Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter on Writing, Thinking, Reading for Founders, Entrepreneurs & Professionals. Find long-form essays and interviews that will help you imagine an optimistic FUTURE and leave a solid LEGACY behind. Join My WhatsApp Channel to get curated readings.

Brand New Series: ‘The Long-Term Game’.

If we choose to focus on how we want to be remembered after our death, our perspective changes on a lot of worldly things.

This is why I started ‘The Long-Term Game’. Every Monday, I offer you curated readings to help you set your legacy. This is Edition One!

I handpick pieces written by global experts and their practical frameworks on how to grow in creative endeavors and live a fulfilling life. I start by saying why you should read it, and then I highlight the best sections from the essay under ‘punchy quotes’.

This series is my conscious effort on how we can build our values and develop skills that will outlast the rapid changes happening around us from AI to gloom & doom.

Welcome aboard! Do invite your family and friends.

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Ten Ultimate Essays About Career

I have high ambitions for my writing career. You’ll find me often reading about writing, learning about writing, and thinking about writing.

As a newsletter writer, my goals include growing a large reader base/paying subscribers, attract inbound ghostwriting leads, and tap into unexplored opportunities. So my brain constantly keeps braining about jobs, careers, and impact.

• How do I make the odds in my favour when things are so shitty?

• What should I do in age of AI?

• How do I find purpose and meaning?

These are some questions I ask myself and try to find answers by reading a trillion essays. I have read some high-quality practical pieces in the past few months. I filtered the best ten for you to get the whole picture. Let’s go!

Essay 1: ‘The Death of the Corporate Job’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

My new job after moving away from journalism was boring. There were unnecessary meetings and protocols to follow. It was then I stumbled upon this essay by Alex McCann. It inspired me to focus more on my newsletter project ‘The Fiction Emailer’.

Reading this essay also reminded of my eldest brother’s role at an IT firm. As a team lead, he struggled with colleagues who whiled away their time and did a mediocre job, hoping to do something else. Alex’s writing is for such individuals dreaming to make sense about their job, and understand why the corporate job is dying (or is dead).

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• The most honest person I've met recently was a VP at a tech company who told me: "I manage a team of twelve people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150k a year. It's completely absurd, and I'm riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side."

• Your corporate role doesn't need to be meaningful. It needs to be useful. Useful for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.

• … you can stop pretending your corporate role is real. You can show up, do the tasks, attend the meetings, but you don't have to believe in it. You don't have to tie your identity to your email signature.

Essay 2: ‘You’re Wasting Your Potential. It’s Not Your Fault’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

I have a confession to make: When I started experimenting with newsletters during Covid days, I spent a lot of time learning how to build a newsletter instead of practically doing it. Was I lazy? Was I procrastinating? Was I worried that I should publish only when it’s perfect? Maybe yes or no for all this.

Alex, in this essay, talks about why it is vital for us to first get the overall picture of what we are looking to do with our work life. We should have the openness to accept that none of our plans are set in stone. There’s always iterations to be done.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• “I just can’t get motivated to figure out my career.” But when you dig into it, the issue is rarely motivation. It’s that people are trying to make what is essentially the biggest decision of their lives with remarkably little data. They don’t know what kind of work suits their personality. They don’t know what problems they find genuinely interesting. They don’t have an accurate picture of what they’re good at versus what they’ve simply been told they’re good at. And they have almost no understanding of what the market looks like through the lens of who they are rather than what happens to be hiring. When you give people that information, the motivation takes care of itself. The paralysis most people feel is a rational response to being asked to make a high-stakes decision with almost no useful data.

• … careers are long and the process of understanding what kind of work suits you is lifelong. The people I’ve spoken to who seem happiest in their work are the ones who got comfortable with the process of revisiting the question, regularly and honestly, throughout their lives.

• …You don’t need to have your career figured out before you start moving. You just need to care about a problem enough to keep showing up, and be willing to learn as you go.

Essay 3: ‘The 5 Types Of Bullshit Job’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

A friend from Mumbai spoke. She’s working at a large insurance company and ranted about her junior trainee colleagues. They haven’t been assigned any tasks yet for months. They are just coming to office to sit idle in their desk and go through mandated corporate workshops that serve zero purpose.

I wasn’t surprised to see a large organisation failing to optimize its workforce. Our phone call soon made us discuss about David Graeber’s book ‘Bullshit Jobs’, which Alex incidentally cites in this piece.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• A bullshit job is defined as a form of paid employment so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though they feel obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

• Flunky jobs exist only, or mostly, to make someone else look or feel important. The people in them are given minor tasks to justify being there, but the real reason for the role is to serve as a prop for somebody else’s status

• Goons are people whose jobs have an aggressive element to them, and who exist mainly because other people employ them. The clearest example is armies: countries need armies only because other countries have armies.

• Duct taper jobs exist because of a glitch or fault in the organisation. These people are there to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The clearest examples are people whose whole role is to clean up after sloppy or incompetent superiors.

• Box tickers exist to make it look like something useful is being done when it isn’t. Survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers. One of the examples in the book is a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities at a care home. Her real job was to conduct elaborate surveys of the residents about what entertainment they wanted. She compiled the surveys into reports. The reports were filed. The residents got the same entertainment regardless. The whole exercise existed so the care home could show, on paper, that it was consulting its residents.

• Taskmasters come in two forms. The first type are people whose entire role is to assign work to others, where they themselves believe there’s no real need for them to be there… The second type are worse. Their main role is to create bullshit tasks for others, or to supervise bullshit, or to generate entirely new bullshit jobs. They’re the ones producing the strategic vision documents and mandatory reporting frameworks that fill other people’s calendars with work that everyone privately knows is pointless.

Essay 4: ‘The science of career anxiety. (With Anne-Laure Le Cunff)’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

I lost my job during the COVID days. For nearly four months, I was looking for opportunities. It was quite difficult because the entire world went through an unpredictable phase.

I was fortunate that my mother and brothers supported me no matter what. So reading this essay on career anxiety naturally threw me back to the lockdown days that I somehow sailed through with my family’s love. Here, Alex speaks to Anne-Laure, a former Google employee turned neuroscientist, the founder of Ness Labs, and the author of Tiny Experiments.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?”: The question Anne-Laure prefers is a much more manageable one. Not “what is my one true calling,” which tends to produce either paralysis or a confident guess dressed up as certainty, but, in her words, “what are you curious about?” She extends it a little when she describes it: “what is something that, even if it fails, you’ll be happy that you gave it a try?” Curiosity asks far less of you than passion does. It does not demand a lifelong commitment before you have collected any evidence at all. It just asks you to run the experiment and see what comes back, which is the only way anyone has ever found work they love, including the people who will later tell you they simply followed their passion.

• Work is one of the main ways a modern adult signals to everyone around them that they are a contributing member of the group, that the tribe is better off with them inside it than outside it. Anne-Laure put it more bluntly than I would have dared to: “being productive is a way to say, don’t kick me out. You need me, and we need each other.”

• Post-industrial modern society handed each of us a single title and asked it to do all of that work alone. Your worth to society now arrives compressed into one line, one role, one answer to the question people ask within thirty seconds of meeting you. When that line is missing, or unimpressive, or recently lost, the brain does not file it as a neutral administrative fact. It reads it as the early warning of exclusion, the same signal our ancestors got when the group began to turn its back, and it produces a fear that feels enormous because the machinery generating it was built for a matter of life and death. The fear makes complete sense once you see where it comes from. An ancient and accurate survival system is doing exactly its job, in a modern situation it was never designed for.

Essay 5: ‘Should you love your job? (The Jay Pritchett story)’ by Alex McCann for ‘Still Wandering’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

I am a huge fan of the Modern Family series. I love it for its writing, sharp dialogues, and of course, the cast performances. My brother, who is an equal fan, loves Jay Pritchett, the patriarch of the series. Jay is a successful businessman who is retired and lives in a grand home. Every time we watch the show, my brother and I often promise each other to build such wealth for ourselves.

When you speak about wealth, you think about how you want to do it. When you think about how you want to do it, you think about which job (or business) will make you reach that. As a writer, I certainly do think of achieving financial freedom, and magnetting opportunities. This essay is a good reminder on love and work, and work and love. Do give it a shot!

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• Telling someone to do what they love often gets heard as “make a living from your hobby,” which is why so many people end up trying to monetise their love of skiing or photography or sourdough and finding the experience considerably more painful than they expected. The passions worth building a career on are almost always one level deeper than the hobby.

• …I think being good at something is incomplete advice on its own. You can’t outwork people who find the work natural. For them, the hours don’t feel like hours. The thinking happens in the shower and on walks. The hard problems get worked on in the background, while they’re doing something else, and the answer arrives later without anyone having to force it. Mastery accrues from those unrequired moments, the small obsessive optimisations they make because the work feels like play and they can’t help themselves. Galloway’s advice tells you to pick what you’re good at, and that’s good advice as far as it goes. What it under-prices is that two people can be equally good at something on paper, and the one for whom the doing of it feels natural will, over twenty years, leave the other one in the dust.

• In an economy with four hundred thousand niches, falling barriers to entry, and AI rapidly dissolving the boundary between what counts as “a job” and what doesn’t, the calculation changes. The intersection between what you’re good at and what you find rewarding to do has more entries in it than it used to.

• So should you love your job? Duh, yes, of course you should love your job. Or at least aim to. You have one life, and spending the majority of your waking hours on something that doesn’t bring you joy is a great shame. But for most real people, the ones who aren’t celebrities or lottery winners or the rare child who knew at nine what they wanted to do at forty, getting there requires a deep understanding of yourself, what you’re capable of, what you actually love doing once you separate it from the hobbies you do to escape work, and where there are opportunities in the market for someone with that combination. Those are the three corners. The work of finding the overlap, and finding it again as you change, is some of the most worthwhile work you’ll ever do.

Essay 6: ‘How to Start a Career When AI Is Doing Your Entry-level Job. Four pieces of unsolicited advice from an AI-pilled millennial’ by Katie Parrott for ‘Every.to’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

• “Won’t AI take your job?”

• “Can’t I do my writing with AI?”

• “What makes your writing different than AI?”

I’m often asked these questions by clients, friends and work acquaintances. I reply:

• “Nope, I protect myself from AI by learning to read and write everyday.”

• “Yes, you can write with a $20 Claude subscription but it won’t look nice to your personal brand if your reader gets to know that you offloaded your thinking and your story to an AI bot.”

• “I work as a not just a ghostwriter but your SaaS partner (Socrates-as-a-Service). As your in-house co-thinker, I ask complex questions, which will make you go through your memory shelves and share with me detailed anecdotes of your work-life experience. This in turn will be converted into writing that drives leads and offer value to your target audience.”

I say something along those lines every time I have a discovery call with a client.

Katie’s piece gives a picture of how the job market is reacting today. It’s a practical guide for graduates stepping out from college post-ChatGPT era. Don’t miss!

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• Pick a problem you want to help work on—something happening in the world that you find yourself thinking about, even when nobody is paying you to. The role of “content marketer” or “data analyst” may shrink, split, or even vanish, but the problem behind those titles—how to get a stranger to pay attention to something they didn’t know they cared about, how to make sense of a pile of messy numbers—will still be there, and somebody will still be paid to solve it

• Choose one discipline to protect: Once you’ve picked your problem, pick your craft, whether it’s writing, building, researching, designing, strategizing, or operating. You’ve probably heard the truism that it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery of a skill. The actual research is more complicated than the popularized version, but the underlying idea is right. You don’t get any good at anything until you’ve done it many, many times. If you want to write for a living, write your own sentences. If you want to be an engineer, write your own code. Protect this craft from AI at all costs. AI can find resources, explain things, quiz you, and point out where your reasoning has gaps. But if you let it write your sentences or do your research, you won’t get the hours of doing things badly that you need in order to do them well.

Essay 7: ‘Why your nonlinear career needs a personal brand. How to stop explaining yourself and start attracting the right opportunities’ by Hannah Zhang for ‘NonLinear News’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

It is easy and hard to build a career in the age of AI slop and the internet.

It is easy because all you need is just a day or two to set up a website, a Substack, your LinkedIn profile, and update about the things you want to do or things you have been doing.

It is hard to stand out because a million other folks are doing the same thing, covering the same bases, following obvious tips from more experienced builders.

If you truly want to have an edge so that people recognize you before you apply for a job or an opportunity, then this is a guide that can offer you a good start.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• A personal brand brings you more opportunities so you can attract, not chase. And people with nonlinear careers have the most to gain from building one. When your career path follows a straight line, your title and your resume explain you. You show up in LinkedIns searches for “Product Manager” or whatever job you want because it’s already the title you have. Or you look like a star founder when fundraising because you have years in an industry. When your career zig zags, you’re left to do the explaining yourself, over and over. You don’t show up on recruiters radars because they can’t search for you by title. When you’re starting a new venture you look completely inexperienced in your field or function. A personal brand fixes that.

Essay 8: ‘How to Build a Fulfilling Career and Not Get Replaced by AI. On when quitting a job feels to early, figuring out what’s next, and how to build a personal brand in 2026’ by Hannah Zhang and Alex McCann for ‘NonLinear News’. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

It is indeed scary to read headlines that say, “AI will take your job.”

So what do you do? How do you AI-proof yourself? What can you offer? What are the systems you build? What is your moat?

