Jacob Szymanski

More cholesterol.

Yeah, cut the cholesterol.

Now, if you put all of this together, if somebody listens to all this advice and an author has a great voice of their own, and you could say that they have phenomenal prose, the ultimate goal of that is to have the readers feel something.

When writing is done well, it feels a certain way.

What does good writing feel like to you?

And something that goes a long way in writing that way.

is to engage in hyper specificity don't say oh it smells like it smells like amazing food at this street corner no it smells like the fish and chip shop it smells like the well-used oil of the fish and chip shop now we're talking now i'm feeling like i'm in london

I have to add one more feeling that I get when I'm reading really good prose.

And that's that you get this I'm in good hands feeling where you can just trust what the author is saying.

And you take off that critic hat and you just you sit in the moment and you fully trust the author.

You don't question where is this going?

Why is this relevant?

You just assume everything is relevant.

You don't even tell yourself that it's all relevant.

You just feel it internally.

Exactly.

You're right there.

You're right there in history when you're in that history class and you get put in the place, right?

It's that feeling of...

being present in the page you're not reading a book with print you're not listening to an audiobook with somebody's voice you're just there that's the magic trick of literature isn't it that you can get transported in that way that's why books have this mystique to them they're magical in that sense they're like these old tomes i will say