Why Serious Authors Must Not Listen to The General Advice of “Write Simple and Small”

C. Simple vs Complex Narration

The water story

a) Simple water story

For example “our body is up to 70% water” is an oversimplification of the complex fluid dynamics of the body which doesn’t at all tell the story of water in our body. This simple story assumes that water is present in our body as is, and we need to drink a lot of water to maintain this ratio. If we drink a lot of water, the excess water will be anyways excreted by the body.

b) The real complex water story

Let’s see the actual underneath water story:

1. Females have 58-66% body mass as water.
2. Males have 66-73% of their body mass percentage as water.
3. Newborn babies have about 75% water mass.
4. The above is because men’s body is much more inflamed as men work more(or are supposed to work more), and water acts as the coolant. The same with a newborn who has more water to support the inflammation when it makes an effort to come out of the mother’s womb.
5. Fat people have only about 45%-55% water as their body mass. This is because lean fat enables the retention of much more water, and adipose tissue fat mass retains less water.
6. Salt and glucose help the body to retain more water. If salt is reduced, water retention also reduces. That is why fat people have much higher cravings for glucose and salty food.
7. Because water act as a coolant, and fat people have less coolant, their physical throughput is much lesser than an average lean person.
8. Water molecules in the body don’t stay in the exact liquid water form that we see them, instead, they are present in the body in different chemical forms, such as interstitial fluid(ISF)(the space between the tissues), intra-vascular compartments(IVC), trans-cellular fluid(TCF), intra-cellular fluid(ICF), and extra-cellular fluid(ECF). Intracellular fluid is about 70% water but has different properties than water. The mineral absorption by this fluid is much slower than normal water.
9. The ICF pH value is 7.4, whereas the pH in ECF is between 7 to 7.4(slightly alkaline) which increases as the cell grows.
10. Water shifts from one space to another space by controlling the osmotic pressure and hydrogen gradients and is managed through a complex physiological process. This is called a fluid shift.
11. Third spacing is referred to as the abnormal amount of fluid shift into the interstitial space. Whenever there is a burn or inflammation, third spacing increases. This also increases during long complicated surgeries where a fluid shift from intravascular space to interstitial space shift is observed.
12. When we drink a lot of water, that has to go through several processes to get transformed and placed into the needed space. Excess water is not excreted immediately by the body but after a lot of processing. Water is more abundant than fat, and therefore drinking more water doesn’t make the body release fat. When fat intake is more, the body will store that fat in anyways it can, and will release the water.
13. When the body feels dehydrated, drinking a lot of water doesn’t solve the problem. One has to burn more fat, and one has to reduce the inflammation(such as overactivity, overthinking etc) to bring back the water balance in the body.

c) Interpretation of the simplicity theory from a) and b)

You can easily understand that one who has a need to understand the water story in the human body has to understand and know it deeply. However, if one reads the simple water story just so that he can feel “knowing something” he will miss very important aspects of the story. One who needs to know about water(such as one who is facing frequent dehydration problems) will put all the effort to learn it. One who is not affected by any illnesses that affect bodily fluids will not make an effort to understand and learn a complex story.

D. Commercial Aspects of Simple Writings

Our brain doesn’t work in two ways. So if a reader is investing less time, emotion, attention, cognition, and energy into reading something, the reader’s urge to read is less. If a reader continues to read such less simple pieces where he doesn’t have to invest anything, then when the author intends to monetize the writing, such readers will also not invest any money in acquiring the paid writing, because the readers don’t need to read that. When they got something simple for free, they took that free. It was a bonus for the readers, which served their greed of “reading something” but not necessarily serving any of their real needs.

In the same way, when someone advises an author to write easily and simply, they are doing so because they are familiar with reading some sentences here and there, some unnecessary essays to feel that they are reading and learning “something.”

When authors and readers are investing less time and effort in reading and writing, they are not emotionally attached to the essays, and anything that we are not emotionally attached to, we don’t care about. Anything we don’t care about, we don’t invest in.

Always remember, there is no such thing as passion. We all have to survive, and for that, we need food and money. Anything that doesn’t hold a promise of feeding us fades away from our lives.