These are some questions that are answered in this essay.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• One of my favorite books on this is Range by David Epstein. He goes through history and shows all these examples of people who, because they had experience in different fields, went on to make great inventions or discoveries because they brought something in from a different domain. His idea of the spiky generalist — someone who can do a lot of things but is quite good in one or two specific areas — that’s the sweet spot. Because it is so hard to be number one at one single thing. But if you can be great across a bunch of different things and particularly good at one or two, that’s a real edge. And here’s what I figured out about my own path: my day job is product marketing for a technical fintech startup, which means I’m learning how to tell a story, reach an audience, and sell something. My content does the same thing. The newsletter does the same thing. The speaking does the same thing. It’s all building the marketing muscle — I want to become so good at this craft across different parts of it. On paper, it looks like my eggs are in different baskets. But it’s the same basket. These things compound.

• In the context of AI, being high agency comes down to this: some people are never going to open Claude or ChatGPT until someone forces them to. Then they’ll use it like a chatbot and never take the extra step to figure out what it can actually do. That’s where the gap is going to widen — between people who learn these tools and people who just sit and wait.

Essay 9: ‘How to enter side doors. a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people’ by Maja for Velvet Noise. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

During my college days, I ran a blog. I would reach out to authors, engineers, scientists, and so many interesting individuals, asking them to sign up for a Q&A session with me. I would record our conversation and put it out as an interview on my site. This helped me secure a first job at a local newspaper, and the rest is history.

The ones who get a job or land a role that does not exist yet are folks who are proactive to reach out with decision-makers. If it fails, they have a thick skin to know that it is part of the game. They get back on track and keep repeating.

This is a heartfelt long-form that tells you how you do it.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• The job market can be brutal. It can make intelligent, sensitive, capable people feel like ghosts, sending pieces of themselves into portals and receiving only automated silence back. It can make you forget that the economy is not actually made of hiring portals. It is made of people. Confused people, busy people, kind people, distracted people, people with problems, people with budgets, who are sometimes willing to take a bet.

• All it takes is one person. One person who sees the signal and who has the problem you can solve. One person who reads the essay, replies to the email, takes the call, forwards your name, invents the role, opens the side door, says, yes, come in, let’s see.

• If someone takes a bet on you, honour it. Do the work. Become worthy of the luck. Make them glad they trusted their instinct. And when you are in a position to do so, pay it forward. Open doors for other people and reply to the overly earnest email when you can. Notice the student with the bright eyes and remember that almost every career contains, somewhere in its origin story, a person who did not have to help but did. The world is dazzlingly big.

Essay 10: ‘🌻 the old world is dying. opinionated advice for c/o 2026 graduates’ by Jasmine Sun for @ Jasmine’s Substack. Read Here.

Rayaan Writer’s Why:

There are a million creators yapping advice on a million things online. Sometimes it is practical, sometimes it is pure AI slop mixed bullshit. Sometimes it is actual advice. It is soul-sucking too when we are consistently slapped by the algorithm with such reels or posts. This essay reminds us of the abundance of info age and why it is a requirement to be self-aware; to know how to thrive when things are so uncertain.

Punchy Quotes To Sip:

• The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next. Know your fallback plans.

• I am admittedly worried about AI making people stupid. AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of learning, thinking, and productivity. It turns hare-brained notes into grammatical sentences, doing the cleanup for you (and the mental processing too). It takes meeting minutes and you assume it’s like listening; it’s not until later that you realize you don’t recall a thing. You’ve got to actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does?

• Advice is context-dependent, and often looks like survivorship bias or bootstraps moralizing. Caveat: privilege check: I know that I’m lucky; there’s a reason I usually talk about systems instead. But now some are too down on the whole agency enterprise—they assume all abilities are baked in from birth. I often ask AI folks what they’d tell a normal 22-year-old. Don’t know, they’re screwed, is the non-answer I get most. In that response, I hear depressing defeatism: What can anyone do in the shadow of the technocapital machine?

  Faced with such fatalism, self-help seems essential. Disruption is real and it’s hard and we’ve made it through before. You can do more than you think you can; you are more malleable than you think you are. You don’t choose the game board but you choose how to play it. Relish the pivots; ride the waves; recite the Serenity Prayer every morning and chase sunsets at night. I won’t tell you that the future’s smooth sailing. But what a thrill to be alive!

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Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Find here long-form essays and interviews that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. Visit my site to know more.

Elegant Writing Needs Harder Reading, Tougher Questions

I’m a journalist. I’m also a ghostwriter helping boomers with successful offline businesses but zero online presence to build their digital legacy on LinkedIn or a newsletter. These are busy folks wanting to transform their career stories into impactful pieces of writing.

To learn about my client’s industry, I spend hours researching the works of other entrepreneurs and thought-leaders. One of my clients is a former CTO at a major tech firm now running an AI consultancy business. I scour through journals explaining Large Language Models, I sniff whatever economists predict about AI stocks, I scoop my email for newsletters suggesting best prompts to use. I spot Google trends to track breaking stories from Silicon Valley by tech reporters.

For another client, a bespoke tailor, I dove into the world of fabrics, fashion, stitching, designing and everything in between. My browser had a gazillion tabs open from fashion websites to style guides to documentaries on dyeing factories.

This is the part of grunt work that I won’t offload to an AI chatbot for now. They can be faster but they don’t have my taste to filter out the best as doing this boring process is what helps me ask my clients solid questions. Thus, deep reading aids me to get the vocabulary used by industry veterans, trends they expect, learnings and mistakes they made, and what makes them love what they do.

Importantly, it directs me with the right questions to ask my clients, alongside the Speculative Journalism & Speculative Fiction frameworks I use. Therefore, when we sit down for an interview, they respond with sharper answers. After hours of editing their replies, it transforms into writing that goes out from their social accounts. This is my ghostwriting job in a nutshell with deep research and reading being a crown part of the process. This leads me to…

If It Is Easy to Read, Then It Was Hard to Write

A core brain muscle building activity that I do to sharpen my writing craft is to read tough pieces of writing, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and humanities. I get to learn how to explain a complex topic in the most simplified manner.

I follow NatGeo, Scientific American, Asmiov Press, Aeon Mag, etc. I often read their pieces 2-3 times owing to the complexity of the themes they cover. The first attempt is a quick eye glance, the second read is to get a hold of the writing style, and the third reread is when I actually get a grip of the subject.

Thanks to my ex-roomie and great friend at Ashoka University Abhigyan Ray, I was introduced to Quanta Magazine – reporting high quality journalism in science and mathematics. Reading Quanta unlocked the fear I had for math.

From analysis and history covering The Evoling Foundations of Math to the interview of Terence Chi-Shen Tao, the Fields-Medal winning Australian-American mathematician, in How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math, to A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces on how ‘Maryam Mirzakhani’s monumental work draws deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems’, I have sampled how writers untangle tougher premise that our brains can’t process yet. It was impressive that these wordsmiths unwrapped higher math with flair and finesse. I yearned to become such a writer myself, an expert in spinning dense thesis with ease. As the saying goes, “Easy reading requires tough writing.”

Before reaching the easy, there’s often a hill of problems to climb. This got me to think…

Fearing problems? Try Pólya’s Way

All my school and college days, I hated math. My teachers just attacked the problem at hand, without helping me think why I needed to solve them, or where it came from, or how should I think of a solution. It was all just a grim set of numbers, x and y. What the heck does f(x)|2 dx < ∞ even mean! Ugh!

However, this fear was cracked open during a Statistics Course that I took as part of the Liberal Arts Program (the Young India Fellowship) at Ashoka University. Taught by UPenn Professor Santhosh Venkatesh aka Prof. SV, he introduced us to “The Art of Solving Problems; Or What Would Pólya Do?”. [See screenshot from the class note]

Prof. SV kept reiterating that he didn’t want the right answers but only wanted us to record our process of thinking and how we are coming up with possible solutions. This shift was so crucial because ALL MY LIFE I have been barraged with math problems that kept pushing me to find x. What the heck man?!

This shift by Prof. SV made me wonder:

• Was I taught math the wrong way all my life?

• Won’t it be cool to ask questions about questions themselves?

• Perhaps how we think of a solution is a better metric to advance our learning?

Maybe I would have been an actual engineer instead of scribbling in my notebooks as an act of rebellion!

Pólya’s method nudged me to think of problems with deeper curiosity, not fear. It forced me to set sail to find answers by exploration, not concern. As explorers, its vital to think before we chart our course. And writing can be a great tool to develop our thinking. But before we sit down to write, it is fundamental to build the right mindset to ask deeper humane questions, which leads me to…

How to Develop Our Questioning Brain

In the essay, “Undone by unthinking“ by Rajeev Bhargava says, “In a world where strong forces systematically devalue our inner lives, what is sorely needed is the recovery of the conditions under which self-reflection and thinking become possible.”

He points out the cost of attention loss due to social media: “Attention is most reliably captured here not by complexity but by manufactured intensity, by an emotion that fires the fastest and burns the hottest, namely: outrage. Such platforms perpetually stimulate instant reflexes and pre-empt reflection. By the time a considered response is formed, the event in question has been replaced by another equally enraging event demanding immediate reaction. Can one ever examine something that one cannot hold still?”.

Every day we see crises one after the other. The constant barrage of this chaos from genocide reports to war to corruption has resulted in no time to self-reflect. Self-reflection happens ONLY when we ask questions about complex issues affecting our daily lives. Hence, for starters, it is vital to ask questions about things we fear or things that doesn’t make sense to us in both personal and professional lives.

Writing can be one of the greatest method as a self-reflection activity. Writing can also be a great creative exploration tool. To build the latter, I try developing the wordsmanship — art of chiseling away difficult subjects and say it clearly with style.

In “Writing to Learn” by William Zinsser (author of one of the greatest non-fiction books “On Writing Well”) speaks about his interaction with Joan Countryman, the Head of Mathematics Department at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia.

In the chapter “Writing Mathematics”, Joan discloses how she involves writing in her teaching to help her students chip away the fear of math by urging them to write letters about the sums. [Refer the pages below]

In this form of writing encouraged by Joan, her students captured their raw thinking. And as they wrote, their thinking evolved. As their thinking evolved, so did their perspective on the problem at hand. That’s the whole point of writing —

• You write not to find ONE solution but to know who you are

• You write to help build your thinking muscle that can push you get multiple possible solutions

This is a mental dexterity that develops over time.

Just like how Joan noticed the transformation that writing offered to her students, I get the same upbeat feeling when working as a ghostwriter. It sure does feel lively when I see founders’ thinking unfold when they share anecdotes for the detailed questions I pose regarding their work.

And speaking of questions, this leads me to…

Mathematicians Guide to Questions & Story Foundations

A mistake I made when I began writing publicly on social platforms was that I just wrote whatever was trendy and followed the templates of popular thought-leaders. I shared hacks, tips, and tricks on varied topics. Naturally, my writing style was too shallow as I wrote pieces that were like ‘How to do XX to achieve YY’.

Bleh! I was only adding the same POV to the noisy feed, not offering anything of value. I did try the Speculative Journalism framework, where I ask myself a series of questions on what to expect in a particular field (just the way how I ask my ghostwriting clients too)

To stand out, I had to do tougher reading i.e., access supreme long-form essays and reportage. Reading such works will help me learn how to improve my own artistry and also learn how to develop the prowess to ask the right questions. I decided to mix myself into a mathematicians mindset and here’s what I found:

1. No brainer; follow the works of writers you love! — In The OpenNotebook, mathematics journalist with over 20 years of experience Erica Klarreich, in the explanatory ‘Mathematics Reporting: An Uncrowded Niche for Writers’ stresses why it’s crucial to reach out to research driven individuals.

Reading Erica’s piece reminded me of a similar essay by Eleanor Warnock for Every.to: The Heyday of the Writing-first Practitioner. Eleanor notes professionals are figuring out that the ones who write publicly about their field, their mistakes, their process, or their opinions are building something that a job title never could. These are people who write to think, not just to market themselves.

Of course, many are yapping on LinkedIn or Substack these days. Most are sadly doing this with AI. But the ones who stand out are the folks who know this; the best way to tell a complicated story is to tell the human side of it.

Read this segment by Erica in the same piece:

2. To tell great stories, we need to keep the foundations strong — Consider the advice by Terence, the Fields Medal winning mathematician. In this blog post ‘Write professionally‘, he says:

3. Ten tips to good writing, the mathematicians way! — Thanks to regular reading of Quanta Magazine, I was introduced to the work of another great mathematician Paul Halmos who penned down ‘How to write mathematics’. This blog post ‘The Mathematical Tourist’ lists his recommendations:

I wanted to go further and here’s a core section from Paul’s book:

4. Trust in the process but know it takes practice and patience — When I rewrite my writings with numerous attempts, it certainly feels heavy. Sample the section from Erica’s piece we discussed earlier:

5. Read far and wide to develop taste for diverse styles — I stumble upon human pieces by journalists writing about difficult STEM subjects. Take this -- My Fantastic Voyage at Quanta Magazine. The ‘Founding editor-in-chief Thomas Lin looks back at a decade of Quanta journalism and forward to what’s next for the magazine’. It’s a beautiful curation of all the well-researched high quality writing on science and math produced by the team.

Reading Thomas’ note felt like a call-out to William’s ‘Writing Mathematics’ chapter from his book ‘Writing to Learn’.

