Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture | Hacker News Reader

Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture

theguardian.com

208 pointssohkamyung71 comments

I relate to this deeply as a creative person. I'm in the middle of trying to bootstrap some businesses this year, and the act of creating these things is such torture sometimes.

Which is weird right? I've left my day job, I'm doing exactly what I want to do, working on exactly what I want to work on, so it should be great all the time right? And yet the daily emotional sensations I feel while actually doing the work is usually a mixed bag. Every once in a while I'll have a fantastic day where I feel great about what I'm doing from start to finish, but sometimes just defeating the resistance within me and getting any trivial amount of work done is the best I can do.

A lot of it comes down to basic quality of many creative endeavors: starting is easy, and finishing is hard. You can start anything, but if you work for long enough eventually you arrive at this ugly middle place. The part of the journey where you start to notice all the warts and imperfections of what you're making, when your limits start to show themselves, when the picture of the thing in your mind starts to diverge from what you're realistically capable of doing. Seeing that, knowing that it was you who created all of that "crap," and _still_ pushing through it to get to the flawed, imperfect, compromised final product, THAT is tough.

I suspect this is what Adams was expressing: "Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me." Or expressed differently: "This character I've created is starting to become ugly in his imperfections, and I feel like I'd rather throw the work away than continue with it."

If you're curious to read more, I write about these kinds of ideas in this part of a recent blog I wrote: https://startupinamonth.net/month-two-week-three/#flying-on-...!

> A lot of it comes down to basic quality of many creative endeavors: starting is easy, and finishing is hard. You can start anything, but if you work for long enough eventually you arrive at this ugly middle place. The part of the journey where you start to notice all the warts and imperfections of what you're making, when your limits start to show themselves, when the picture of the thing in your mind starts to diverge from what you're realistically capable of doing. Seeing that, knowing that it was you who created all of that "crap," and _still_ pushing through it to get to the flawed, imperfect, compromised final product, THAT is tough.

Reminded me of this excellent zenpencils comic illustrating Ira Glass' advice for beginners : https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beg...

What keeps me going is the deep knowledge that at the end of the day I will be happy I did it.

Same with running. Of course I hate the idea of getting up early or going out in the evening esp in bad weather. And of course first mile is horrible, horrible experience. But what keeps me running is this certainty and knowledge that it will get better ( as oxygen high kicks in and muscles stretch and body warms up ) and that I never and I really truly mean ever regretted I went for a run. Absolutely ever.

So my only job is to remove friction, get multiple types of clothes ready and near the door, not over do it and create bad experience and show up. Even if I have to lie to myself, put on running clothes and grab MP3 player and say I am just going for a walk. I know I just have to do that first mile.

It is same with my work. Of course it is hard at first. And scary. And I end up scanning job sites during breaks. But even when I create something, even something I don't like or even when project fails, I am still proud and happy I did it. Always. So I just have to show up and survive first 30 minutes.

There are still temptations you have to map out and avoid, and there are always bad days you have to be ready for. And every job has parts you don't like.

At the end of the day I do feel better than when I work anywhere else. I am not 9 to 5 kind a person. I am too anxious for that and I always end up doing free unappreciated overtime to make sure project gets done. So it is even financially better to work for myself.

Running is a good analogy for another reason. Lots of amateur runners push themselves way too hard, to the limits of perceived effort, especially early in a run. It's important to have a sustainable pace during a run, which actually means not pacing based on perceived effort and using other guides like heart rate. It should feel like you could be going much harder. (Edit: setting aside runs in training schedules meant to increase vo2 max, etc etc)

This is almost true, but not quite. I find I can do some creative things very, very quickly. They don't take much time or effort at all, and they're honestly pretty good.

Other projects take an obscene amount of time and effort. They're not necessarily better.

With the first type of project I don't care about the results. I'm just noodling around with various toys, trying out various things, following up if I think they look interesting. Sometimes good things fall out.

The second type is far more conscious. I'm working, checking, improving, iterating, trying to reach some kind of standard that is impressively high.