E. Emotions in Writing

If one is serious about writing, one must acquire real-life knowledge about the subject. The subject is a real problem for the author. The author must walk through horrific failures to some success in the subject to have any real understanding, and knowledge about the subject, and to be emotionally associated with the subject.

For instance, this article’s theme is quite simple. Should one write in a simple concise manner, or should one go deeper into the subject and present the subject with as much totality as one can? The answer could be political such as “if you intend to write for a premium and small group of readers, write a detailed article, and if you want more popularity and readers, write simple and concise articles.”

If the eventual message of the article was the above politically correct, absolutely central answer, then you wouldn’t have given any fuck about the article in the first place. Whether it is a simple story or a theory, we learn to be able to take better decisions. You want to shape our worldview. We want to establish a theory and philosophy in our brain around which we want to live.

We are already in a central state of indecisiveness if we are reading an essay. Because, we already know that we don’t invest our resources into anything that is not our need, and anything that is not challenging us, or making us struggle is not our need. To overcome that state of struggle will need one to take action, and that action needs to come through a decision, and that decision needs to come through a philosophical framework of the brain. Therefore the philosophical framework of the brain has to be polarizing and point us in one direction. Therefore the message of an essay and reading has to take the user in one direction.

Because every essay is targetting the philosophical framework of the reader, not presenting a subject from enough angles appears like an opinion.

Martin Luther, a German Christian Theologian, and priest published 95 Thesis in the year 1517, an essay pointing out the malpractices of the church that is against God, and against spirituality.

Pope Leo X, wanted to rebuild and decorate St. Peter’s Basilica of Rome and left his name in history. However, for this, he needed a lot of funding. He decided to hire indulgence agents to offer indulgence to wealthy individuals in Germany. Indulgence was the practice of paying money to the church to buy a pardon from God for one’s sins so that one did not have to suffer in Purgatory(an intermediate place where Christian souls rest before their final journey to hell or heaven).

Martin Luther cited various biblical writing, examples, and historical evidence and tore apart the indulgence drive of Leo X. Initially he was seen as someone with a desire to get some limelight or someone who perhaps wanted a position in the church through his theatrics. However, then invented new printing technology, and emotionally written 95 Thesis spread amongst the general German population like a fire.

Thesis 86, asks: “Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?” Of course, you wouldn’t expect the pope to be kind, as his honor and political position were at stake.

Sylvester Mazzolini was given the responsibility to counter Martin Luther’s thesis. However, Sylvester Mazzolini first created an opinion of Herasy against Martin Luther and then started publishing one-sided essays depicting Martin Luther as an anti-christian, and anti-church. Each time Mazzolini published an essay, Martin Luther would write a rebuttal with far greater depth and keep the two essays side-by-side, asking people to decide.

Even after several efforts and tricks Leo X couldn’t put Martin Luther into trial, though the church excommunicated him on the charges of trial. He couldn’t be called to Rome. After the excommunication, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, and wrote hymns and essays for God worshipping, leading the path to the Protestant Churches.

Whenever an author like Sylvester Mussolini forms an opinion or a rigid worldview around a subject and then tries hard to justify the opinionated examples that enforce the narrative, such a narrative becomes one-sided simplified opinions of the author. Any opinionated view is not well processed and thought through and therefore is not philosophical.

As our brain attaches its emotion to the philosophy, but defends the opinion with aggression, the one-sided narratives become aggressive pieces if any human emotions are to be found in the essays.

Whenever an Author like Martin Luther arrives to challenge that narrative, people more often or not sideline the author. Martin Luther could engage people’s emotions because he had a doctorate in theology, as well as spent almost seven years searching for a true God, outside of church and papacy. He went into deep thinking spaces, would jolt down ideas, challenge his own ideas, present them before his critique, get the ideas and theories challenged by the other theoreticians and theologians, and would present the contrary views about his own ideas and thesis.

The more you are troubled by a problem, the more you suffer in life with one subject, the more time you spend on the subject, the more you think through the subject, the more you experiment and learn, and maneuver, the more you read and then implement the theories, the methods, theories, the problem, and the subject start forming a multidimensional philosophy in your brain. You know that the idea that you are presenting is not an opinion. The idea that you are presenting has been looked at from different angles and has been developed as a live idea. You know that the philosophy is emotional for you because you have invested significant time and resources of your life into the subject to solve your real-life’s problem.

