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Writing: Every paragraph is a universe.

Originally published 2026-08-09 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-08-09. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

Writing: Every paragraph is a universe. image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Writing: Every paragraph is a universe. image from the original Advisory Hour post.

This is an exercise in writing. I’ve written before on why I write by hand. Here’s why. AI teaches the lesson that if you want better results, then you need to write better. Know more concepts, connect more ideas, and write with a fearless authority that makes bold blush.

I couldn’t say where I read or misread the concept. The idea stuck with me like chewed bubble gum and hair. This notion of a paragraph as a universe wedged itself somewhere tangled up in my brain. It was something I chewed on for a while.

Every paragraph is a universe.

Being AI “attuned” meant that I had voice and text chats to make sense of what this could mean. I make no claims at being great at writing. Each word is trapped in an abstraction that I’m pulling apart, seeking truth and sacrificing communicability for speed of it. The gum is intertwined with the hair strands of clarity. (What a sentence!)

My substack is filled with wonder, awe and virtual worlds. Simulated places to visit, or perhaps shallow reflections sampled from the multi-verse that we haven’t learned to “tune into”. Each multi-verse a strand of hair and our cosmic ride, short as it is, wedged into the timeline like chewed gum buggering it all up.

ChatGPT said it would be easy enough to just use a formula to make sense of the mystery. Everything with ChatGPT is simple. I’m a mere mortal amongst these immortal, digital creatures that seem to extend beyond space and time. So it amuses me when they reduce a complex idea of a universe in a paragraph, a virtual world latent in a few sentences, into a three-act play.

The first sentence opens the world.
The middle discovers its laws.
The final sentence changes the weather.

I don’t really understand the writing exercise. I’m holding a screen-door open and leaning in, but it plants my face into the cold, wooden front door to the house of clarity. I’d let you in, but I need to find a way in myself. I could jiggle the handle, but it doesn’t seem to help. More characters get pressed by my slow moving fingers over an impossibly loud keyboard. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed for the entire Cubs game at the bar? That thought runs around my mind like a rhetorical question of the absurd. No, the Cubs are important. We stay until it’s over.

Those who know me realize I have undertaken a grand journey of reading a ridiculous number of books this year. The books pile up around my house. The journey is a search for discovery. There’s a question I can’t ask and an answer I can’t find. I know the thing I need is hidden in a book. I jiggle the handle to the door a little more. My forehead pressed against the door. The answer is hidden just behind the door. I just don’t have the key.

The keychain of clarity is likely not a single book, but our relationship to them. Reading lots of books changes you in weird ways. It’s a slow-motion version of the Matrix movies. You travel with Lewis and Clark, dive into the marshy depths with Beowulf, experience Monty Python like moments with Caesar, and learn the hidden secrets of history that are smoothed out in history class because of politics and international interference.

A paragraph has international relations. It’s connected to each other paragraph in an essay like this. I’m not sure if I can talk about the foreigner of the prior paragraph or the very first paragraph is the one that’s secretly controlling the entire show. I try pushing the door as I turn the handle. The answer, I’m sure, is just inside.

The universe is an inside. We’re all contained inside of it. So many writers and thinkers over time have wondered if there’s an outside to the inside. It seems likely and also not. An apple has an inside. It has seeds, a core, and skin and a stem. It also has color, flavor and smell. The universe might just have a flavor. Maybe buttered enriched salted popcorn like they offer at the movie theater. Since every paragraph is a universe, then it makes sense for each word is filled with color, flavor and smells.

A well written book is a recipe that the mind cooks with. It doesn’t take much effort on part of the reader. Shapes, sounds, symbols conjure dazzling scenes if you slow down to imagine the slow draw of a blade from a sheathe, or the sound of elephants loud trumpets as they marshal their way down an old, cobbled street. A print of parchment flaps in the wind with font covered up, takes flight and the wind carries it to the doorway. It settles in the corner. The door to clarity is still locked. The paper might hold a clue. Instead, it’s a riddle.

Every paragraph is a universe.

The Notebook

I chew through creative writing exercises in notebooks on the regular. The doodling fills most pages. Cartoon like expressions when words fail to find their way from mind to ink. If writing is an interest of yours, too? Well, this might be useful to you, too.

Hardcover journal matte - Every Paragraph is a Universe

Writing: Every paragraph is a universe. image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Writing: Every paragraph is a universe. image from the original Advisory Hour post.

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