Most of the effort goes into overcoming self-criticism and self-consciousness. And it's not a surprise these tend to be longer-term projects with goals.

It would be interesting if there were a way to build businesses and websites that was basically just about experimenting and fooling around with no real costs, in time or money.

I wonder if that might not be more successful than we way we usually do things.

Its why I think so many people in the startup community say get users right away instead of making the perfect thing - those users interest and needs sustain you when you are just too bored and disgusted with all that crap.

> so it should be great all the time right?

For me at least, I think most of my "suffering" has come from expectations like this that are incongruent with reality. Who said it should be great all the time? I'm right there with you. I have add all sorts of expectations like this in life that when put to the test via my own experience, and the experiences of others, just don't add up.

I really appreciate this comment - when I was working on my old startup, I felt exactly the same way.

I quit my old job and was working on what I wanted to, and yet felt this resistance that I couldn't explain. The nagging doubts that I was doing the right thing, that it wouldn't be good enough, and the fact that it would be all o n me if things didn't work out.

It's definitely one of those mental roadblocks that's hard to explain until you've been through it.

As someone who has been susceptible to chronic depression, I understand completely. I've had to explore these nagging doubts with a good therapist to be able to get past them.

Motivation is still a black box for me. I have learned that of I'm not motivated, something is wrong.

As someone finishing the last touches on an MVP, I really relate to this. I've been at it part-time for almost a year, so I'm surprised to see you hitting this point after only two months. Good luck, I hope it gets better!

Rich Roll discusses this barrier in his podcast with Andrew Hiberman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwQhKFMxmDY

Typed out version:

> General Note to Myself

> Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them. Give yourself time you can come back and do it again in the light of what you discover about the story later on. It's better to have pages and pages of material to work with and sift and maybe find an unexpected shape in that you can then craft and put to good use, rather than one manically reworked paragraph or sentence.

> But writing can be good. You attack it, don't let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it...!

Yeah, I'm in the middle of editing a novel I wrote late last year right now. A big thing I figured out was it it okay to leave out some of what a final draft needs because I can do it later. Right now I'm actually adding more rich descriptions to a lot of my scenes because I just didn't bother originally, and simply not worrying about it let me focus on the things I knew I needed and now I'm fixing it.

Not trying to do everything at once makes writing prose way easier.

When I embarked on writing my first (of 10) books, my publisher shared a wise quote/insight, which I have never forgotten:

[The quote has been attributed to many authors, so I won’t engage in that debate]

“I don’t enjoy writing. But I love having written.”

Na’er a true word has been spoken.

Contrast with Stephen King:

https://youtu.be/EhwLqRQ8unM?t=136

I think this is the "correct" strategy for long term success. Why? Because this was also Issac Asimov's strategy. In a essay in the late 80's he talked about the visceral enjoyment of using a typewriter. The essay was in a Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. I can't find it at the moment. But I read and reread it as a kid.

These kinda get the gist :

https://www.developgoodhabits.com/isaac-asimov/

https://lynnkilmore.com/2009/07/18/janet-and-isaac-asimov-on...

Some version of that applies to many many things.

There's also the closely-related case of people like the concept of being a $OCCUPATION. But they don't really want to do a lot of the day-to-day work associated with it.

Upvoted for na'er

Knowing that Adams struggled with procrastination has helped my own battles with it:

> I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” ~ Douglas Adams

This and also some interview with Neil Gaiman where he talks about how he has to invent strategies to make himself write are a great confirmations that I am on a right path in my creative endeavours.

It is easy to start rationalizing, that when you get to the point in the process where you "suffer" or loose all your interest (the grind starts), that it is due to the activity not being "it" - your passion. I dont believe this is the case. Its just the plateau which every artists experience once in a while.

I have to keep reminding myself about this. Great artistic outcomes are result of hard work which does not have to be pleasurable all the time.

Creativity is backed up by plain hard work. Have idea, work hard to bring it to life.