If the author is not emotional about an idea or an essay, then that idea has no impact on people, and if one hasn’t lived the idea in real life, gaining real-life experiences on the subject, if one has not witnessed and considered the aberrations and contrasts, then one is merely opinionated about the idea and not emotional about the idea.

If you have read other internet pieces on this subject, then you can easily distinguish the change that is taking place inside your inner world, in your hormonal and emotional space, as you are reading this article. This article is taking you through a journey in your mind and not just trying to trick you towards an opinion. This article is also not attempting to convince you to believe in the subject. Rather, you are walking with the story, thinking about various other related pieces of information and life experiences as you are reading this. That is the emotional engagement, and that is an outcome that every author, and every essay desires and deserves.

F. Actual Readers is a Subspecies of Humans

Just like the political correctness answer we saw at the beginning of the article where we took an example of simple politically correct messages of the essays “If you want to write for mass, write simple, if you want to write for elites, write complex” considering everyone who can read and write as same is also an oversimplification.

There are primarily two Types of Humans

i) Body that drives the brain(like a mine worker, driver, farmer)
ii) Mind that drives a body(like intellectual job).

Not everyone who can read and write looks for discovering the solutions to problems in their life. If one has to invest a significant proportion of their energy into physical activities, then one can not spend hours thinking about ideas. Such theoretical and thinking acts are more suited for the second type of people. Even amongst the second group, there are lazy greedy brains and there are people with a growth mindset.

People with a growth mindset try to explore life’s problems. They do not complain about life. They see any situation in life as an opportunity to learn and grow. This subcategory is hardly 5% of the human population.

As we have already learned that there is no point in trying to sell sand to sea-beach residents, the same way there is no point in narrating to the category of readers who are not with a growth mindset and who do not invest time and resources into thinking, learning, and experimenting.

You also serve people who are like you. Therefore to serve a mass, you have to stoop down to their levels of intellect. You can not have higher multidimensional thinking and yet be able to convince mass about any subject. The mass carries a believing brain, which works on a herd mentality. A herd mentality is one where a brain does and believes something that others do and believes. To get aligned with such a population, you will also have to shed your desire for emotions in writing, form strong opinions and present the opinions to the crowd.

Your own growth will stop. There is no harm in writing simple, concise essays and stories for the mass, but you need to be ready to get lower in the intellectual spectrum to the mass level.

G. Theory of Devolution

Anything that uses less loses strength. So a footballer has strong feet, but weaker hands. Reading is a phenomenon of Humans (ii)

The human brain is born with only 250 cc. Even after a brain has grown to full size, a limited number of genes remain expressed and are increased based on the use.

So, brevity leads to brain devolution. The question is why care for brains that are killing themselves and want you to do the same?

Shouldn’t you care for those who want to grow their brain, and that need complete theory, not compact quotes?

We already know that believing and opinionated brains are closed brains and they do not put effort to think, explore, discover, or challenge their own beliefs, but rather rely on the crowd for any decisions.

The objective of every human life must be to grow in life, unlock more genes, improve cognitive skills, and improve emotional regulation. However, if you are listening to those who have not developed their independent thinking, then you are also letting go of your independent thinking and are trying to follow what others say based on the assumption that “if ten people say something is right, then that must be right.” As every human being is different, even though ten people may say the same thing, they will arrive at that conclusion using different paths. So how one arrives at the outcome of a narrative is important. That process of the journey through the thought process itself is a proof of superior thinking, and thinking through an idea from different angles.

When you ask those, who advise you to write simply and concisely about why they think so, you will observe that no one would be able to give any definitive answers, because they had never thought through this opinion deeply enough.

Opinionating and saying things, without deep thinking and emotional engagement lowers one’s cognitive as well as emotional capacities. As we grow up in life from infancy towards old age, our brain develops and therefore our cognition and emotions must increase rather than reduce. Anything that is inverse to the natural course of action of human life is devolution. When we devolve, our genetic expressions and genetic spectrum also devolve, reducing the competitiveness of our future genes(our children).

