University Challenge. It was unclear how this was supposed to do anything to improve general knowledge rather than just to test it; we still did not have to read any non-fiction. But when I actually got onto the televised rounds of University Challenge in my final year of university it was because I had started to do exactly that, very intensively and in a ‘linked’ way (more later).

The whole experience taught me that people’s expectations are dramatically out of joint with reality. How do Monkman and Loveday know so much? Almost certainly through lots of reading, but in the eyes of people who don’t read they’re probably just genetic anomalies who happen to have been ‘discovered’. Same with

Daisy Christodoulou

, who was hailed as ‘Britain’s Smartest Student’ when she won with Warwick in the mid-2000s and is now (dramatic pause) a big figure in education, mostly known for her advocacy of knowledge-based teaching over the PEEL Paragraphs/Poster Making/Cutting and Sticking mode popular in British schools.

There’s nothing genetic about knowing stuff and there probably isn’t a huge link to formal measures of intelligence. Almost anyone can reinvent themselves into a Monkman/Loveday/Christodoulou figure given a few years and a few hundred well-chosen books. You might think it takes you ages to learn stuff, but if you are a Zoomer then you have probably been swindled by video essays on the internet, which make you think you’re learning and actually pad minimal information out to an often-insane runtime to get extra money from the increased ad breaks. (Have you ever tried actually reading a Contrapoints transcript? They are all archived online and they mostly give you less workable philosophy knowledge than if you just sat down for the length of one of the videos and read the first chapter of one of the Oxford Very Short Introductions.)

How to expand your personal context

1. Read!!!

The really major key to widening your personal context is reading non-fiction. You should make a habit of reading non-fiction for fun, the same way you would pick up a novel, and you should look beyond the bestseller list to do it. There are thousands of authors writing very good entire books in a readable, journalistic style for the general reader in virtually every niche you can think of, and there is already a vast infrastructure to help you find them. You just need to be plugged in. Countless websites exist to recommend you the best books on a topic of interest (try Fivebooks but also just Google eg. ‘best book about North Korea’). Literary Hub does an overview of the best traditionally-published books that come out every week and there are usually a few of these included.

If I am trying to learn about something and feel lost, I think of an important figure involved with it and look for a well-regarded biography. I consider this an intellectual ‘hack’. Biographies and memoirs are often great entry points to intimidating fields of knowledge because they show you around from the perspective of a single person. Perhaps you think it’s odd to read 944 pages just about Virginia Woolf - have you even read half as much of Virginia Woolf? But Woolf very famously had a huge extended circle of important and influential friends (Keynes! Pound and Lawrence! Katharine Mansfield! Vanessa and Clive Bell, etc!). A well-researched biography covering these relationships, as well as Woolf’s inspirations and reactions, will do loads to orient you in the intellectual current of the early 20th century. Her contemporaries will feel easier to approach, you’ll be able to put her successors in context, and you might draw on anecdotes and background information to form your own opinion of her as an evolving personality (you can’t do that on Wikipedia!).

This follows in loads of other arenas. Good books about politicians will give you a grasp of larger world events and the careers of other politicians and small-scale political procedure (bribery, canvassing, negotiations, etc). Most of what I know about 20th century film industries comes from reading about individual actors - same with recording industries and individual artists. You will have to tell me whether this works for STEM subjects too but my instinct is that it does.

When I’m reading I try and copy down passages that excite me, but this is mostly to help with my fiction work. You don’t have to keep standardised ‘book notes’ or a ‘commonplace book’ or whatever unless your aim is to do a forensic review. The internet is newly obsessed with highlighting and notetaking but a lot of the time this just comes off as ‘thought daughter’ set dressing, ie. pantomiming the notion of “I am reading a book” before a gullible audience. It’s a distraction from the experience of actually following an interest from one book to another as you amass CONTEXT.

I sometimes have conversations with people who say they like reading and then it turns out they mean ‘going down Wikipedia rabbit holes’ (in those words) and not actual books. I do not like this trend. Jumping from one article to another is absolutely not a substitute for reading extended non-fiction. Wikipedia will give you some semblance of a personal context but its lack of overarching order and narrative means you’ll forget what you learn quite quickly. Good non-fiction writers, especially those aiming to reach the ‘general reader,’ will keep memory and structure in mind - they’ll fill you in on the background you need to know when you need to know it, and link it explicitly to the matter at hand. They will also repeat information when they fear you might have forgotten it, which will help preserve the most important points in your long-term memory.