As somebody writing his first novel, I had to discover how hard writing can be. The problem with prose is that it becomes good only after many passes of editing. Many means that the same chapters will be read tens of times, and sometimes certain parts will be rewritten several times. But there is no escape for this process, every prose can be improved, so in order to avoid a subpar output, this is what you need to do. However this only happens in the second stage. The first draft is another matter: in this moment you are free to let your creativity run and deeply surprise yourself. In general I believe that the creation of decent things, whatever they are, and even in the artistic world, a lot of efforts are needed, and this can make you hate the process sometimes.

When working closely with graphical artists in creating mobile browser UIs at Opera Software ~10 years ago I found out kinda the same thing. We went through so many people who just couldn't (or rather: wouldn't) iterate. They made one iteration and that was it. After that first iteration they wanted some new project or some new approach. Improving on the current approach was boring.

They were often great artists, but not yet that suitable for this kind of grinding we're doing when creating mass-market software products.

The people we stuck with were able to do 10+ iterations, slightly improving on each iteration.

I think the ability/willingness to iterate is very important in artistic fields. It does not seem to be a part of the typical university-level education programs. I think this is bad - although I see how it could be a challenge to include this aspect there.

I agree with every word. It is not the most funny part of the process, and it requires some perspective, to realize that the first version of anything is something that can be more perfect. But it pays so much. However there is to make sure to avoid the reverse, iterating forever. There are folks I know with books that are in the "I'm almost there" stage for 5/6 years.

I guess the requirements are:

a) the mental ability to iterate

b) a competent editor who can keep them moving forwards

Perhaps some very unusual people are able to handle a+b on their own, but I think most people need that other person/editor.

Yep, the editori apparently is needed, and I'm starting to work with one. But in my specific case, with my programming background, I wanted to reach the editor only with a novel that was already very readable and already targeted by N passes of reviews and corrections done on my own. Others decide to work with an editor at a much early stage. Depends on many things I guess.

In the Simpson's commentary for the early seasons they said they did 30 read throughs of jokes, and if it was funny for 29 times but not on the 30th, they axe it.

I experience this 100% with writing music. I suspect most of it is around the need for your creation to be good, versus allowing it to be child-like play. If you're able to suspend the need to be good for a moment, you can start to experience again the joy of playing, inventing, letting go. Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery is a great reference for this.

Thanks for reference. I find music inexplicably easy unti it needs to be directed. If I am just exploring whatever has come out then it just follows a natural path. If I must write to a brief or to another’s melody then that is a different beast!

I find that the creative juices come and go but the real pain is doing it for other people and that seems to drive the procrastination and waning interest.

I built up an observatory and starting publishing data/images and i wrote a lot, did a bunch of guides, shared everything and dealing with people sucked the life out of it.

I can't imagine being a writer by trade and having to deal with the pressures of people trying to impose their views on the creative process.

I'm selling everything off and restoring my sanity and going with a mobile set up and writing free posts and giving away everything for free and it like the weight of the world off my shoulders...

I'd hope i could do it for a living and be creative and welcome people to the hobby - but i found it way too competitive and the community too challenging - in an odd challenging every decision you make kind of way... the best people i dealt with were teachers so i kept them around - but the worst people i dealt with were the hobbyist... they have no problems paying 5000 bucks to have crappy photos in their backyard as long as they do it but 100/bucks a year for access to 500gb of raw data from b1 skies and they do charge backs and file tickets if its not 100% perfect - even after they went and downloaded everything or sync'd the dropboxes...

maybe i'll go self publish everything in a book ;)

> Note in which Hitchhiker’s writer reminds himself he will finally get pleasure from process to be part of book based on his archive

Are words missing from this or am I having a stroke?

This is a classic garden-path sentence [1] if I ever saw one. It happens sometimes in "headlinese" when editors or authors try to squeeze as many characters out of a headline as possible.

"[A] note[,] in which [The] Hitchhiker's [Guide To The Galaxy] writer reminds himself he will [']finally get pleasure from process['][,] is] to be part of [a] book based on his archive."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

I think the crime here is that this tortured sentence isn't even the headline but the byline, and The Grauniad seems to permit up to three lines of text, e.g.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/23/thomas-bernhar...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/22/kate-briggs-re...

