A Brief Look At Paul Graham's Writing Habits (with Charts)

I would say that Graham tends to have the modernist tendency to cut anything superfluous; to quote Milan Kundera in _Encounter_, "Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever comes from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say)." Kundera, like Graham, is very good at doing this in his nonfiction; his essays on the novel contain more in 200 broadly spaced pages than most tomes about literary theory that I've read.

One other thing: is very, very good at not repeating himself and not having ideas with an extreme amount of overlap. I think that's one reason he tends to say things like, "I'm not saying X" as clarification -- to avoid misreadings that might result from his terseness.

This tendency towards minimalism, by the way, is one of the same things that John Sculley talks about Steve Jobs having in terms of industrial design: http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... . Graham does it in nonfiction writing. Elmore Leonard does it in fiction; he's incredibly skilled at compacting a lot of action into a very small space. If you're looking for fiction that's as "dense" (for lack of a better term) as nonfiction, try Leonard. His subject—capers of a vaguely criminal and usually underworld nature—might not appeal to you, but the man has style.

In addition, Graham is very good at using metaphors and comparisons with history. There isn't really a good way to analyze metaphor that I know of. Some of the better attempts include Lakoff and Johnson's _Metaphors We Live By_ and Steven Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_. But, as far as I know, no one has a complete theory of why we think associatively and metaphorically. Good writers, however, will tend to exploit the tendency to view one thing in term of another.

The problem with these kinds of generalizations is that they're very hard to make concrete. You might notice that I don't cite a lot of examples from Graham's writing because it''s harder to prove the absence of perceived filler than it is to identify filler when you see it.