He says, “Listening to these examples, I saw that many of my beliefs about writing and learning also apply to mathematics: that we write to discover what we know and don’t know; that we write more comfortably if we go exploring, free of the fear of not being on the “right” road to the right destination, and that we learn more if we feel that the work has a purpose. Motivation is as important in mathematics writing as in every other kind of writing.”

Once I allow the dumb words to simmer into my draft, rough hard thoughts of my brain slowly make sense as words on screen.

Then I work on another draft and another draft because, “We write to discover what we know and don’t know”.

That's the whole point of writing and the mathematician's way of telling stories!

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Look at the illustrations below.

On the left is Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings, and on the right is the City of Tashbaan in the Narnia series.

Don’t you find it similar?

It’s an upside-down cone, and has the same style of spires, walls, and roads.

As a fan, I obsess over such cities of fictional universes including Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars, or Harry Potter. I’m baffled by the effort that writers of these worlds put in to make them so real.

When I saw the city of Minas Tirith and Tashbaan, I was intrigued by how nearly identical they looked. Did J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis copy each other?

Certainly not but I did have a pleasant shock when I learnt that they were actually friends. As members of the ‘Inklings’ club, Tolkien and Lewis met every week at a pub to read drafts and give feedback alongside other 19 or so writers.

Can you imagine your writing critiqued by the greatest of world-builders? What would Tolkien speak about my style? He’d banish me to Mordor until I improve my art for words. What about Lewis? He too may have thrown me in some wretched place of Narnia.

I ended up asking questions on having a creative partner

This further went downhill in my mind and soon I was left with:

1. First, why do we need one?

2. Second, what happens to partnerships when most of us rely on AI?

Since Tolkien and Lewis were friends, perhaps each other got influenced by the other’s literary universe that they were building. Tolkien is quoted as saying he couldn’t have finished LOTR without the support of Lewis.

In the earlier editions, I wrote why we need offline activities to keep our brain raw, without the influence of AI to prevent ourselves from offloading our thinking.

I have written on Why Every Online Writer Needs an Offline Compass, Why To Write No Matter The ‘Perfect’ AI, and about developing taste In How To Write Curations That Outlast AI.

The core message from the above essays are:

1. WRITE BY HAND, then use voice dictation tool to yap and later use your laptop to work manually on your first draft.

2. Read a lot and don’t really trust AI summaries because you need to know when you should do the full reading to get the complete depth of a topic.

3. Consider doing offline activities such as drawing maps, and note-taking directly using your pen or a pencil, when you read something on your phone or a laptop.

What about using AI tools for ‘creative partnerships’?

Now before you think I am pushing for using AI completely as your creative partner, I’d say wait till the end of this piece. I have been adopting certain AI hacks nevertheless for the writing and research work I do.

First, paste the prompt below in your Claude and store it as instructions under your relevant Project Folder.

This prompt prevents from hallucinating and is brutally honest. It sort of feels like the good old days of manually Googling and scouring through links to find the right source of whatever info you’re digging around with armed caution and judgment.

[Btw, you can read this too that I wrote a fortnight ago:]

Second, read ‘Writing With AI is Harder Than You Think’ by Katie Parrott of Every.to, who says ‘it takes rigor, judgment, and willingness to be told your work isn’t good enough.’

The headline might make you think it’s entirely ‘writing’ using AI but that’s not the case. Sample a section pasted below of how Katie expands her thinking of a topic she sets out to write.

I adopt a somewhat similar method as proposed by Jay Dixit, who was the Head of Community for Writers at OpenAI. I use the prompt below:

Here, the key sentence from the prompt is Do NOT attempt to write it for me.

I then start writing my first draft by referring to my hand notes and online research stored in Notion. I do this by thinking out loud, i.e., yapping into my laptop using Wispr Flow by answering the questions Claude asks me on the topic I’m about to write.

Thirdly, what follows is JENGA STACKING. Just like how we move the wooden blocks of Jenga to build a tower, I move around sentences in my own accord to understand the flow and structure of the essay.

I start off by spending a lot of time figuring out the headline, the strap line, and two to three subheadings. This acts as the overall skeleton in need of the bones — the sentences here and there.

I don’t offload this step to AI because doing this manually, the old-school way, helps me get the feel of what my reader can experience as they progress through my essay.

In the entire process of my writing, I use AI to ask me questions on my writing which pushes me to think deeper. It brings a perspective that I didn’t have a clear vision before. But I still need to balance this with human intervention, which leads me to…

Your Family & Friends As Editors To Your Creative Work

It’s worth revisiting my essay How Grace, Niche & Cringe Help

Here I wrote on why we need family and friends when we build something in public:

“It is ideal to centre your writing at the hero of your niche: the community interested in this topic. When we treat our audience as our heroes, we go deep into their topic, the problems they face, the solutions that already exist, and how we can offer a different perspective and take.

To bring this out in your writing, the best trick to adopt is to share your writing or talk about the ideas in draft with your family, a friend, a spouse, sibling or your parents. When these are the people you think of as your first reader, you adopt an easy to understand writing style…”

Apart from my brothers, I have phone calls with my close set of friends on a million things related to work and life. I also have accountability partners. One of my dear friend, Shruti Bajaj who works at Ashoka University reminds me to take a walk, while I message her that she should start writing more often on LinkedIn. We exchange ideas, takes on relationship, work, life, and more. I ask her gazillion questions and I appreciate her thinking.

Human conversations really make a difference. Many of my writing have taken shape thanks to a different angle that my brothers or friends tell me in random moments.

Do I want AI to act as my creative partner? Absolutely not! It is just binary. It is ones and zeros, and great at pattern recognition, telling you what’s the likeliest output that can happen.

But I’d prefer my own Inkling Club any day, all day, just like how J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis gave feedback and admired each other’s work. My brothers and friends know who I am, what I do, and what’s the best version they want me to be, and speaking to them builds a creative partnership that I know will have life-long endurance.

Further Reading:

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My LinkedIn feed lately has two perspectives by founders and professionals:

1. AI is going to take your writing job.

2. Writing will always exist despite AI.

After tech giants like Anthropic and OpenAI put out a hiring net for copywriters, there has been an optimistic chatter among comms professionals and writers, all sighing in relief that their future is secured (or atleast for now).

I assumed the same and was hopeful myself, until I read: “The Companies Building the Machines That Write Are Paying $400K for Humans Who Can. That Should Tell You Everything.”

This segment from the analysis pasted below stood out for me:

The key sentence is: “[The comms/writing job role]…requires judgment about audience, competitive positioning, cultural context, and organizational identity that gets built up over years of doing the thing.”

After reading, I had to rewire my assessment of the hiring news with a sense of cautious optimism. I wanted to adopt a practical mindset.

To get further context of what led these AI companies to hire, I read another piece from April by the same publication: “Every Company Now Sounds Like ChatGPT and That’s the Biggest Brand Opportunity in a Decade”.

I’ve pasted the core portion of this essay below:

This line stood out: “[If the company uses AI to write], the company doesn’t trust its own voice.”

It’s a punchline no founder, CEO or a solo entrepreneur should ignore. I find it strange how someone can offload their writing to AI, and expect customers to buy their product or service, or simply just read their “writing”.

It’s not rocket science to know that a key foundation to build a strong business is communication. You can be the next big thing in any line of business if you are someone who articulates and speaks well. This skill can be built if you write regularly. Your writing need not be public (atleast in the beginning). And you need not do it just for the sake of hitting the publish button. You do it to develop your thinking muscle.

Imagine you write from the first day of your journey as an entrepreneur; the odds may certainly be in your favour; from attracting partnerships to finding mentors to forging relationship with potential customers who can become your lifelong well-wishers.

Yeah yeah bro, we get it!!!

Everyone should write but what about us — writers who are yet to find a comms job or any job where we can write?

I’d point such a person to this practical guide by Every.to: How to Start a Career When AI Is Doing Your Entry-level Job.

From this piece, the writer Katie hits a SIX with the words below:

I am seriously considering to put this in my wall: “Protect your craft from AI.”

Like any skill, the edge can only be sharpened until and unless you make mistakes.

AI, unfortunately, prevents you from making mistakes. Every time you write something gibberish, dump it on AI and then let it edit, what happens is that we don’t really see the grammatical or narrative changes it does. All we do blindly is copy-paste. Many always simply just ask AI to “write a 500 word essay on XXX”.

Thus, building the foundational muscle by reading some key books such as

• On Writing by Stephen King,

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser,

• The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicholas Cole,

• and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott can make a difference.

You can always read about writing but remember -- your writing output should be more than your input that you do to read about writing.

Some habits that continue to hone my skills include:

• Practicing to write by hand in my notebook everyday.

• Using tools like Wispr Flow so that I can yap a lot directly to my laptop or phone.

• Anytime I pick a piece of a newspaper or a book, I scribble what I feel on the corner of the pages with a pen.

• If I want to write about something, I first send a voice note to my loved ones who give feedback on what they feel about my idea in its clay-form.

Remember, writing is thinking, and thinking can be sharpened every day, like how you go to the gym to stay fit.

And if I have to romanticize writing, then all I say is its perhaps one of the greatest gifts and miracles that we can experience as humans.

Why should we even dump all of this into an AI bot when we should experience it ourselves?

As for comms professionals and content writers, do check out the pieces below:

The core nutgraf of Noema’s essay states:

• “One of the great ironies of this new machine age is that it seems set to rehabilitate, quite precisely, the value of the traditional ‘liberal arts’ education.”

• “This is an arena where liberal arts-informed thinking, storytelling, historical analogy, ethical reasoning and cross-domain curiosity become tangible competitive advantages.”

Finally, for brands and businesses looking to standout when AI makes everything sound the same, do yourself a favour and read this piece below:

Finally, to every writer out there, for the love of God, just keep writing and develop core skills that will be your leverage from using AI as your sparring partner for creative work (and not a replacement) to adopting liberal-arts problem solving frameworks.

The universe eventually rewards those who play the long-term game.

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Why to be Indiana Jones as a newsletterer

You need the skills of Indiana Jones to scavenge the Internet.

This requires the surveying technique that George Newman explains in his book How Great Ideas Happen.

In the opening chapter, George writes about a successful paleontologist from Kenya, Kamoya Kimeu, who had a knack for understanding terrain.

Kamoya was a goat herder who walked a lot and knew the land’s geography. It helped him become very sharp at guessing the secrets hidden underneath. After answering a local call for help for a paleontological work, he rapidly became skilled at spotting fossils.

I have been thinking about Kamoya’s story and what it means to hunt for ideas in the times of AI and newsletter abundance. I believe Kamoya mastered the art of geology as he enjoyed exploring the land thanks to his comfort as a long walker. This helped him become an expert dino-bone hunter.

In the book, George says, real spark of creativity “often lies in what is new to us, not necessarily what is new to the world.”

To be a creative newsletterer, you have to be curious and hunt for ideas…just like how Indiana Jones travelled the globe for treasures. It’s ideal to adopt some frameworks that aids in capturing ideas faster and pushes you to think actively while scouring the web for uncharted pixel islands of wisdoms.

How to Think While Surfing the Web

In my first job as a local reporter for News Today, I got the railways beat. I roamed the Southern Railways office or the Chennai Central Station to sniff story ideas, followed other reporters to catch stray of untested breaking stories, and connected with PR officials to regurgitate press releases.

When I struggled, my senior editors advised that the best way to get story leads was to be on the ground and speak to as many people/sources every day. Soon, I found folks who whispered suggestions or pointed me at newer directions.

Before any chat with a potential lead, I used the scooter ride or bus commute as thinking time. I’d structure the questions I needed to ask and what would make the story good. I’d dig through their LinkedIn, their website or their work for context.

I then visualised in my head the final draft of my story like an epaper clipping: how the headline should sound, the opening lead and the story skeleton.

While chatting with a source in person, I would scribble down our conversation in my phone or scrapbook. I never wanted to miss out a word! Fast forward to my current life, I do pretty much the same. Here’s how that goes:

Why to Use ‘Languaging’ Compass as Indiana Jones Newsletterer

When reading articles online or while I interview my clients as a ghostwriter, I imagine myself as a painter dolloping the info I read or hear. I capture the words of whatever I feel and think and scribble them into the fresco of my notebooks. It is haphazard.

But I know what it means, even if I pick it up several days later because it’s my rough, unfiltered version of how I think. I also know what I dashed on the paper as I use a ‘word compass’ while taking my notes.

In the book Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One by Nicolas Cole, he speaks about Languaging. It is a word association that a creator builds and stays focused on throughout their career.

If someone wanted to tell you to read Ryan Holiday, they’d have to say is: “He writes about Stoicism.” That’s the power of languaging; “You know exactly who they are and what they write about in a single word.”

(I recommend you to read the section on Languaging from the book below)

How to Use Languaging as Idea Capturing Compass Word

For my newsletter, I have kept a goal to write every Monday.

I aim to make sure that the topic I choose goes back or refers to the main languaging word of my newsletter: speculative journalism and speculative fiction.

Anytime I read something, I always ask myself ‘what it means to speculative journalism and speculative fiction’. This is my north star, my compass word.

Since my topic covers writing, thinking, and reading, I extract themes of speculative journalism and speculative fiction under these three variants. It comes up based on whatever news or ideas I read in a newsletter, podcasts, books, or YouTube videos.

• From one long-form topic per week, I take three sub LinkedIn posts out of it.