The headline of this article is a garden path for me too, because at first I thought they discovered a book he wrote on torture or something.

I think I've figured it out after reading the article, but I'll be damned if that's not some strange phrasing:

Note (In which Hitchhiker's writer reminds himself (he will finally get pleasure from process)) to be part of book (based on his archive)

You can see how it happened. Now that you've explained it, it's easy to read, even without any assistive punctuation. But the first time I tried to read it through, it was impossible. The writer is obviously already at the latter stage, so they can't even see that it's unreadable.

Note that the first word of the phrase, “note”, is a noun rather than a verb.

That Douglas Adams hated writing is extremely well known. Stephen Fry has a good description of Douglas Adams trying to write. (It's probably in Fry's oddly titled autobiography.)

It's in the least oddly titled of the three volumes, "The Fry Chronicles".

What’s the description?

> Douglas’s writing routine was painful in the extreme. Sue Freestone, his publisher at Heinemann, would come round and beg, often almost with tears welling in her eyes, for pages from his printer. Douglas would hurl himself downstairs to the coffee machine, hurl himself back up again, thump to his desk and sit in front of the computer. After an hour or so twiddling with the screensaver, the wallpaper, the title of the file, the placement on the desktop of the folder the file was stored in, the formatting, the font, the size, the colour, the margins and the stylesheets, he might type a sentence. He would look at it, change it to italics, swap the word order around, get up, stare at it some more. Hum, curse, growl and groan and then delete it. He would try another sentence. He would look at this one and now perhaps give a little puff of pleasure. He would stand up, stride across the room and hurl himself down to the kitchen, where Sue and I would be gossiping and smoking around the table, and make himself another incredibly strong coffee.

> ‘Dare I ask?’ Sue would say.

> ‘Going well. I have the first sentence!’

> ‘Oh.’ It would be perhaps July with the new novel already overdue the previous September. One sentence written so far. Sue would smile tightly. ‘Well, that’s a start at least …’

> Douglas would nod enthusiastically and fling himself back up the stairs, coffee dripping in his wake. We would hear the feet thump across the floor above our heads and then an agonized cry of ‘No! Hopeless!’ would tell us that the proud first sentence was not, after all, up to snuff, and a banging on the keyboard would register its angry deletion. An author’s day is tough enough, but the writing life of Douglas Adams was excruciating in a manner quite unlike anyone else’s I have ever known.

This is almost literally how I write code.

Me too and I want to die

If it gives you any additional will to live, this process almost always produces the best code.

I'm sure that this is embellished, but I'm a more than a little shocked that someone could achieve this level of procrastination pre-internet.

Ian Fleming, too. He'd check himself in to the most unpleasant hotel he could find and not allow himself to leave until he'd finish the draft.

Read "War of art" by Pressfield.

Writing can definitely be torturous. Creative "anything" in general can be painful. Writers block is very real.

A book I read on writing had this quote, on the process:

"Hate writing. Love having written."

I always thought it was Dorothy Parker who said that, but the true origin seems to be difficult to track down: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/

My favorite Adams construct was the SEP Field

Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) Field - the ultimate cloaking device :)

I always like to think of the TARDIS' perception filter as a type of SEP Field :)

https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Perception_filter

Adams also wrote for Doctor Who:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams#Doctor_Who

I met Douglas Adams once at a public appearance. It was one of the great honors of my life to tell him, personally, how much his books had meant to me.

He was friendly and gracious despite seeming, to me, rather uncomfortable with the throngs of people there to see him.

In addition to feeling slightly bad about being part of said throng, I always remembered and admired that about him.

It's easy to be friendly and gracious when you're comfortable; it's quite another to manage that feat when in truth you'd rather be anyplace else.

I often think of him. I'm so sorry that we lost him so soon.

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds"

His editor helped him by booking him into a motel and being there preventing him from procrastinating. He had to just sit in the front of keyboard or write.

No matter how talented or skillful, without the grit and willpower to get over the internal barriers nothing gets done.

