JPEG GHOST

It won't be a surprise to you that I love beautiful writing. Writing that breathes, writing that twists, that flows like a river over smooth, unblemished stone; writing that evokes aroma, sound, imagery, that flexes the reader's imagination in new, unexpected ways; writing that makes us believe, for a moment, that we are really there for the events unfolding in front of us, no matter how extraordinary or strange they might be. Writing, in other words, that takes you on a journey.

In 2025, beautiful writing* is not in vogue. In my experience, the prose of most bestsellers today runs the gamut from "irritating" to "occasionally evocative." I've certainly read a number of contemporary works in the past two years where the story was well-executed and easy to read. In these books, the writing is in service of the story, not elevating it.

I sometimes watch videos about writing. While I would like to say my YouTube history is perfect and unbiased, I'm sorry to say it isn't. I'm vulnerable to clickbait like "why no one writes beautifully anymore" or "people don't know how to write." And recently, I happened to click on one of these videos.

What followed was roughly an hour of conservative dogwhistles, interspersed with the seeds of good ideas. I felt very mixed about the whole thing, as the literary crisis in the United States is real, and again—I rarely pick up books these days that stick with me because of their writing. To make matters worse, I visited the creator's Substack, only to find even more conservative ideas like objective morality (based on Western ideals, of course) and facts over feelings, while the creator cherry-picks sources of questionable credibility to support her claims. Eurgh.

So let's have a bit of fun. Let's discuss that video against two other videos I've watched about writing and see how it holds up. At the end of my analysis, I'll even try to offer some ideas (purely subjective) of my own on the question of beautiful writing. We'll begin with the video I took issue with.

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* NB: within traditionally published work in English in the United States