• I follow my own 80/20 rule: 80% of ideas spark when I write by hand as and when I scour the Internet.

• The other 20% are from note-taking apps or bookmark tools to capture things I might have missed.

• I’m aware that great ideas come not because of the tools we use but because of the active thinking we do ourselves as we consume.

Remember George Newman: “Explore what is new to you, not necessarily what is new to the world.”

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Last week, my home state Tamil Nadu elected popular movie star C. Joseph Vijay as the Chief Minister.

Newspapers are flooded with a million opinion pieces on:

• How Vijay’s fandom launched TVK into power

• How the duopoly of AIADMK and DMK was broken

• How cinema and politics go hand in hand

Political pundits postulate that Vijay was a cinematic hero who made his mark on screen as a commoner or an elder brother. Millions found themselves in the character of his movies and eventually voted him to power with the hope to bring a change in the Dravidian politics that has existed for decades in the state.

The underlying theme in many of the op-eds was ‘Hero’. Every fiction story has a hero. Every true story has a hero element too. As writers, the concept of what makes a hero a ‘hero’ is often studied from their journey to their flaws, to their path of hunting side-quests, and finally to their redemption or victory.

I am not a political journalist, nor am I writing for a newspaper full time. But using the frameworks of speculative journalism and speculative fiction, I try to make sense of the world around us. In this edition, I wanted to explore ‘Hero’ in writing.

Why Grace & Humility In Writing Is Important

Grace and humility are the anchors that keep you afloat every time a rough wave of arrogance — knowing your niche too much — tries to rock your boat. These virtues help you stay humble and aware that there is always an uncharted island in your topic yet to be explored.

So how do we get this?

You start with the ‘hero element’. Every bit of writing we do should have the ‘hero element’. The ‘hero element’ is the niche of work we select and its target community. Smart public thinkers and professionals have cracked this code in a simple yet effective way on LinkedIn.

Take Maggie Blackburn on her LinkedIn. She runs Portfolio Career Strategist & Coach, and runs the ‘Feeling Free’ Newsletter. Her LinkedIn Banner is a pretty cool template of how to say a lot with less. It has who she is, what she does, how she helps, her newsletter shoutout, and the companies she has worked with. It is a very visible north star we can follow. What Maggie’s banner proves is this: when you are clear about who your hero is, your positioning writes itself.

The hero section on your personal website should do the same. Additionally, you have a chance here to address your value system — the type of work you do, the people you enjoy working with, and the impact or transformation you offer.

Many times when we start writing in public, we often end up imagining ourselves as the ‘ultimate, unharmed hero’ of our niche. Think of all your favourite movies and you will agree that in the beginning, the hero is shown to be victorious only to be slapped with a big rejection, a heartbreak or a death. This then changes the hero’s path to a road unknown. So don’t have the ‘ultimate, unharmed hero’ mindset when you begin, as this might prevent us from learning deeper — the arrogance of being overconfident of a topic that you pick could be a real hurdle.

Thus, it is ideal to centre your writing at the hero of your niche: the community interested in this topic. When we treat our audience as our heroes, we go deep into their topic, the problems they face, the solutions that already exist, and how we can offer a different perspective and take.

To bring this out in your writing, the best trick to adopt is to share your writing or talk about the ideas in draft with your family, a friend, a spouse, sibling or your parents. When these are the people you think of as your first reader, you adopt an easy to understand writing style. Since you are writing with the lens of grace and humility, you won’t have the arrogance of being niche smart. Remember: our job as writers is to help our audience become heroes themselves.

Hero’s Journey: How to cast a wide net under ‘Generalised Niche’

Over the years working as a journalist, I always come across people desperate to start writing. They have built successful teams, minted a lot of money, and led projects to great deals. They have all the time and attention to reach this state but so little time to put down a word on paper — to write and to live deeply.

Last year when I became an indie ghostwriter and spent redesigning my website rayaanwriter.com, I kept my focus on addressing the needs of such individuals. I wanted to help boomer founders and entrepreneurs running great offline businesses but with near zero online presence, especially on LinkedIn.

To reach this stage of niching down, I knew early that I should not mummify myself into a creative coffin and rather be a cartographer with maps to fly beyond known quarters.

In ‘How Great Ideas Happen’, author George Newman asserts that genius artists are not creative individuals who had one light bulb moment after another but rather were creative explorers consistently trying to fuse several light bulbs that fail to fuse. These are folks who spend time spinning the wheel in a different direction instead of creating a new wheel altogether. Their joy of work comes in the journey of discovery which eventually leads to creation.

In his essay on genre research for fiction (Genre Fiction Market Research 101: How To Find Profitable Categories & Cater To Readers), Nicolas Cole demonstrates how to find a niche. He selects a wide umbrella genre, pins it down to a category that has been steadily growing, and finally goes into a specific sub-niche.

Commercial Fiction Club

Genre Fiction Market Research 101: How To Find Profitable Categories & Cater To Readers

Commercial Fiction Club is a paid newsletter documenting the process of building a $1,000,000/year self-published fiction empire—starting from $0. If you want to make money from your fiction, and learn what’s working in real-time, this is for you. New posts every Friday…

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3 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Nicolas Cole

I have always been interested in how journalistic practices and principles can be replicated in other forms of writing too. I have also been someone who is interested in fiction. So speculative journalism and speculative fiction is the umbrella topic I am using to spread my wings wide: to write about writing, thinking, reading, and how to create impact using this framework.

Looking back, to be a creative explorer as a writer is like being a professor with a chalkboard: you erase, you write, you explain, and repeat. When somebody asks a question you were never asked before, you are allowed to fumble, because writers who dare enough to write about a topic they are uncomfortable with are the ones who crack the code to find their voice. That is part of the hero’s journey as a writer. But do know when to niche and when to continue exploring. Keep writing, and keep talking to people who belong to the niche.

Do we have a recipe to dealing with ‘cringe’

I always have this cringe feeling about what people in my LinkedIn network think whenever I share something. This cringe feeling is like a stock market. There are good days. There are bad days. It climbs up and down like the AI stocks that investors see every week on their screens.

There are weeks when I struggle to be consistent because I feel people will think I am writing for the sake of writing, rather than writing with the intent of actually offering something valuable. There is an imposter feeling I sometimes carry, when I feel I still need more experience before I am allowed to write. I worry the writing is too generic, or that the perspective has already been shared by other thought leaders or writers or thinkers online. This feeling bogged me down even when I was writing regularly and had many articles and feature stories coming out, especially in my first job at News Today and Talk Media.

Whenever I struggle to hit the publish button, I often ask my brothers to give me feedback on my writing. Earlier, I used to send a huge draft and tell them to read. Now I just bounce ideas off of the essays I am drafting to write. I tell them what I am looking to explore and then I hear their perspective. I always find it interesting to get a take from someone in an entirely new field of work. It is like tasting exquisite dishes at a buffet, with each one offering an euphoria of delight to your tastebuds. When you chat with people of varied professions, you are bound to unlock a treasure box of questions that arrive in a sealed envelope of “Whoa! Why did I not think this before?!”

Speaking with my brothers often leads me to think with hope. Whenever I write with hope, I use words that open doors of possibilities I never thought before. When I write with the lens of opening doors of possibilities, I imagine that I am offering a key to my newsletter readers to several unexplored doors of ideas that they can walk through and perhaps experiment with themselves.

Nevertheless, I still do have the cringe feeling when I try to hit publish. The sense of having the cringe may always linger. But it is a bit less after ideating with my brothers than before.

I asked the same question to many of my accomplished mentors: do they go through this feeling too when they have to share their work?

My good friend H.R. Venkatesh, a senior editor, anchor and reporter whose superpower — according to his LinkedIn — is that he forges communities, collaborations, consensus and partnerships, and likes to write about what he is thinking.

Venkatesh, who is now building the next IJNet at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), told me: “It is good to have this feeling, but don’t ignore it and at the same time don’t give in to it.”

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Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.

Here’s Your FREE Resource Notion Link: The Thinker’s Compass.

The Problem I Kept Noticing

As a journalist, I have had the opportunity to interview people across various walks of life: builders, entrepreneurs, businessmen, tech experts. One thing I have noticed across all of them is how often people struggle to articulate their thoughts and ideas. It is a problem not just for a junior professionals but even for managers leading big teams.

I have seen this play out across the last seven years of my life as a writer. Now AI tools is making people to hack their way into writing generating generic, synthetic notes. This is downgrading the art of learning to write and also the habit of thinking itself.

Thinking is writing. And people are not realising this as often as they should.

When you sit down and leak your thoughts onto a page, you do two things at once. You put a leash on the free-flowing words, ideas that keep simmering in your brain, and you bring order to this chaotic space. You also build muscle: putting thoughts on paper with a pen and a journal has proven benefits.

What Writing Bought Me

I was an engineer who disliked his college days. As an escape, I pivoted into writing and reading, and that one shift opened up a world of opportunities. Here is what writing has led me to so far:

• A persuasive scholarship application secured $3,000 from Splice Media for the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka.

• A single email pitch to Splice Beta funded a fully paid trip to Thailand.

• An application essay won me a $5,000 fellowship at CUNY’s Craig Newmark J-School.

• A combination of essays and interviews secured an ₹8 lakh scholarship from Ashoka University.

• A writing career where I work remotely from the comfort of home.

All of this came through persuasive writing with intent: applying to opportunities, sending cold emails to people whose work I genuinely admired through newsletters, scroll-throughs on LinkedIn, and Instagram.

As a cub reporter in my earlier days, I relied on reading amazing essays and books on how to improve my craft from creators such as Nicolas Cole, Dickie Bush, David Perell, and many others. I kept dumping all of my learning into a Notion document, which is what eventually transformed into The Thinker’s Compass.

How the Thinker’s Compass Helps You

The Thinker’s Compass is a curated set of essays, videos, and frameworks from the world’s best writers. As you start learning from these curated links, you will walk away with

• Where Careers Are Headed and How to Amplify Thinking in the Age of AI,

• Why Writing Publicly Matters

• How to Use Writing to Propel Your Career

• How to Actually Start Writing Without a Portfolio or a Following,

• and What a Sustainable Writing Practice Really Looks Like in 2026.

I tested an early version as a small workshop with friends from Ashoka. The response was enough to convince me it was worth making properly.

Enjoy and Happy Learning! 🙂

Here’s Your FREE Resource Notion Link: The Thinker’s Compass.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

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Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Find here long-form essays and interviews that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. Visit my site to know more.

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Quick Note on Today’s Edition: Since Claude Design launched, my LinkedIn feed is full of designers prompting their way to polished collaterals in minutes. And I was left wondering: what happens to the craft of design itself? In this essay, I trace that question from Chennai’s wall painters to Adobe to AI, and land on an answer that lives in comics and fundamentals.

Since Claude Design launched, my LinkedIn feed has been flooded with professionals sharing their work. Email newsletter layouts, carousel posts, web images: all prompted into existence in minutes, primarily aimed at marketing collateral or brand building.

I have been thinking about what happens to the grunt work of creation: the manual art of designing, when so much of it can be bypassed with just a few keystrokes.

The pattern runs deeper than this one launch by Claude:

• First, people said you needed to be smart at prompting to get quality output.

• Then came the advice to write better context.

• Now entire collaterals can be generated through Claude.

At each stage, the same question resurfaces: where does that leave the act of actually making something?

Reading Graphic Novels for Context and Depth

In last pages of The Hobbit graphic novel, illustrator David Wenzel explains his process.

He describes the different styling boards and papers he worked with. He shares about discovering pen and ink in high school, and what that discovery clarified about what line artists are capable of. He sketches the development stages of the dwarfs, noting how Tolkien designated different hood colours to distinguish each character within a crowded ensemble. What Wenzel documents is the thinking behind the illustration.

When you instruct Claude or ChatGPT to create a photo, a design, you do not get to witness the stages of its creation — No rough version or record of what was tried and abandoned. You directly arrive at the final image after a few typing.

This leaves a question worth sitting with: are we getting good at AI platforms, or are we getting good at solving the creative problem… the kind of problem that earlier required us to learn the craft without the aid of any tool?

The Art of Losing an Art Job

I recall the painters who used to hang from scaffolding across Chennai, painting advertisements by hand on commercial building walls. It moved from hand-painting to printed signage on flex boards, to LED screens. The painter lost his livelihood; a business that manufactures LED screens gained one. That is how each tier of technological change has always worked: job loss on one end and job creation on the other.

The same pattern runs through digital design. Designers started with Adobe while non-designers tried MS Paint and then Canva. Now all of these tools are powered by AI to increase production efficiency and allow us to create collateral using pre-set templates. For every significant AI update, there is either a loss of skill or an outright loss of work for a designer. The designer who does not upskill with each update perhaps risks becoming the painter on the scaffolding: skilled at something the market has already moved past.

Testing Tasty Designs with Hands

The question is not whether Claude Design or AI-amplified Canva are useful. They are.

But will you still call yourself a designer if you are an effective prompt author — providing brand color, font style, tone, and requirement — while Claude creates the collateral? To keep pace with what these platforms demand, the imperative is to understand what makes a design effective. That understanding lives in human-made, freehand craft: the kind that carries emotional weight.

There is also a more practical reason to hold on to bedrock skills because depending entirely on one platform is too risky. So when a Cloudflare outage hits AI tools globally, the professionals who can still work in Canva or Adobe at its most elementary are the ones who never let the fundamentals lapse.

