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Comment by kieckerjan | Hacker News Reader

I am a little surprised by the crazy amount of editing going on during writing. It is obvious that this way of writing is not possible (or at least practical) if the medium is pen and paper. Is that a good thing or not? I personally try to resist the urge to rewrite during the writing proper and postpone editing until after I am done putting down the main ideas. At least on a paragraph by paragraph basis.

But each to his own. PG is obviously a prolific and successful writer, so for him this works.

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Being old enough to have gotten through college writing papers on pen and paper, you can still do some editing along the way. Use index cards, as an example - you write an outline in a notebook, you write out sentences and paragraphs for each point on an index card, and then you can shuffle the cards around until you nail down the order in which you want to present the content. Once you have it down, you re-write it all onto paper. And often, then mark up your draft and re-write it again with corrections.

I would never go back to that process, of course. It was painful then, and would feel even worse now. But it was possible.

Are there any advantageous to that process that you think you lost?

Not OP, but having some similar experience I'd say being more grueling, it forced the writer to accumulate experience faster. I'd add that besides the management of the aforementioned snippets that could be copied in at same point, part of the snippet-level editing, that nowadays goes on the computer, before it was just done mentally.

Not the OC, but for me what I lost was the identification of a set of clear, discrete points (with references) that I initially thought contributed to the essay/document.

Sometimes I discarded the nuggets as better ones came along. Sometimes the thesis subtly changed as I gathered these nuggets. Sometimes the layout changed drastically as I shuffled my index cards. All before I even committed to my essay structure.

It might of been Vonnegut who divided writers into bashers and swoopers...this is bashing -- swoopers tend to free write and edit later. But bashers can also edit later, too.

For a writer, the computer (or not) is simply a matter of process just like bashing or swooping. And the world is entirely different for a full time professional writer than for ordinary people who write (I have made the statistical assumption that you are not a full time professional writer).

I mean the waste basket full of the morning's failed pages is a real thing, and if your goal is 500 good words a day, you're potentially in the novel-a-year range.

For what it's worth, the main ideas can go into an outline -- a step the computer encourages skipping. Here it looks like Graham was working from an outline via the ten idea structure. Maybe all first drafts are not equal?

> divided writers into bashers and swoopers...this is bashing -- swoopers tend to free write and edit later

It’s fascinating to see such a similar structure in so many things.

For example, in programming: breadth-first vs depth-first when navigating a tree structure, or in nature: the cycles of the slime mold looking for food.

Or in programming, the people who first swoop out a more-or-less complete program that's closer to pseudocode than something that's meant to compile, and then fix things until hopefully the program works, versus the bashers who only write mostly correct code.

Learning to separate the writer from the editor is the single best piece of writing advice I ever got.

For me, if I edit while I'm writing, self doubt gets in the way and I can't get a draft finished.

When I wrote frequently, I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t make myself keep going down a road once I knew it wasn’t leading where I wanted to end up. It was like I’d get halfway to where I wanted to go and then realize I wanted to go somewhere better.

If I tried to just write it all and edit it after, it would feel like I forced myself to a conclusion. I wrote not just to express what I thought but to figure out what I thought. Putting the words on the page just has this way of clarifying my thinking, and I never end up where I thought I was going to when I started.

> When I wrote frequently

Why'd you stop? I always enjoyed your thinking.

Thank you! Honestly when blogs died it felt like there was no point. I do miss it.

blogs died? ;)

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