As Justice Scalia pithily put it: "I do not enjoy writing. I enjoy having written."

I'm glad the notion of the shitty first draft has grown more popular. For me, I believe I heard it from Anne Lamott–which is basically that first drafts should be expected to suck. I heard it when I was relatively young, so it seeped in. It really gave me permission to let go of expectations, results, hope, despair, etc. and just write.

Frankly I don't know if it actually makes things more "effective" per se—the editing phase is the most difficult for me. I've collected some tricks to edit my own work (e.g., read out loud, change the font, triple space and print on paper, etc...) and also enlist the help of a friend, a peer, or a freelance editor. But this is where the doubts I had let go of come boomeranging back. By then though, the idea is usually strong enough for me to make a case for it and to keep refining. (If it's not I'll just shelf it and start on a different draft.)

I feel like Tarantino is the perfect example of the shitty first draft. His older films were just...tight, for lack of a better word. They were dense, every second was relevant.

With the loss of his editor and his name recognition letting him get away with anything, his later films are what happens when artists ship a shitty first draft instead of putting in the work to refine it.

The same happens with books. I happen to like both versions of Stephen King's _The Stand_ — the one first published, cut down to a reasonable size at his editor's insistence, and the one he published later, representing his original vision. But I honestly have to say that the shorter version is just as good as the longer one, so I tend to side with the editor here.

And Neal Stephenson's newer books seem to lack an editor to tell him they could do with somewhat tighter writing.

Cranking out a mediocre first draft and then revising it can be a very effective process, provided you don't get overly attached to that first draft.

Oh god Stephenson, he'd have made a much better example for published first drafts, but he's been doing this his whole career. Even the Big U and Zodiac, which I love, could both benefit from some serious editorial review.

I just cannot forgive him for not finishing that third Dirk Gently book.

How often was he found writing torture?

reading parsing finally understanding the torturous titles grammar

Clickbait headline as emotional hook for submarined book ad.

"Torture" not even his words, but his sister's and only then sometimes.

Just wondering if any part of what I said is untrue?

The opening of the article so over gushes Douglas Adam's writing, it leaves me critical of everything that follows.

> "He was one of the most wildly imaginative writers of any generation..."

No, he was not, he was typical of a pop culture humorist, with a nice writer's voice. Not much else. Yes, he's a good author, but "great"? No, he was very average and will not be remembered as anything special. He's funny, in an obvious way.

When, pray tell, is his "not be[ing] remembered as anything special" scheduled to begin?

It would appear you have been waiting almost twenty years, and with potentially no end in sight, I do feel for you. I too have stood at a station for too long before realising the train had been cancelled.

(I must say though, it did turn out to be a fantastically good opportunity to try my hand at hitch-hiking.)

    No, he was not [great - ] he was typical 
    of a pop culture humorist

You're presenting "great" and "pop cultural humorist" as mutually exclusive terms.

It feels fundamentally incorrect to compare him to writers producing conspicuously deeper and denser stuff.

If you judge him by standards and goals to which he never aspired then I'd agree he comes up awfully short.

Reminds me of the old days when people derided the Beatles and other rock and roll acts because they didn't meet the standards of classical music. Or when people derided e.g. Shigeru Miyamoto because video games didn't measure up to the narrative achievements seen in the best movies.

It's true: The Godfather and Super Mario Brothers are both things that appear on your television screen. Just like Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Lolita and Finnegan's Wake are all books. Not sure they're trying to be the same thing, though.

It's fascinating that you would in one breath condemn the author of the article for sharing their opinion on Adams, and in the next breath try and pass off your own opinion as objective fact.

I've found if I read this comment to myself in the voice of Marvin this comments becomes rather superbly and obviously funny.

On the one hand, I kinda agree with you. On the other hand, I cannot think of any other author who solely with the written word has made me physically laugh out loud, page after page, book after book. No other writer comes even close. Maybe he was funny in an obvious way, but he did it with such consistency and volume that it became something special.

This is true but his works are much loved, very funny, clever, and brought a lot of people joy. More so than other writers who were better and others who were more popular.

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