Understanding Comics to Understand Design

At the Young India Fellowship in Ashoka University, one of our critical writing course reading was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: a book that explains how comics function, illustrated as a comic itself. The drawing, the icons, the caricatures, the panels, the speech bubbles: each had a distinct purpose, focused on a single question: what does it take to effectively tell a story through a comic?

I have read comics all my life, from Tinkle to Tintin to Asterix & Obelix. In those panels, I was always intrigued by how a story was told within the confines of small boxes on a page.

As we adapt to platforms such as Claude Design, the priority is to return to the first principles of illustration. The best place to do that is through fiction mediums, particularly comics, as a storytelling framework. Fiction has the power to persuade and carry a narrative far more emotionally than most visual collateral does. While it is also useful to study advertisements with strong copy and design layout, narrative art forms teach you how visual composition and imagery carry emotion.

Next time, before sitting down to create something, consider:

• Reading a short comic first. Spend time with the classics: Tinkle, Marvel, Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Calvin and Hobbes, and the like.

• Digging manually for videos on YouTube about how freehand artists and illustrators do their work.

• Dedicating unhurried time to grasping how print collaterals are done: newspapers, classic books on advertising, typography, color, and brand schemes.

You will not just become a person with better taste; equally, you develop a richer appreciation of the history and context of how to brief more completely and use AI platforms with greater purpose.

Amplifying Hand-drawn Art with AI

There is a well-known hack for writers who want to get better at writing: sketch a map. (I had written about this earlier on a LinkedIn post). Author N.K. Jemisin has spoken about how map drawing helps her figure out what her characters want, where the story is set, and how the geography of a place shapes the people who inhabit it.

To build my own fictional universe, I have been scribbling different styles of maps in my sketchbook, using non-AI-powered instruments such as Inkarnate and Canvas of Kings to render them digitally. I have also spent several years studying how authors like Brandon Sanderson, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis approach world-building. This has improved my writing.

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Once, I sketched a map by hand, scanned it, fed the photo into Google Gemini, and explained the different marks in the sketch: the shorelines, the rivers, the hills and towns. Then I asked the platform to render it as a near-freehand illustration. The result was convincing. But the question it left behind has stayed with me: I did the slow laborious work of sketching, then gave the final product to an AI tool for enhancement.

Does that make it better? Or have I simply amplified the creation process?

I still do not have a clear answer.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Find here long-form essays and interviews that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. Visit my site to know more.

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Quick Note on Today’s Edition: This essay is about a 6-minute YouTube video titled “I Interviewed 500 Millionaire Founders. These 3 Traits Matter”. Watching this, I remembered four mentors who helped me without keeping score. It’s also the honest story behind why I’m finally building a lead magnet for this newsletter.

In Chamber of Secrets, Albus Dumbledore tells Harry Potter: “Help shall always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” This is a quote my brothers and I often tell each other; asking for help from the right person with a sense of grace and humility, and hoping you give it back to someone else in return, in time. Looking at the larger picture now as a writer, I think often about what seeking and offering help means, and how it can function as a northern star as I build my newsletter and ghostwriting business.

The Right Way To Offer Time & Mind?

I came across a Hampton Founders’ YouTube video by entrepreneur Sam Parr, titled “I Interviewed 500 Millionaire Founders. These 3 Traits Matter”. The 6-minute explainer categorises the types of people on how they ask or offer help.

• Matchers keep a scorecard. They help you based on how much you’ve helped them.

• Takers take as much as they can and don’t offer anything in return.

• Givers come in two sub-categories. The first type struggle to say no. They say yes to everything and get burned out by offering help to takers, who thrive on taking and being pessimistic. Then there are the successful Givers, who give generously but carry a sharp sense of judgment about who actually deserves their time and attention. My take is that these are people with a heightened virtue system: strong integrity, discipline, and optimism, who are often looking at leaving a legacy.

The Friends and Mentors Who Grow by Giving

In my work life, I have been lucky to know people who lead by helping. They have a strong instinct for where their time belongs, and a genuine willingness to share what they know, asking for nothing in return. This has shaped how I think about giving and building.

• H R Venkatesh, now working with IJNet, told me that protecting his energy is what makes it possible to give it so freely. He is deliberate about where he shows up, and when he does, he is fully present. I always bombard Venkatesh with a million messages via WhatsApp about everything under the sun: journalism, writing, entrepreneurship, business ideas, relationships, and more, and he always gets back.

• Alan Soon and Rishad Patel of Splice Media: When I got into the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka, I was still short of 30 per cent of my funding. Alan and Rishad offered this financial support without hesitation and without expectation. The Splice community is proof of what that culture quietly accumulates into over time: a network of media entrepreneurs who help each other because this was modelled by the founders. Their Slack group is a testament too as I often see members from all over the world sharing and helping in whatever way they can.

• Jeremy Caplan, Director of Teaching at the Craig Newmark J-School: Jeremy runs the Wonder Tools newsletter and has consistently shared tools, tips, and resources with me. I have been lucky to attend some of his workshops too, and have had the privilege of sound-boarding newsletter ideas and more across dozens of conversations over the years.

Why I Decided to Bring Out Seven Years of Writing Wisdom in This Lead Magnet

When I watched the Hampton Founders’ video, I immediately thought of these people. Venkatesh, Alan, Rishad, and Jeremy. All of them fit the ‘Giver’ archetype Sam Parr describes: warmly available but never hasty with where they show up.

I noticed the same pattern in the online writers and newsletter creators whose work I’d followed for years: Nicolas Cole, David Perell, Dickie Bush, Pat Walls, to name a few. They share an enormous amount of their content for free because that is genuinely how they think about building. It made sense why they’re successful. Giving (generosity), done with judgment and discipline, compounds.

After nearly three years in Delhi, I returned to Chennai a few months ago and quickly found myself back in conversation with former friends. Many of them have been asking about writing for different medium: Newsletters and LinkedIn. Sharing what I learned at Ashoka and through the people I met along the way has felt natural and genuinely exciting. That energy is what pushed me to finally start building: a lead magnet.

As a mechanical engineering student who pivoted to writing, I grew up reading free resources by creators I admire on how to build a career as a writer.

Just as Dumbledore said, “Help shall always be given to those who ask for it”, I am keeping my lead magnet a curated reading list for anyone who wants to write their way to a better work life.

I tested an early version as a small workshop with friends from Ashoka, and the response was enough to convince me it was worth making properly.

Watch this space as I tweak, tinker, and sculpt the lead magnet so that it finds exactly the right person it should help. Stay tuned!

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Find here long-form essays and interviews that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. Visit my site to know more.

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Join My WhatsApp Channel: Every other day, I send you one article worth your time… curated for people who think before they scroll. [Link]

Quick Note on Today’s Edition: Every writer I know struggles with the same thing: how do you convince a stranger to care about what you’ve written? I went looking for answers and found them in an unlikely place: a screenwriting book by Blake Snyder and the deuteragonists (side-characters) of fiction. Let’s dive in.

How to Find a Hero to Read Your Writing

People struggle to make strangers read their work.

Storytellers often say that you need to be good at copywriting to persuade someone to dive into your way of thinking or how you solve a problem.

To crack this code, I referred many other works. Author and screenwriter Blake Snyder stood out. He earns the readers’ trust right at the introduction of his book “Save the Cat: The Last Book you will ever need on Screenwriting”. (Refer to my highlights below).

The intro follows a clear recipe:

1. Why is there a need for his book

2. Why he is the right person to write the book

3. What you can expect out of the book

4. What makes his work credible

5. How can you practically apply this book

Whenever I get started to write an edition, I can use such questions as a self-reflection (after I replace ‘book’ with ‘newsletter’). Blake’s style of convincing follows a foundational fiction story arc told over millennia: the sidekicks are the real storytellers, not the heroes.

Here’s what I mean: a hero’s journey in fiction often starts with an invite from a side-character, a deuteragonist. The hero embarks on an adventure, a quest to find answers, win love or riches in faraway land, or it’s a journey of redemption, revenge, or meaning.

Consider the stories below:

• In Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins is gate-crashed by Gandalf and is urged to leave Hobbiton for Mordor.

• Harry Potter is a quiet kid in Privet Drive until Hagrid turns up and informs him he’s a wizard.

Side-characters want the hero to push themselves, and taste an optimistic tomorrow or become a symbol of hope. They understand every hero has a problem. But deuteragonists know how to pull the right levers so the hero can go onto the right path.

As I started writing The Fiction Emailer, it was naturally tempting to write for everyone but I knew I would spread myself too thin. I had to find my right heroes: readers who face a specific problem and need the right deuteragonist to help them move forward.

To figure this out, I studied how the newsletters I admire filtered their own heroes. What problems did they write toward? How did their voice sharpen as their audience narrowed?

I mapped those patterns alongside Blake Snyder’s five questions, borrowing from both to understand who The Fiction Emailer is actually written for.

Figuring out this bit helped me find the right reader (my hero). I’m certain that this decision will eventually help in building a newsletter that is worth returning to, even after a platforms’ rules are changed.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.

You Can Unsubscribe Anytime. No Hard Feelings

Join My WhatsApp Channel: Every other day, I send you one article worth your time… curated for people who think before they scroll. [Link]

Quick Note on Today’s Edition: I obsess over the craft of storytelling in any medium. I end up consuming way more info than I need to, but always with one purpose in mind: Writing IRL. Some habits have helped me align my creative north star. It’s drawing maps, looking for souls in newsletters and trying to replicate them, and capturing voice notes from gibberish scrawls in print. This edition is all about that.

1) Why drawing maps is a good way to start writing

Every fiction author has an idea how to start a story. Some say to:

• begin with your plot,

• fix your ending first,

• create a rich origin tale for your characters.

But author N.K. Jemisin, in her MasterClass, says she uses maps to understand her story more deeply. She starts drawing maps and...

• names the cities,

• designs the geography,

• builds the politics of the land,

• and charts the weather systems.

This helps her decide how her characters will live, behave, and react.

Now comparing this with non-fiction writing, I believe the ‘Business Model Canvas’ (BMC) by Strategyzer is a great map, a visual aid that can help someone with:

• What are they looking to solve through their writing

• Who is their target audience

• How can they make money from their writing

If you are looking to map your writing life and visualise it, then BMC is a good gateway to begin. By merging it along with Design Thinking Questionnaires (Bill Burnett’s resources) as a self-reflection, you can unfold the north star for your career. Do this exercise with a pen and paper!

I’ve pasted below a screenshot of author Jemisin’s guide to world-building with maps because I adore drawing maps. I find them therapeutic. This is an underrated creative hobby to experiment if you want your imagination to go wild before you start writing.

Once you have figured out the long-term picture of your writing life with BMC, then the next possible question is: where do you want to write? I’ve kept my focus on building this newsletter because nothing beats owning an audience through an email list. Thus, I’m always on the lookout for quality newsletter writing, which leads me to…

2) Why a newsletter deserves a ‘soul’?

So many newsletters, so little time, but the ones I open are usually the ones with a soul.

Now what’s a soul?

I often come across advice that says writers need to find their voice. My understanding is this: Voice is the ingredient that defines how you tell your story; it is the style of words you use, your grammar, your punctuations, or the way you loop in a fact into an anecdote with rich vocabulary, grace and humility.

Soul, on the other hand, adds a layer of quirkiness, the depth of contextual knowledge of a topic, a subtle sense of humor or wit laced with candor and clarity. It can be a mix of these or it could just be one. But the root element that binds a soul is the promise that you offer when a person opens your newsletter: addressing the reader’s need. I often stumble upon such high-quality magical writing in newsletters I subscribe to:

• I love The Browser for their curation of long-form reads. It’s like walking into a library of rare finds from the nook and corners of the Internet. I imagine myself that the Browser team are like jewelers dusting gold off a rough piece of ore. It’s clear they read a LOT to filter out only the BEST. Thanks to Browser, I have now stumbled upon writings from publications that I have never heard before such as Aeon, Asimov Press, etc. (Btw, Here’s a replug to my old essay: How to write curations that outlast AI)

• In Splice Frame (weekly update on media product and design) by Rishad Patel, you will always find a personal story in the opening section of each edition. It’s often a conversation that Rishad has with a friend or a work acquittance that eventually leads into the core theme of the newsletter (Read an edition). What stands out is Rishad’s style of narrating a story by blending facts and opinion subtly.

• I look forward to ‘Transfer Orbit’ by Andrew Liptak for its soulful curation of upcoming sci-fi/ fantasy books, and author updates on this genre. It’s evident from Andrew’s writing that he is a nerdy dude who LOVES this genre. (Sample this gargantuan piece: Kingdom come: How George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones took over popular culture)

• Last week, I mentioned Ann Friedman’s pie charts in her newsletter. Now that’s a strong soul that brings in character to her writing as Ann draws them by hand!

It definitely takes time to conjure a soul into your newsletter. I’m figuring this out myself. But to get started, I’m just trying to replicate the quirky things my favourite newsletter writers do and iterate as I progress. The more I read, the better idea I might get. But I have to keep writing because in the end Volume + Consistency + Intent is the greatest way to game any digital platform.

While our aim is to occupy the online space as storytellers, it is often the most mundane offline activities such as scribbling notes on paper that lead to a creative spark you never imagined. Which leads me to the following:

3) Is it easier to capture notes while reading on print?

