Hacker News Reader

Comment by samdk | Hacker News Reader

This is linked in the article, but you can watch the author write this article here: http://ietherpad.com/ep/pad/view/somers-atlantic/latest

It's really interesting to watch someone else's writing process and see how that compares to mine. (Especially when that someone does a lot more writing than I do.) I find that when I'm writing a mid-length essay like this I tend to get very disorganized very quickly. I think it'd be valuable to try to record myself and see what, exactly, I'm doing, and then try to use that to improve.

View on HN

Wow! This makes me feel so much better about my writing. I always thought good writers just busted out an article. I didn't think they put in so much scaffolding. Being a good writer now seems almost attainable.

I'd like to see the same thing done with math.

That's a hell of an idea. One thing it took me a long time to learn was that being good at math is mostly about working really hard. It's hard to know that, because until you're a graduate student the only messy incomplete work you ever see is your own. Everything you find in textbooks is pristine, and worse, it all looks like it occurred quite naturally to the author.

"because until you're a graduate student the only messy, incomplete work you ever see is your own"

That's assuming, of course, you never ever try to solve a problem with anyone else before grad school. That seems possible but highly unlikely.

There's a big difference between seeing a peer struggling on a problem and seeing an instructor/professor struggling on a problem.

A few weeks ago I was in a maths lecture, and the lecturer was, as is fairly standard, writing proofs from his notes as he went. He then mentioned one of the exercises, explained the proof strategy for it, and then started to actually write out the proof.

After five or six lines he stopped, scratched his head, looked at the proof, and crossed out the last line he'd written. Then he looked at it some more. After a couple of minutes he looked up, apologised, and said he'd got stuck and that we'd go back over it in the next lecture.

It was a great relief to me that my own struggles were not the result of laziness or stupidity: some things are just hard, and take a while to get right, and it's rare to be able to write down something in its correct form on the first pass.

>After five or six lines he stopped, scratched his head, looked at the proof, and crossed out the last line he'd written. Then he looked at it some more. After a couple of minutes he looked up, apologised, and said he'd got stuck and that we'd go back over it in the next lecture.

He probably just proved the Riemann Hypothesis in his head and got distracted.

"The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn't write."

Oh, yes. One of the things I learned as a writer is to write crap. Write drivel. Sitting there trying to get it Just Right, staring at the page or screen as you attempt to dig up that bon mot just kills it.

Write whatever, get it down. Out of order, out of the blue? Stick it in the Do Something With This section. Just get it out of your head and saved someplace.

Then you can go back, read it over, rewrite stuff, fix it up and, ideally, cut the shit out of it to make it tight on a serious murder-your-darlings rampage.

Hence NaNoWriMo, of course.

Oh, I don't know about that. I didn't write Don Quixote, but it's pretty good.

I don't consider myself a great writer, but for anything complex I work on it will be full of bits like "Benefits include X, Y and [needs third benefit]" or "[NEEDS TO EXPLAIN WHY WE ARE MORE SECURE CHOICE]" that I throw in so I can get my framework down without getting bogged down in details.

It didn't hit me until you in particular said it. This sort of scaffolding reminds me of how I write code.

   def foo(a,b,c):
      h = bar(a,b) + bar(b,c)
      if h > a + b + c:
         h = dothatotherthing(h,a,b,c)
      return h

where neither bar, nor dothatotherthing are written yet. (clearly, they have better names than that)

When I write anything longer than about a paragraph, I always start with an outline. I used to hate outlines; I'd just bust out a 10-15 page paper and write up the outline afterward (who didn't do that?).

Now though, for a 1000-1500 word piece, I spend at least an hour outlining it. Even the outline itself goes through a few drafts before I start trying to add complete paragraphs. I'd rather have a solid grasp on the ideas I want to communicate than on the specific turns of phrase I'll communicate them with. Turns of phrase are a dime-a-dozen. A clearly communicated idea is much harder to find.

A lot of that has come from practice, but I also owe a lot to PG's essays on rapid iteration from mush to presentable product.

My teacher once told me of a newspaper journalist who, when using his computer, would just turn off the monitor and write his piece from start to finish. He would then, presumably, proceed to polish it afterwards. How is that for distraction-free work flow?

There are so many ways to approach writing, it sometimes scares me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com