Good writing is obvious, not original

When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original. Ironically, this is the best way to do truly original writing. Every important idea has been discussed already. I learned this in grad school for philosophy1, but it’s true across the board. Almost every field2 has generations of very smart people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking about the biggest problems. If you try to only write about ideas that are truly brand-new, you will restrict yourself to writing about ideas that weren’t important enough to be considered before: in other words, trivia and ephemera. What happens if you focus on the obvious instead? Writing about things that are obviously true is surprisingly difficult. Writing about anything is difficult, because reality has a surprising amount of detail. Still, writing about obvious things is especially difficult, because they’re almost too obvious to see. It’s trivial for me…