I get distracted easily if I read from my phone or laptop. And I struggle to capture the ideas that crashes in my brain as I read. I’ve tried note-taking apps to help me organise this burst of creative interpretation that explodes after reading a million Substacks.

But it’s different whenever I read newspapers or books. These physical objects fortunately don’t have notification alerts (yet). They seem to spark a sensation in me (especially the smell of new books) to make notes more actively.

Here’s how that goes:

When I read from a print medium, I jot down micro notes with my pen on the corner of the pages or in a diary. I list down my thoughts as short bullet points and then try to give them a headline. This exercise, particularly just adding my own headline, often leads me to answer the core theme of this newsletter: Speculative Journalism and Fiction.

Some of the questions that I ask myself as I make notes are:

• How would I recommend this article or this section from a book that I’m reading to someone in two sentences?

• What do I love about this writing?

• What was the thinking behind this writing?

• What didn’t I like?

• What was missed in this piece?

• What does this mean to Speculative Journalism & Fiction?

Questions like these are the net that I cast to fish out the vague words that swims in my head. And to give them a structure further, I use Wispr Flow (a voice-to-text dictation tool) and I yap out loud by referring to my handwritten notes (that are just crisp words of tiny sentences). [I wrote in detail about this process in my earlier edition: Is Speaking Out Loud Grammar’s Last Defense?]

I used to perfect this step but it took a long time to learn that some writing aren’t meant to be published. They exist way before the real writing begins as they are vital offline exercises that no AI prompts can (or should) replace.

Writing on hand helps me crack open my brain to get a grip of the creative wildfire. Many times this process has led me to germinate my seed of ideas into long-form essays.

Love live the print medium!

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.

You Can Unsubscribe Anytime. No Hard Feelings

Join My WhatsApp Channel: Every other day, I send you one article worth your time… curated for people who think before they scroll. [Link]

Quick Note: I have over 150 books at home. I often have the habit of reading them randomly in the most odd hours, depending upon my mood. Sometimes I pick Lee Child; sometimes I pick James Patterson; sometimes I am devouring a comic.

Last week, I was rereading Dan Brown. Later, I had a call with a friend that eventually led me to a book shop. Finally, I retasted an action scene from Matthew Reilly’s world.

All of this made me understand something in common: ‘simplicity is velocity’ (as said by Nicolas Cole) in fiction, and I believe this has to be adapted writers of any genre.

I talk about this in today’s edition of this newsletter.

1) Does Dan Brown’s 𝘙𝘰𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 follow the same plot?

Here’s what I’ve noticed in all the books:

1. Robert is summoned to a speech or an event at a historical place,

2. He is invited by a friend/a work acquaintance.

3. Scene shift: You have the antagonist belonging to a secret society or a cult preparing to destroy the world or unleash something dangerous.

4. Then, you see a female lead helping Robert in his journey of finding answers.

Dan Brown narrates them all through action and tense dialogue peppered with ‘real facts’. The author says to make your story ‘unputdownable’, then let it have a ‘morally ambiguous situation’;

• Write a great hero with a solid reason why they do what they do.

• Write a greater villain with an equally legitimate reason of what makes their evil justifiable.

He then throws his characters face a...

• conflict between science vs religion,

• modernity vs tradition,

• secrets vs transparency.

If you’re his fan (like me), then do check out his MasterClass. Tons of great writing lessons here! [The note below is from his reading material. Shared below pics of his recent books that I enjoyed.]

© rayaan_writer (Book pic)

Sometimes, the best reads don’t arrive because of formula… they arrive through a phone call from an old friend! This leads me to…

2) I love diving into ‘reading rabbit holes’ if it is led by a friend.

Few days ago, Suhas Peela from the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, called me. We caught up after several months and spoke long about life, work, and everything in between.

Among the dozen topics, our chat moved into ‘creativity’... about what it is to live a creative life as an artist. Suhas suggested Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’.

Right after the call, I got inspired (or rather, I just needed a push to visit a bookshop) and I went hunting for this title at Higginbothams. I didn’t find it but I ended up purchasing:

• Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Remain’: A Supernatural Love Story

• Blake Crouch’s ‘Pines: Book 1’

• Stephen King’s ‘Full Dark, No Stars’

• Robert M. Pirsig’s ‘The Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

• Uketsu’s ‘Strange Houses’

I didn’t get the book I wanted but I do have five books that maybe I needed.

(If a friend says to read something, then do try! That’s the most fastest and simplest way to get yourself to buy a book)

© rayaan_writer

I have the habit of over analysing how a writer wrote a scene in a novel. I add notes, highlights in the books as I read. It helps me understand what probably went into the mind of the author as they penned the literary magic on paper… which leads me to…

3) Who is the literary equivalent of a Michael Bay movie?

I’ll choose one of my favourite authors Matthew Reilly.

His success as a techno-thriller novelist comes down to his unrealistic action scenes... ridiculous yet soo fun to read.

Sample the ‘action sequence’ from the photo I’ve shared below from his #book 𝘐𝘤𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 (1998).

© rayaan_writer

It follows a team of US Force Recon Marines led by Shane “Scarecrow” Schofield, dispatched to Antarctica after a research team at Wilkes Station is found missing following a mysterious discovery deep beneath the ice. Scarecrow is pitted against French commandos, British SAS, killer whales, and mutated sea creatures!

I love Matthew’s work for the pacing as it reads like a Hollywood script with:

• Short sentences.

• Paragraph breaks.

• Sharp dialogue.

• Crisp descriptions.

In an interview with Australian Writers’ Centre, he says:

“So when Ice Station was being edited I was often educating my editor. They said, “Oh, what about this?” I said, “No, no. This is something that thriller readers will be OK with.” They said, “Oh, OK.” So to their credit, it was almost like Warner Bros making The Matrix. “We don’t quite understand this, but it looks good.”“

This reminded me of a quote by Nicolas Cole on keeping one’s writing short: “Simplicity is velocity”.

And that’s all for today!

If this landed with you, forward this edition to a reader or writer in your world who might appreciate it. I also post atomic essays on LinkedIn three times a week. Come say hello. Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com 😊❤️

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Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.

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Quick Note: My mother taught me grammar with Wren & Martin textbook and a simple rule: speak out loud when you write. 15 years later, I’m using AI voice dictation tools to do exactly that but for different reasons. This essay traces my journey from red squiggly lines in MS Word to Grammarly’s corrections to Wispr Flow’s voice-to-text. Here’s what I learned: In an age where AI slop floods the internet and quietly reshape our sentences, speaking out loud might be the last defense against homogenized thinking. Grammar isn’t just rules—it’s how we think.

When I was in school, my mother taught spoken English classes. Those were the days when you actually had to be present to learn something. ‘Being present‘ wasn’t a mindfulness buzzword because words like doomscrolling or brainrot never existed. Thus, students turned up without distractions, aiming to improve their communication skills.

Mamma had battered stacks of grammar textbooks piled on the bookshelves. She’d refer to them when teaching students. Sometimes I’d flip through to see what she taught. That’s when I encountered one of her grammar books: the thick red Wren & Martin. It had exercises on nouns, verbs, active voice, passive voice, conjunctions, punctuations, adjectives, and more. Mamma would occasionally tell me to work on them. If I did them right, she’d mark it 10/10 and draw a tiny heart with ‘R’ inside or scribble ‘Ryu’. Those were the foundational days of how I became a journalist.

Looking back now, I realize how grammar has evolved. In the book by Rebecca Lee, “How Words Get Made: The Story of Making a Book,” she writes:

• Without grammar, words mean nothing and they need the subtle assistance of punctuation to lend even more nuance. Punctuation reveals the relationship between words, the emotions we want a sentence to convey, and gives us breathing space - pauses- between ideas we encounter as we read. Ultimately, all words rely on the scaffolding of punctuation and grammar to take them from good to better… The Greek word for grammar translates as the ‘art of letters’ - and that’s how we should think of it: as an art form without which our words and letters can’t reach their full potential.

After stumbling through such grammar books at home, I graduated to devouring fiction novels from Eswari Lending Library. My brothers and I read stacks of Dan Brown, James Patterson, Lee Child, Stephen King, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix or Enid Blyton. Mamma would read Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon. She had the habit of underlining certain sentences or dialogues to learn the grammatical style of these authors. Mamma’s lesson was obvious: Learning grammar is a constant effort made through consistent reading and speaking.

The Red Squiggly Lines of Authority

During the final leg of my school days, we got a secondhand laptop from a cousin, and I used its MS Word to write short stories. I recall getting upset whenever I noticed the many squiggly red lines pointing out my grammatical mistakes. I felt back then that writing is considered good only if there are no red lines in MS Word. But mamma would say: “Speak out loud. Hear how your writing sounds. The more you speak, the better you’d get.”

I recall a David Perell podcast where a guest explained the flawed logic behind MS Word’s grammatical rules: If you paste a Shakespeare quote, there are red lines too. Does this mean Shakespeare wrote with illogical grammar?

Yes… writing, reading, and communication has evolved over the years. We started by writing on stones. Then languages were born. So did culture, which led to nations and empires thriving. Then came technological revolutions across continents. We learned to speak faster, sharper, clearer—and we were also forced to create noise, confusion, and tension from the dawn of the Internet to social media. Amid all this, grammar has adapted, evolved, or dissolved. New words are born and many are lost. This led me to read this: “4 Ways the Internet Has Changed the English Language”:

• When people are bilingual – especially when they speak the standard variation of a language and then a dialect, creole or a language that is seen as inferior – there have long been concerns that the second language or dialect needs to be suppressed, or they’ll never learn the first one properly. Much the same instinct can be seen with the concerns about what the internet is doing to the English language; what if a generation grows up able only to speak lolcat, and not to read Shakespeare?! But a couple of decades of widespread internet access have demonstrated that internet dialects operate much like any other dialect: speakers learn to switch confidently and accurately between the two, borrowing words from one to the other as seems appropriate, to the lexical enhancement of both. The internet has changed the English language considerably; long may it continue.

I often look back at my own experience with grammar: I learned from my mother and by reading fiction. Later, I experimented with my writing style by depending on MS Word. Now I read more online stories, essays, articles, and newsletters. And my writing, my grammar style has changed accordingly. Now in the age of AI, writing continues to be refurbished, sliced or spiced up. So how do we engage with grammar now?

Tracing the Spike in Artificial Writing & Synthetic Grammar

We have advanced descendants of MS Word such as Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Scrivener, or Lex. In my quest to find answers about grammar’s evolution since GenAI, I first wanted to understand “Why Does AI Write… Like That?“ This New York Times essay notes:

• If we’re going to turn over essentially all communication to the Omniwriter, it matters what kind of a writer it is. Strangely, A.I. doesn’t seem to know. If you ask ChatGPT what its own writing style is like, it’ll come up with some false modesty about how its prose is sleek and precise but somehow hollow: too clean, too efficient, too neutral, too perfect, without any of the subtle imperfections that make human writing interesting. In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive to anyone who has ever encountered it. It’s not smooth or neutral at all — it’s weird.

• …A.I.s have spent the last few years watching and imitating us, scraping the planet for data to digest and disgorge, but humans are mimics as well. A recent study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos consisting of extemporaneous talks by flesh-and-blood academics and found that A.I. language is increasingly coming out of human mouths. The more we’re exposed to A.I., the more we unconsciously pick up its tics, and it spreads from there. Some of the British parliamentarians who started their speeches with the phrase “I rise to speak” probably hadn’t used A.I. at all. They had just noticed that everyone around them was saying it and decided that maybe they ought to do the same. Perhaps that day will come for us, too. Soon, without really knowing why, you will find yourself talking about the smell of fury and the texture of embarrassment. You, too, will be saying “tapestry.” You, too, will be saying “delve.”

I then dove into “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” This section stood out:

• …for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.

I later read “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing,“ and it says: “While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others.” The author continues:

• Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or becoming unreadable altogether. But good writers recognize that grammatical rules are dictated by problematic power structures and are not independent measures of correctness. Good writers assess the rhetorical context for their writing and make deliberate decisions about where to conform and where to stray.

Speak Your Mind First. You Can Draft & Edit Later

As I dissected the different wisdoms shared by the authors of the essays that I quoted above, it soon hit me: one way to become better at grammar today is perhaps to speak out loud. This was something mamma taught me several years ago when she held those spoken English classes the old-school way with textbooks and a whiteboard.

We tend to become better speakers when we interact more with others, read more and write down our thoughts in our journals. When we speak with anyone, we don’t think of grammar. We just speak because it’s instinctive, and natural. It’s like breathing. We don’t think about punctuations, adjectives, nouns, or pronouns. Thus, the more we speak, the better we can grasp our thoughts and convey our ideas clearly.

Today, tools like WisprFlow make this easier. Here’s how it works for me:

1. I jot down bullet points of any essays I want to write with pen and paper. [I write by hand because it impacts your mind positively.]

2. Then I start ‘writing’ using WisprFlow, a voice-to-text diction tool on my laptop.

3. I proceed to edit all these blurb of words and do basic grammar checks using Google Docs. Since I ‘write’ by speaking, the art of editing the flow of my grammar feels more natural and conversational.