Because human life, like all other living beings, is a pursuit of {survive, thrive, reproduce}, even though writing simple and concise essays for the masses and for mass popularity can bring you more success in terms of money, by putting yourself into inverse growth, and impaired reproduction(or competitiveness of the future genes), they push you back the ladder in the species.

Whether it is worth the risk to devolve and put your future generations into struggle and existential battle for some momentary financial success by pleasing the mass is something that you need to judge and decide upon.

H. Should Authors Be Afraid of AI?

Today generative AIs are becoming popular with each passing day and more and more content is being created by AI tools. Many ghostwriters and copyrighters are losing their jobs and earnings to AI tools. Therefore can any discussion on writing be completed without considering the effect of AI on writing?

For instance, read the recent news item in a leading business daily in India that highlights how a 22-year old student lost her income from content due to AI.

It is quite obvious then for any aspiring or existing authors to think and ask “Should I at all be writing? Is writing at all a viable career? Can I earn bread and butter for my family through writing? Will AI not replace me?”

In order to answer this insecurity and fear of your brain, I would use the example from my life and the theory that I practice.

I observed if two or more people could do one thing, there was always a machine that came along to do it.

Hotels can make Palak Paneer across the globe, but only a passionate partner can cook Sorshe Ilish for her man, and no machine in the world can replicate that taste.

In the same way, a generative AI depends upon a large language model(LLM), where anything that gets created is merely contextual, informational, or like a simple process summary. Because the AI doesn’t have emotions, and it did not have to invest its life, in solving problems that threatened its life, the language model-based generations will be the variations like “Human body is 70% water.”

In this article, we saw Luther King’s way of making people understand and accept a narrative that was against their very belief system. Whether one should write a small article, a simple one, or a more complex article that one is emotionally invested in had nothing to do with Martin Luther, but his story would help you understand the current theory better.

Such a correlation of subjects and stories from other domains is called a Lateral and abstract correlation. It is the depth of the neural network which spreads like the root of a tree in the ground, far wider, far deeper. Such abstract and lateral correlations happen when one is creating neural network models while solving life’s challenges all along.

large Language Models(LLM) are literal. In a language model, “The sun is brighter than the moon” means the celestial star is brighter and radiates more energy than Earth’s satellite moon. However, if in the current context, I presented this line to you, your brain can interpret “Sun is brighter than the moon” in many ways:

1. Large articles are more powerful than small articles.
2. One who has more knowledge will be able to shed more light on a subject than the one who borrows the learning from other experts like the moon shines from the sun’s energy.
3. Anything that has more gravity will keep people attracted to it, and one with less gravity will orbit around the planets or masses.
4. Your brain may go further deep and associate as more pH means more Hydrogen atoms, and Sun has more Hydrogen, one who has more water would be able to produce more attractive essays.
5. Your brain can further correlate because children are born with 75% water, if an author becomes child-like, he will have more water, and therefore more Hydrogen and therefore more energy and gravity.
6. Shedding light on a subject like the way moon shows light in the dark may not be enough, you need to provide energy to act also to people like the sun.

There may be a whole lot of different ways your brain can interpret the sentence, and these interpretations and their depth will depend upon how severely you are affected by the subject.

Because your brain is not commanded, and directed to believe a statement like “Sun is brighter than the moon,” and because it invested its cognitive ability to discover the meaning that is relevant to your life, it will be satisfied by the discovery and the gradual cognition process.

If you understand that an AI doesn’t have emotions, abstract thinking, gradual discovery, or contextual abstractions and depends only on the literal meaning of a context and that writing is all about helping a reader to arrive at his/her conclusion rather than presenting opinions and forcing a world-view down their throat, then you know that AI can not do what you can do.

While writing this article, I am putting myself in your shoes, imagining you as an author, understanding your mind, your fear, and insecurities, and guiding your mind through the gradual process of discovering the truth. Therefore I am connecting to you emotionally, even though I do not know who is that you who is reading this article at this moment. In the same way, you may also experience an emotional connection with the author, that is me because your brain is becoming increasingly happy as it is reading this article if it has been able to read up to this point.

I am relying on my human instincts and my emotional energy to connect to the readers I don’t even know and the article is flowing through that emotional energy, guided by that emotion. I am pouring all my passion into the subject as I am also an author. I am feeling your pain, and I am trying to overcome that pain myself.

