The P.G. Wodehouse Method Of Refactoring (2008)
basildoncoder.com
basildoncoder.com
(There was a mention of P. G. Wodehouse from Paul Graham's latest post and ensuing discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27675603, and some people did not believe that Wodehouse rewrote his sentences so much, so I remembered this old classic. I also love his interview at https://web.archive.org/web/20100927115549/http://www.thepar... but more for his attitude to life and work that shines through.)
That being said this is a great article and the interview you linked is pretty great as well. I'll have to check out the book that recommended the technique of viewing the code zoomed out in a word processor.
I've read quite a lot in my life but I haven't checked out Wodehouse yet. I'm pretty impressed by his work ethic and his general approach. Do you have any recommendations for a Wodehouse novel?
When asked how long it takes to write a novel:
>Well, in the old days I used to rely on it being about three months, but now it might take any length of time. I forget exactly how long Bachelors Anonymous took, but it must have been six or seven months.
I had so much trouble writing papers in college that I couldn't imagine writing four novels a year at his peak. For me I end up spending 95% of my time thinking about what I should write and whether or not my ideas are bad.
On Wodehouse recommendations: this seems a nice post, with choice quotes that give an idea of what readers who like Wodehouse like: https://honoriaplum.com/2017/01/08/p-g-wodehouse-reading-gui... (For a specific recommendation: "Right Ho, Jeeves" is available online, and Stephen Fry mentions somewhere that one of the scenes in it "has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language"; John Le Carré was also an admirer.) Not to everyone's taste perhaps, but Wodehouse's talent for the language is clear; he's easily one of the masters of the English sentence.
Edit: The Wikipedia article has a section on "Technique and approach" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=P._G._Wodehouse&o...):
> Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that "It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out." He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions. For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop. […] In his younger years, he would write around two to three thousand words a day, although he slowed as he aged, so that in his nineties he would produce a thousand.
> […] Wodehouse would ensure that his first draft was as carefully and accurately done as possible, correcting and refining the prose as he wrote, and would then make another good copy, before proofreading again and then making a final copy for his publisher.