4. I then feed this into Claude for pattern recognition and here’s what I do different: I use AI tools to ask me set of questions that is focused on expanding my thinking. [The essay by Every.to, ‘Think First, AI Second‘ offers practical insight on the same]. I get bombarded with frameworks such as why I wrote what I wrote, what’s my point here, what’s my contrarian view if any, what’s right, what’s wrong, and other such questions.

5. I respond to all of them via WisprFlow. This lets me to amplify my writing further because writing is thinking. I think and then I speak. This goes on until I believe I have created a decent first draft. Thus, AI doesn’t write for me but it simply helps me spot different ways I can think about my own writing.

These day whenever I sit down and ‘speak’ my writing, I imagine mamma sitting next to me with her grammar book, telling me the red lines are okay—that the more I speak, the more my thinking expands, and the better my writing becomes. And maybe, maybe in time, my grammar might fall into place.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more.

You Can Unsubscribe Anytime. No Hard Feelings

Quick Note: I panicked after losing my job during Covid. So I subscribed to every newsletter I could find to stay updated on anything related to media industry. That’s when I noticed: the best curators didn’t just share links—they had taste. I pull from Paul Graham on why writing is thinking, Kevin Kelly on why questions beat answers, and James Cameron on why he waited 15 years to make Avatar.

This essay is about how taste outlasts AI. It’s for anyone who is a writer, a solopreneur building a newsletter, a creator curating content, or just someone wondering how to stand out when algorithms can generate anything instantly.

I panicked when I lost my job during Covid. To stay in touch with the media industry, I subscribed to several newsletters—Neiman Lab, Splice, Axios, Charlotte Ledger, The Mill. I then stumbled upon on a piece by the Washington Post on the growth of Substack, how journalists and writers who had lost their jobs were creating their own micro media empires by building newsletters. While reading different newsletters, I noticed a pattern in how things got curated. I loved Axios’ bullet-point summaries or Splainer’s chatty tone in curating rabbit holes of things to watch, read, and listen.

When Writing Muscle Weakens

I later moved to pursue the Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University, and sadly my writing frequency dropped a lot. My style and flair were getting lost as I was offloading my voice by just prompting with ChatGPT. So I decided to focus: to think better and write for myself. Not with the intent of just getting it published, but to organise my thoughts on paper and learn the skill to dissect information I consumed through independent thinking.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen AI’s rapid growth. Now, essays can be drafted in a passable, readable format. But how do we develop taste when it comes to writing that involves curation? With this as a premise, I wanted to first understand:

• How do we write

• How do we think

• How do we curate

• How does taste come into play

Of course, there are dozens of frameworks that tell you about prompts you can use to curate writing in your own tone and style. But I wanted to get a psychological framework of writing—one that outlasts AI. Because writing is thinking, and AI cannot think; rather, it can just dump whatever you feed it. And to stand apart, you need to do what you’re supposed to do, which is to write yourself. And enjoy the act of writing.

Writing Is Thinking (And AI Can’t Do That)

For writing online to stand out, it has to have exceptional style, tone, voice, and grammar. But sometimes we forget the core part of writing is thinking. One of the world’s most popular essayists, Paul Graham, mentions in his piece “Writes and Write-Nots“:

• “One of the strangest things you learn if you’re a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they’re worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren’t; writers know how many people need help writing. The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.”

If you think better, then you’re someone who asks good questions. Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine and whose essay “1,000 True Fans” created a ripple effect during the early days of the creator economy, talks about how questions are extremely valuable in his essay “With AI, answers are cheap but questions are the future.“ Here’s a condensed version of what he wrote:

• “Today we have rapidly improving technology to answer our questions. We have Siri on our phones and Alexa in our homes. We have Google, Bing and Baidu getting smarter every day. Very soon we’ll live in a world where we will be able to ask the cloud, in conversational tones, for free, any question at all. And if that question has a known answer, the machine will explain it to us, again and again if need be....

• “Yet, while the answer machine can expand instant answers infinitely, our time to form the next question is very limited. There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work and speed needed to absorb an answer. While answers become cheap, our questions become valuable. This is the inverse of the situation for the past millennia, when it was easier to ask a question than to answer it. Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”

• “The role of humans, at least for a while, will be to ask questions. To ask a great question will be seen as the mark of an educated person. A great question, ironically, produces not only a good answer, but also more good follow-up questions! Great question creators will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new industries, new brands and new possibilities that our restless species can explore. A good question is worth a million good answers. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering. If answers indeed become a commodity, questions become the new wealth.”

In the age of information abundance, we can ask good questions only if we read and write a lot. Deep thinkers write with the goal of recording whatever readings they consume and for their ideas to simmer.

The Human Touch in Algorithms

There are so many newsletters that offer us different things to learn or entertain. The more we read, the more we’re able to think, and the more we’re able to think, the more we can ask good questions. Good questions often lead us to taste. This was predicted by Ben Thompson, one of the coolest newsletter godfathers who runs Stratechery. Here’s what he wrote in “Curation and Algorithms“:

• “Jimmy Iovine spared no words when it came to his opinion of algorithms during the unveiling of Apple Music: The only song that matters as much as the song you’re listening to right now is the one that follows this. Picture this: you’re in a special moment...and the next song comes on...BZZZZZ Buzzkill! It probably happened because it was programmed by an algorithm alone. Algorithms alone can’t do that emotional task. You need a human touch. And that’s why at Apple Music we’re going to give you the right song [and] the right playlist at the right moment all on demand.”

This shows how human touch or rather taste really matters when it comes to curating something people would enjoy.

I then read “Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever“ by Nitin Nohria for The Atlantic. He says, “In a world of limitless AI-generated choices, people need to know how to choose best.”

• “Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental. It’s cultivated. AI can now write passable essays, design logos, compose music, and even offer strategic business advice. It does so by mimicking the styles it has seen, fed to it in massive---and frequently unknown or obscured---data sets. It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations. But for all its capabilities, AI has no taste. It cannot originate style with intentionality. It cannot understand why one choice might have emotional resonance while another falls flat. It cannot feel the way in which one version of a speech will move an audience to tears---or laughter---because it lacks lived experience, cultural intuition, and the ineffable sense of what is just right.”

I started exploring foundational frameworks about curation. I read Tiago Forte’s piece, who popularized the concept of having a second brain—using your laptop or phone as a repository for all the things you consume, be it podcasts, movies, books, stories, or articles. In “The Maker’s Guide to Content Curation, Part 2: The 7 Pillars,” three points stood out for me:

1. Create a repository of valuable, pre-selected material: It’s impossible to curate effectively just by sharing things on social media as you come across them. There’s no chance that you’ll know whether something is “the best” if you’re evaluating it in isolation. The value you provide is putting it into a broader context or narrative. And that requires collecting things in a repository before sharing them.

2. Weave the personal and the objective: As a curator, you should split the difference, sharing content that has inherent value for others, while also adding your own interpretation or commentary. You want to get people used to hearing and valuing your take on the subject, apart from the plain facts.

3. Always be pitching something: You heard me right: pitch other people’s products and services that you’ve tried and enjoyed; pitch books and articles you’ve found valuable; pitch people on trying new things or pursuing their interests; pitch them to rethink or improve an aspect of their lives. Every time you write an article, post a social media update, or meet someone for coffee, try pitching them on something you know will benefit them.

Taste Takes Time (Just Ask James Cameron)

Back in December, I watched watch Avatar 3: Fire and Ash in the theater, and the experience was surreal. The VFX, the production design and James Cameron’s direction was exceptional. But I also wondered why Avatar didn’t create a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe have done over the years. Daniel Paris wrote in the Ankler Newsletter piece “The Strange Case of ‘Avatar’ and Its Missing Cultural Footprint“:

• Over the past two decades, we’ve grown accustomed to the excessive fan service that accompanies mainstream entertainment products: a franchise installment every year, a world-expanding TV series, limitless merch, casting rumors, Comic-Con trailers, co-branded Lego sets, and stories that are mostly the same but add a dash of novelty (i.e., a new actor plays Spider-Man but Uncle Ben still dies). We’re given films that serve little purpose beyond sustaining their own existence and generating future monetization opportunities --- artifacts of corporate strategy that keep a fandom flywheel moving. Fortunately, Big Jim [James Cameron] does not care about any of these things (and fortunately, Big Jim does not miss).

Avatar was designed to be watched in a theater as a 3D experience—a cinematic experience that would be nullified if you watched it on TV, as a visual novel, or on your phone. In many interviews, James Cameron kept pushing why it’s essential to watch Avatar in theaters for the big cinematic experience. He had a long-term vision. He had drawings from 20-30 years ago, but he waited 15 years as he wanted the camera tech to catch up. Today, the Avatar trilogy is the highest-grossing with a $6 billion figure.

How do you develop Taste in the age of AI

This essay by Every, “What Is Taste, Really? Understanding and honing taste in the AI age“ breaks down taste into two types: personal taste (what you like) and “good taste” (what a culture values). Personal taste comes from accumulated experience—trying things, comparing them, articulating why you prefer one over another. Good taste is cultural, often tied to status and tastemakers like Steve Jobs, whom the essay cites as an example.

AI makes execution easy, but taste becomes your edge. You sharpen it by making things, not just consuming. By building, writing, creating—you surface the decisions others gloss over. That’s how you develop discernment. Thus, developing taste takes time. To offer something of value—which is what curation is—takes muscle, skills that we build as writers with experience. By reading a lot of content that is of value and ensuring that it offers something either extremely practical or extremely entertaining.

A Small Experiment that I’m looking to test at The Fiction Emailer

To curate useful links to my readers here at the Fiction Emailer, I have a long way to go to develop taste. As a starting point, I decided the following: Rather than just bombarding with weekly curated links, I was thinking to selecting a theme, addressing patterns that fall under this theme, and then offering you a solution you can practically use. And it will all lead to what my newsletter is about—trying to make sense of our world through the framework of speculative journalism and fiction. Here’s to a more quality curatorial segment from my newsletter that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

Quick Note: I currently have 250 readers, but I’m looking for the right ones—people who genuinely value this kind of writing. Expect a personal email from me soon. My goal? 1,000 engaged readers by May 2026. If you’re here, you’re part of building something real. Thanks for sticking around so far.

You Can Leave Anytime. No Hard Feelings

I was one among hundreds of thousands in a mass of white and black across Masjid Al Haram on a warm January night in Makkah. The atmosphere electrified with the hum of Dhikr or the hushed whispers of Dua—a million voices echoing across the pillars of the largest mosque in the world.

I hear echoes of security guards yelling “Haaji!”, get tossed around by pilgrims eager to touch the Kaaba, and walk through hundreds of people from around the world whose language I didn’t understand but were ever so eager to offer me dates or snacks.

(Pic by Me)

Outside the perimeter of the massive praying complex, you will always find a long queue flooding towards Al Baik, a fast food restaurant that’s the Saudi equivalent to KFC. In the book The Barakah Effect: More With Less, author Mohammad Faris writes: “When Shakour Abu Ghazalah opened [Al Baik], he set one simple rule: for every fried chicken he sells, he’ll donate one riyal to charity.”

Muslims are often encouraged to do Sadaqah Jariyah (ongoing charity). My late mother reminded my brothers and me how this act will help us get better Barakah (divine blessing). As Muslims, whenever you think of Barakah, you often end up thinking about your own legacy, about what you leave behind after your passing. When you are in Makkah among a million other pilgrims, you think about such things: from your relationship with Allah to your relationship with your kith and kin, and what you’d want to be remembered for when you pass away.

With a gazillion thoughts storming my mind, I was also thinking about my skills as a writer. I’m looking to leave a body of work that will outlast me, and hopefully stay relevant as long as the Internet exists. This ambition has led me to sharpen what my newsletter is about:

a publication that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’. You will find here longform essays that make you become a better thinker, reader, and writer to create value, impact and legacy.

Here’s the problem that I am looking to address:

Smartphones Killed Our Ability to Think. AI Slop Is Finishing the Job

We all know what brain rot has done to us. The internet has made us foolish and hate each other. Stats say we’ll spend a major chunk of our lives looking at screens. It’s common now to have our feed flooded with fake news or genocide clips. It is super-duper hard to do any offline task because there’s always a phone notification ready to yank away our attention.

Now, thanks to AI slop, we don’t know what is real or what is synthetic. While it is easy to produce content, be it a video, a text, or an audio with just a few prompts, what AI can never do is replicate our lived experience as a human being: AI has never walked in our home, nor has it felt how we felt when we read a new book, watched a movie, or chatted with our family and friends whose memories still live in our mind rent-free.

Thankfully, this is the best part of AI – it can never be human. But for us to be better humans, writing and reading is perhaps the most important thing to do.

The Solution: Write to Think and Read to Travel a Million Worlds

To write as a human, you need to think better. And to think better, you need to read deeply—not AI summaries or apps that allow you to digest content like quick pills. Reading is powerful. You read to make sense of something complex, or to escape because the world is incredibly bizarre. So why should we let AI cut down things for us?

Writing is probably the most intimate act that lets you think clearly and to dump the words that float around our brain. Maybe some idea that popped when we were listening to a podcast, watching a reel, chatting with friends, flipping through a random book. Those offline experiences which feel so deep and humane… maybe we want to capture them by writing it down and possibly make sense of it.