That is why, human authors would beat the AI-generated content hands down in terms of its impact, emotional connection, creating human values like trust and belief, giving satisfaction, and encouraging greater investment in time, money, energy, and emotions. Those who are using AI to generate content are only concerned about their own ease and producing a large number of content for a large amount of the population, forgetting the laws of devolution completely. They are putting their future generations into survival threats because they are doing something for the sake of monetary benefit, rather than being passionate about helping others with the ideas, stories, and theories that have benefitted themselves.

I. You should write for the purpose of writing, not for the sake of writing

Life is a pursuit to find the purpose that one is born for. Everyone is born for one purpose. Family, systems, relatives, society, economy, and state, do everything to keep us away from searching for that purpose.

In class III my teachers asked me “What do you want to become in life?” some said scientists and some doctors. I couldn’t understand if I already have become “Rupam” how can I become anything else?

It took me 15 years to find the answer. Studying, teaching, science, arts, history, reading, creating, socializing, earning, farming, and labor is life long pursuits around the uniqueness towards the purpose, and not a profession.

People are afraid of AI because they became someone else long back. The 22-year-old Indian student who was earning $45o earlier was researching existing articles on the topic and was rewriting them. She neither had a need to solve problems with her writing nor did she need to invest her deeper energy into the subjects.

This is exactly what the quest for shortcuts, and devolved brain has done to people. They did not realize that they were devolving into copy-paste rewriting content. They were satisfied with their earning and focussed on the earning, when the earning, or the content neither gave them any emotional and cognitive growth.

When humans lose their human values, human cores, compromise on emotions, satisfaction, and integrity they devolve into machines, where they start taking anything as a task and does as a task. Fortunately or unfortunately machines do better tasks than humans.

If you write, or for that matter create anything that remotely can be created and reciprocated by someone else, then you are not answering the call to the higher purpose of your life, and you are not creating anything that is created out of the uniqueness that you are born with. In such a case you are doing a task by writing something. You may be passionate about writing(or so you think), but you are not passionate about the subject, and you have not interacted with enough humans to get spiritual with the subject. So, whatever you do will be replaced.

E. Write as men have written throughout history

Men write to leave behind their life experiences, the hardships of life, the realities behind the facades, the true mask and face of the societies, so that the children and generations to come can see through the hypocrisies of the society.

Men never wrote to earn money, or get a name, or an opportunity to write “Author”. If men did so, then Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Upanishads, Shushrut Samhita, Old Testament, and such pieces would have never got created.

If one has to write, one has to write about life, and for that one has to have a life in the first place. Because life is a battle for survival, one has to have enough battles to have enough life to have enough wisdom to have enough words to write anything.

Bengali Poet Madhusudhan Dutt got educated in English and thought that India was not the ideal place for his talent. He adopted Christianity, changed his name to Micheal Madhusudhan Dutt, and went to London for pursuing his writing career and to get famous. However not long after he reached England, he discovered that there were no takers of literature in English in an English-speaking country that was written by an author of a Non-English Speaking “Slave uncivilized” country that Britishers ruled.

Micheal Madhusudhan Dutt was starving to death, when Bengali social worker Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, raised money from the public and brought Madhusudhan Dutt back to Kolkata, almost in an ill-diseased, dying state.

Madhusudhan realized the value of connection to the ground. However, as he had already struggled in his life, it was his survival battle. He went on to create Meghnad Badh, one of the most extraordinary pieces of literature created in Bengali to date.
Madhusudhan had a purpose. He wanted to prove his literary brilliance. He wanted to show how Bengali literature can also become an eternal masterpiece. he wanted to pay back the debt of being rescued from anonymity and death and for being given an opportunity to prove himself.

Many authors today want to become an author because they see other ‘successful authors” in social media the exact way Micheal Madhusudhan Dutt thought that being good in English is a good enough reason to write in English and get worldwide popularity.

Many young authors of today aspire to write for money, name, fame, and for recurrent revenue. However, they do not realize that even if they get some initial success by luck, eventually their devaluation and devolution into a machine-like human would lead them to lead a miserable life in the future, as well as put them at massive risk of being eliminated from the livelihood pool.