2. Expose yourself to a lot of other kinds of culture, but in a focused and organised way

Film: There are huge problems with the Sight & Sound decade polls but they are also a good source for very quickly getting to grips with a lot of major filmmakers and movements so you can branch off and develop your own taste. I went through almost all of this one over the two COVID lockdowns and it was like night and day. I don’t know everything about cinema but I can now usually tell who filmmakers are getting their ideas from and whether or not I approve of it. I recommend building up a mental timeline of all the films you’ve seen so you can proclaim things ‘ahead of their time’ or ‘a bit dated.’ (Those are original thoughts!)

Fashion: Nobody tells you this but you can literally just make a massive spreadsheet and take notes on YouTube videos of different runway shows. I know at least one other person who has tried this! I recommend doing it last out of everything because then it’ll be obvious exactly what all the other stuff has been pastiche-d from.

Writing your ideas down will help you articulate them. It is quite normal to have new original thoughts halfway through a first draft. Here are some tactics I like to use in the writing process:

Paragraphs from bullet points

I used to do a load of really short film reviews on this blog. I forced myself to post them as a weekly thing, which meant quite a lot of the time I actually had no idea what I thought of the film until I pasted a screenshot into a Google Doc and then started writing out my ‘vibes’ in bullet points. It was weird and sort of magic but I just had to get down a few individual ‘vibes’ (perhaps about scenery, or certain aspects of a single character, or a soundtrack) and then I had my ‘independent thought,’ which had apparently been lurking inside me all along and linked all the ‘vibes’ together. (There was also a network effect here, ie. it was way easier to ascertain ‘vibes’ once I had seen other films and had points of historical comparison, see above).

Zettelkasten-ing (sort of)

This is a new thing I’m trying and there is a huge online community around it. I would recommend this book as a sensible explainer but please know you are allowed to simply evade the admin-heavy slip-box/Obsidian stuff while still reaping the benefits. My Zettelkasten is not a Zettelkasten at all, it is a single document linked to the Cloud, and I’ve split it into three sections - ‘Literature’ (notes on books, articles, etc.), ‘Fleeting’ (notions of an original thought, semi-developed, possibly linked to literature) and ‘Floating’ (entire ideas, articulated in mini-essay form with a large body of references, that could become article pitches or book chapters).

In every to-do list I assign 45 minutes to maintenance of this document, which could involve expansion of ideas, linking ideas together, taking notes on articles I read, or porting in things I’ve highlighted on my e-reader. (I do not take routine book notes unless I know beforehand that I will be using said book as the sole focus of a piece of writing). The whole point (for me) is to try and articulate ideas all the time, and to incorporate new references more systematically into existing ideas as backup.

Essays from lists

Go and read Sontag’s Notes on Camp and then come back to me. She makes very cogent bare-bones points about huge swathes of culture and the list structure means you can actually see her mind work. I get the feeling it must have started as just a list of cultural phenomena that gave her the same ‘vibe’ and that the elucidating statements came a bit later. Sontag is one of the best models for deliberately working on your personal context: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 covers her adolescence and student career and she’s constantly and deliberately reading and listening widely, watching apparently every film showing nearby, etc. (NB I have been informed by an enemy of Sontag’s that Notes on Camp underwent a considerable amount of second-party editing, but you wouldn’t know!!)

I’ve got a lot of running Google Docs in this vein. There’s ‘Why I Should Be Allowed To Control Hollywood’ in which I list all the reasons why various celeb PR efforts don’t chime historically and how I’d do it better, ‘These Things Are Soooo Blond Ambition’ in which I try to articulate the historical meaning of Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour footage by listing all the references in proximity that I can think of, and ‘Why I Should Be BBC Director-General’ where I explain how I would reform the BBC (that’s like 5 different op-eds in one). The titles are overconfident because you kind of have to be. The itemised references make it much easier to join a proper thought together. Like you barely even have to try.

Postscript: the FAIRYLAND! HOTLIST #1

Here is what’s hot right now: