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Comment by Ciantic | Hacker News Reader

What I like about this is the 40 page limit. He actually considers it a kind of feature, and this arbitrary limit has contributed to his works.

One would think that if 40 pages comes to full, the writer would just find a way to extend it, but instead he didn't bother and shortened instead.

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I distinctly remember an assignment from college where there was a 12-page limit on the report for a machine learning assignment. Some people freaked out over this - "12 pages isn't even enough for me to finish describing the problem!" And the professor's response was essentially "If that's true, then you are writing the wrong report." Brevity is the soul of wit indeed, and having these sorts of constraints can definitely yield a better result under some circumstances.

We had to write “real” research article, and was limited to 14 pages. One article was selected for a conference, meaning that we had to trim it down to 6 or 8 pages, I don’t recall precisely. That was a difficult writing assignment.

I believe that with screenplays there's a fairly direct correspondence between the space taken up on paper and time in the movie. So a page is generally a minute. In the article, he talks about how it "creates acts" - each act is going to be about 40 minutes.

I'm not in the field at all so I'm hoping someone knowledgeable will confirm or refute this.

The gold standard set out by Syd Field in his famous screenwriting book is that for a 2 hour movie this is the breakdown: act 1 - 30 minutes act 2 - 60 minutes act 3 - 30 minutes

But of course rules are made to be broken and they're also adapting a novelistic story structure.

But now kind of curious to watch some of this writer's films and time out these 40 minute act breaks.

I feel like Twitter does this for me. I'll go over the limit on a long tweet, and I'll go back and trim and exchange long words for short ones and remove words that don't contribute anything.

The result will fit, and basically say the same thing. I've never had to fundamentally alter the meaning of a tweet, I just make it shorter, which is a healthy writing exercise.

I often find that to be true, too.

However, there are cases where there isn't enough space to articulate an idea. In those instances, I've tended to not Tweet at all.

Twitter is just a poor tool for communication of nontrivial ideas.

Yeah there's a pretty big difference between limiting yourself to 280 characters, and limiting yourself to 40 pages. Limiting yourself is great. Handicapping yourself is bad. I find the character limit in Twitter also contributes to society's increasingly poor grammar, as well.

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