That’s where frameworks come in. Frameworks are anchors, a guideline, a style of thinking about how we approach to do something to get better outcomes. Think of it as a north star to direct our ship of thoughts to reach the shores of optimism. Thus, I strongly believe the best frameworks that we can adopt in this hopeless world is speculative journalism and speculative fiction. Here’s why:

1. Speculative journalism helps you look forward to what our future could be from the current times we live in. It helps you look ahead in time through an optimistic lens, even if the present is grim.

2. Speculative fiction are stories that make you live in wildly imaginative sci-fi or fantasy worlds, offering an escape from the physics of our real world.

Together, these frameworks work hand-in-hand. Speculative journalism lets you imagine what the future can be while speculative fiction allows you to briefly live in this future through pages.

What The Fiction Emailer Does

Ryan Holiday says in The Perennial Seller that any form of writing has to either entertain or transform. I aim to do both.

The Fiction Emailer explores deep-dive essays that will help you think clearer, read sharper, write better, and look forward to an optimistic future. I’ll show you how you can use these core aspects to tap opportunities at work and earn money as a better communicator.

I’ve done this myself over the past seven years of my career from working at the smallest of newsrooms (News Today, Talk Media, DT Next) to national dailies (The Hindu) to working at leading private institute (Ashoka University) to working as a ghostwriter for accomplished entrepreneurs with decades of experience.

Of course, I still have a lot to learn. Thus, my newsletter will also include interviews with journalist creators, fiction authors, non-fiction writers, scientists, academics, and entrepreneurs. I’m eager to ask them three vital questions:

1. How they think and capture ideas.

2. How they write and communicate.

3. How they make money with these skills.

I’m joining a movement of creative individuals taking imaginative stories on a global scale from ‘MAYA’ by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon, Vaibhav Chavan’s ‘Mukti’ to writers like Peter Gould and Rehan Khan building ‘Tales of Khayaal’. There are other comparative publication examples too such as Every.to, Asimov Press, The Science of Fiction, Locus Magazine, Transfer Orbit, World Builders, and works of Nicolas Cole & Dickie Bush.

Is This For You?

My newsletter isn’t for everyone but it is certainly for someone.

I’d describe someone as follows:

• If you believe that writing sharpens thinking, and helps you become a better communicator,

• If you finish novels and immediately ask “what does this mean for the real world?”,

• If you’re looking to learn from interviews of global creatives their craft of clear writing, thinking and reading,

And finally, if you are looking at writing as a source not just to grow financially or professionally but personally too, then you’re home.

Here’s what you can expect with this newsletter:

• You’ll become someone who thinks before prompting, who reads past the headlines, who writes to clarify thoughts rather than just fill pages.

• You’ll spot patterns where others see chaos.

• You’ll communicate ideas that earn you better opportunities at work—maybe a promotion, maybe a side project or maybe just being known as someone who makes sense of things.

Because in a world where everyone can artificially create anything, the people who win are the ones who think the long-term game with skills that outlasts AI with virtues that foster impact, value and legacy.

I’m super excited to get things started. Stay tuned!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

Here’s the New Edition of🪙Scroll Gold: Weekly antidote to info overload. Articles, books, insights that actually mattered, handpicked and ready to read.

Quick Note: This is a a scheduled post that I drafted in 11 Jan 2026. I’ll be back live at end of this month.

Nailing The Newsletter Economy

The State of Newsletters 2026 | beehiiv Blog

Trends, Growth, and What’s Next for Email in 2026

www.beehiiv.com/blog/the-state-of-newsletters-2026

✍🏼 Writing + AI: Sharp Reads on Both

I Studied the Trends. Here’s What Will Matter for Writers in 2026

10 practical predictions for writers and Substack creators in 2026, covering books, newsletters, AI, distribution, micro-offers, and building a real writing business.

neera.substack.com/p/i-studied-the-trends-heres-what-will

2026 Trends And Predictions For Indie Authors And The Book Publishing Industry with Joanna Penn

What does 2026 hold for indie authors and the publishing industry? I give my thoughts on trends and predictions for the year ahead.

www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/01/05/2026-trends-and-predictions-for-indie-authors-and-the-book-publishing-industry-with-joanna-penn

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

Here’s the New Edition of🪙Scroll Gold: Weekly antidote to info overload. Articles, books, insights that actually mattered, handpicked and ready to read.

Curation by Newspapers/ Magazines

Curations by Literary Publications

Sci-fiction & Fantasy

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

Quick Note: Today’s edition is a bit different. Instead of bombarding you with the latest headlines—which you can find anywhere—I wanted to experiment with theme-based curated readings. So let’s start with optimistic new beginnings.

January is when we actually stick to our plans: As a writer, it could be writing consistently or finally writing that book you’ve been dreaming about. One of the best ways to tackle this? Start small.

I’ve seen how small is often the new big. There are writers running tight, focused publications. What follows are curated stories from people I’ve personally spoken with and followed over the years.

1. Central Desi [USA]

Ambreen and I were part of the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. It's been incredible watching her grow her hyperlocal newsletter out of New Jersey since the COVID days. She covers people, culture, local trends, civic issues—the kind of stories that matter to a specific community. In this interview, she breaks down how she built it.

2. Mylapore Times [Chennai, India]

This is one of the most respected local newsletters in Chennai—a staple in the old Mylapore neighborhood, led by Vincent D'Souza. When I worked at The Hindu BusinessLine, my colleagues constantly praised its editorial style and Vincent's take on local issues, life, culture, and trends. When I spoke with him during COVID, he kept emphasizing one thing: stay hyper-focused and niche. Cover stories that matter to your reader's specific neighborhood.

3. The Continent [Africa]

Sometime in 2023, I chatted with Sipho King, co-founder of The Continent. He explained how his team editorially develops each edition and distributes it through WhatsApp. It's a fascinating concept as WhatsApp is notorious for spreading misinformation. Thus, delivering fact-checked, well-reported journalism through the same channel is a smart way to counter fake news.

4. The Mill [UK]

During the pandemic lockdown, many journalists got laid off and started building micro-newsletters on Substack. Joshi Herrmann was one of them. Based in Greater Manchester, he launched The Mill with an essay called "The Case for a New Newspaper in Manchester"—laying out his vision from day one. Over the last five years, I've watched him build something real: crime investigations, long-form reporting, community support that eventually funded a print edition. Watching it unfold on LinkedIn has been fascinating—a masterclass in local journalism bootstrap.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe

Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

You Can Unsubscribe Anytime. No Hard Feelings

Newsletter Recommendation of the Week

The Browser is one of the fewest newsletter I subscribe to. The founder Robert Cottrell has been reading roughly 1,000 articles per day—yes, daily—to surface just five pieces of writing worth your time.

Now edited alongside Caroline Crampton, The Browser delivers timeless writing across every imaginable topic: art, science, politics, culture, history, philosophy. The key criterion? “Will this still be worth reading a year from now?”

🫶🏼Why I Like It:

• Anti-algorithm by design. While everyone else chases breaking news, The Browser hunts for writing with lasting value—pieces you’ll refer months later, not scroll past in seconds. Think long-form investigations, historical deep dives, cultural criticism that rewards slow reading.

• Intellectual range without the exhaustion. One day you’re reading about alpine kitsch, the next it’s malevolent mollusks or religions of the book. Topics span art to botany to data science, but the writing quality never wavers. It’s for curious generalists who want breadth without sacrificing depth.

🔍Get Started

• Read a sample edition

• About the editors and their approach

• Ghost’s case study on The Browser’s curation system

• Interview: The man who reads 1,000 articles a day

And that’s all for today!

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Welcome to the Fiction Emailer: A newsletter that aims to make sense of our chaotic world through the lens of ‘Speculative Journalism & Fiction’ by rayaan_writer. Visit my website to know more. Tap here to learn about the Paper Chronicles Universe.

Quick Note: Reviews of new movies, TV series, music are everywhere. When I started watching Pluribus, I didn’t want to write another review but thought of experimenting with it in a different style: a mix of personal essay + some of my reading brain experience peeled out + merge it with history/science/ideas. Wired Magazine often does such ‘what-if-in-real-life’ kind of pieces, and I thought, why shouldn’t I? So here goes:

When I started watching Pluribus, I loved that the series had zero visual effects. It is from the creator of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, and I was expecting it to be exceptionally great. It is. Rhea Seehorn, the actress who plays the protagonist Carol, is fabulous—good, rude, very short-tempered, and she just aces it .

The premise is simple: What happens when just one short-tempered novelist is the only person (along with another dozen) who can make ‘sense’ after an alien virus infects the rest of the world? ‘Turned’ humans become part of a singular hive mind and can only speak the truth and cannot harm each other — a self-imposed law that means they do not even chop trees or pluck vegetables. The world comes to a standstill. The ‘humans’ then try to convince Carol how best they can help her.

While watching, I wondered: What will happen if there is literally no evil, no need for struggle? It made me think about the science behind it, the philosophy, the logic. So I did what any writer would do: I researched both sides. What if eliminating violence and struggles created paradise? And what if it destroyed everything that makes us human?

When Struggle Feels Like Salvation

We have been told that when we struggle is when we become the best version of ourselves. While devouring essays, I noticed a pattern: philosophers from Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt argue adversity is constitutive of human greatness. Evolutionary biologists like Richard Wrangham show that intergroup conflict drove human cooperation itself.

Psychologists document that post-traumatic growth requires challenge. Political theorists warn that eliminating opposition leads to institutional weakness. The research suggests a violence-free world might produce existential emptiness, institutional decay, and evolutionary stagnation.

Reading all this research made me think of my days back in college: I flunked engineering math in my first semester. Scoring an arrear on your transcript was considered a taboo, a black mark—people assumed you can’t graduate, won’t get a job, that you’re fundamentally broken. I remember how nobody at college really offered how to see my failure in math as an opportunity to learn but just an extra burden to carry for the next semester. But that failure changed everything: I distracted myself by writing obsessively to vent my frustration. Eventually, I realized: maybe I actually enjoyed this. Maybe writing is what I need to do. Perhaps the struggle was necessary for me to pivot to writing?

The supporting character in Pluribus, Zosia (played by Karolina Wydra), who acts as Carol’s chaperone, tells her the perspective of the hive mind. She reasons with Carol that the world is a better place now with no struggles. Flashbacks sparked off my college days yet again–I’ve told the story of failing math to myself for years as proof that struggle builds character. My failure created my writing ability. But what would have happened if I hadn’t failed math? Would I have been an engineer today? Perhaps a science writer?

Pluribus And History

I’ve always been drawn to fictional world-building. I admired Pluribus‘ minimal effort in showing more by crafting less—spoiler ahead!—it doesn’t reveal the virus’ cause, nor does it show the aliens. The infected merely refer to themselves as “we.”

This drives them to work as packs. Wars stop. Everyone has the IQ of the smartest person on the planet because they can “access memories” through a “single mind.” Every child can answer complicated scientific questions.

So in my quest to dig through the history of “have we been close to developing a utopian society,” here’s what I found: Eliminating violence wouldn’t create emptiness. It would unlock the largest economic boom in human history.

Violence costs humanity $14.4 trillion annually—10.5% of global GDP. The ten countries most affected lose up to 59% of their GDP to conflict. The most peaceful? Only 3.9%.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Pre-Islamic Arabia was defined by jahiliyyah—an era of injustice, incivility, inhumanness. When Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) established the Constitution of Medina in 622 CE, replacing blood feuds with individual accountability, the transformation was dramatic: This period is considered the Golden Age of Islam because he was one of the first to establish rules of law, ethics, and conduct—guiding what makes us human. What happened? Within a century, the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East and the Mediterranean nations saw cultural growth spikes. Baghdad grew to over one million people with 36 public libraries, and so did Córdoba in Europe.

Likewise, Costa Rica abolished its military in 1948. GDP growth jumped. Today, it ranks No. 6 globally for happiness—the happiest country in the Americas. When violence recedes, civilization explodes. Rutger Bregman argues we waste talent on meaningless jobs when we should build a society aimed at betterment rather than endless growth. His ideas often focus on safety, community and access to better healthcare with less struggle.

What We Should Imagine Instead

Whenever I watch shows like Pluribus, I often try to look behind the frameworks the creator brings. Where are we heading? What does it mean for us? Pluribus was indeed entertainment, but it also flooded my brain with questions I didn’t expect: When Carol faces a world where no one can harm anyone, it feels dystopian. Something feels wrong. But maybe that’s conditioning thanks to the constant bombardment of hate speech and violence on our social media feeds. When violence/hatred recedes, humans flourish (as we saw in the stats from Costa Rica and ancient Arabia).

The show made me wonder: Just like the infected humans who tell Carol they have shifted resource for essential healthcare, what if we really did have an alien virus that gave us a hive mind to solve healthcare, climate change, natural disasters together as a whole?

I was also left thinking: What if we lived on Mars and rebuilt society from scratch? What if everyone had healthcare? What if there were no billionaires, no genocide, no monopolistic countries?

These are absurd questions—but absurdity is where creativity lives. Questions that push against the status quo could be the answers we need for a new tomorrow. Maybe paradise, a ‘utopian’ society like Pluribus, doesn’t feel wrong because it’s impossible. Maybe it feels wrong because we’ve been taught our entire lives that we need suffering to deserve greatness. But perhaps we can still touch greatness if we do get access to better everything with less struggle. Maybe a Pluribus world then might not be a dystopian nightmare.

And that’s all for today!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions.

Feel free to reach me at rayaanjournalist@gmail.com or you can simply reply to this email or comment below. See you soon! 😊❤️

Subscribe