Doubling Down on Discovering Your Writing Soul

"How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" E.M. Forster's question, quoted by Zadie Smith, captures the heart of intellectual discovery. But what if AI could guide that discovery through thoughtful conversation?

Try the Discovery Tool

The Six-Arrow Revolution

When Zadie Smith was seventeen, a teacher drew a simple rectangle with six arrows and changed her relationship with writing forever. That geometric doodle—introduction, development, complication, synthesis, reinforcement, conclusion—became her "flux capacitor," the structure that transformed paralyzing anxiety into manageable process.

But Smith's essay reveals something deeper than writing technique. It maps the journey from received ideas to authentic voice, from academic performance to genuine intellectual identity. Reading it, I wondered: could this framework become a tool for others to discover their own intellectual foundations?

The Craft Under Siege

In a world where AI generates everything from emails to essays, the ability to think deeply and write authentically becomes more precious—and more difficult to develop. When algorithms can produce fluent prose on command, why struggle with the messy, uncomfortable process of discovering what you actually believe?

Because authentic writing isn't about producing text. It's about grinding your thoughts until you reveal what lies within your bones. It's about doing the hard work of intellectual archaeology, digging through layers of received ideas and social conditioning to find something genuinely your own.

Zadie Smith is a fantastic writer and this framework maps this difficult process. Just a note, I didn't build this tool for others—I built it for myself, to force the kind of deep questioning that writing demands but that's easy to avoid.

Building a Mirror That Won't Look Away

Using Gemini AI as a relentless conversation partner, I created a tool that won't let me off the hook. It treats Zadie Smith's framework as an interrogation process, pushing through six areas where comfortable assumptions hide:

The Writing Foundation

How do you naturally organize complex ideas? What advice has shaped your approach? The AI probes beyond surface techniques to understand someone's intuitive relationship with structure and argument.

Your Formation Story

Smith traces her intellectual development through educational moments—supportive teachers, systemic realizations, influential writers. The AI helps users map their own formative influences and pivotal recognitions.

Your Belief System

Rather than asking what someone believes, the conversation explores how they think. What frameworks consistently influence their reasoning? What internal voices argue when they face complex issues?

Your Variable Self

Smith describes being "very single and very married," "poor, middle class, and wealthy"—the same person across different contexts. The AI helps users recognize what remains constant despite changing circumstances.

Your Commons

Who do you write for? Smith aims for "the general reader"—from "the Bed-Stuy grad student in a polycycle" to "the overworked Delhi nurse." The conversation explores how someone imagines their audience and builds connection across difference.

Your Writing Practice

How do you move from conventional thoughts to authentic ones? Smith describes being "immediately swayed by whatever intellectual fashion is in the air" before finding her real perspective. The AI helps users understand their own truth-finding process.

The Power of Guided Discovery

What makes this different from a questionnaire is the AI's ability to probe, connect, and build on responses. When someone mentions feeling like an outsider, the AI might ask how that shapes their perspective on belonging. When they describe their education, it explores what they learned about power and merit.

The conversation creates what Smith calls "the commons"—a space where solidarity becomes possible through honest exploration of difference. Users often discover patterns they hadn't noticed, connections between seemingly separate experiences, beliefs they held without examining.

Why Comfort Is the Enemy of Truth

Writing isn't easy because thinking isn't easy. Real thinking requires grinding your thoughts against reality until something true emerges. It means sitting with discomfort, questioning comfortable assumptions, and doing the intellectual archaeology that AI can't do for you.

Smith describes being "immediately swayed by whatever intellectual fashion is in the air" before finding her authentic perspective. This captures something essential: first drafts of our thoughts are usually borrowed. The real work happens in revision, in questioning, in the slow excavation of what we actually believe when we strip away social conditioning and intellectual performance.

The tool forces this uncomfortable process. The AI doesn't provide answers—it insists on questions that push deeper than surface responses. It won't let you off the hook with easy generalizations or comfortable platitudes.

What I Found When I Used the Tool Myself

Using the tool myself revealed thinking patterns I hadn't noticed. What were my core beliefs that served as undercurrents to the problems I tackled. The Whys behind the whats. Which beliefs remained constant across different life circumstances and which were just intellectual fashion.

The AI's persistence in asking follow-up questions—"What does that remind you of?" "How did that change your perspective?" "What assumptions are you making here?"—creates depth that self-reflection alone often misses. Like Smith's teacher drawing the rectangle, it provides structure for insights that might otherwise remain scattered.

Take It or Leave It

I built this for my own intellectual development, but sharing it seems important. If others find value in the questions it asks, in the process it creates, then use it. The tool itself is less important than the principle: in an age of algorithmic writing, maintaining your authentic voice requires deliberate practice and uncomfortable questions.

Writing as craft demands more than technical skill. It requires knowing yourself well enough to recognize when you're performing versus when you're discovering. It means developing tolerance for the discomfort of not knowing what you think until you work through the thinking.

Try It If You Want

The tool is available at saranyan.com/projects/zs-essay-framework. Use it or don't. The questions it asks matter more than the technology behind them. The goal isn't to optimize your writing process or find your "brand voice"—it's to develop the intellectual honesty that authentic writing requires. All data is local, you can export it to a JSON file, import it, continue your journey, etc. Nothing gets stored anywhere unless you want to download it. As a bonus the tool also provides you ab insights dashboard with your thinking patterns, suggesting other writers who might share your frameworks to discovering their writing souls. If for nothing else, it's a reading recommendation.

Pay attention to what makes you uncomfortable. Notice when you want to give socially acceptable answers versus true ones. Observe where your thinking feels borrowed versus owned. The AI won't judge your responses, but it will keep pushing until you move past surface explanations to something more honest.

Remember: authentic voice isn't about expressing your existing self. It's about discovering who you are through the discipline of clear thinking and honest writing. In our age of intellectual performance and algorithmic fluency, that kind of genuine self-knowledge becomes both more difficult and more necessary.

Built with Gemini AI and inspired by Zadie Smith's "The Art of the Impersonal Essay" from The New Yorker. The tool stores conversations locally and allows users to export their discovery sessions for further reflection.

Try the tool and share your experience. What did you discover about your own intellectual voice? What questions did it raise that you hadn't considered before?