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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

I am amateur (but wannabe professional) fiction writer. When I see this type of tool I realize that I have a conceptual misalignment with some (most?) writers in regarding to focus, editing, flow.

For me, editing is part of the flow. I like to edit things as they go through my head, as part of my state of flow, not as a separate chore from which I have to “protect” my draft writing from.

I think of it as an analogy from sculpting. The first draft writing is getting the amorphous block into a rough shape of, e.g., a hand. Then, editing is the fine work to make the bones, skin wrinkles and veins of the hand to make it perfect.

In this analogy, the editing is the hardest, most focus demanding, most detail-oriented work that requires no distractions.

But just offering my perspective here. A good thing about having more software developers in the world is the diversity of tools available for diverse people. So I am happy that this exists.

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You and I are what Kurt Vonnegut called Bashers:

> Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

> I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

I always did this as well. You are the first other person I've heard describe that.

Here’s another person reporting the same thing:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM#t=5m10s>

(It’s Larry McEnerney’s very excellent lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively, aimed at writers who are either academians or otherwise experts in some field.)

Just as a side note, I worked for several ad agencies with art directors who did the same thing. We'd make the final ad, then screw it up intentionally and show it to the client so they'd spot the obvious flaws/mistakes, tell us to fix them, and then we'd give them what we'd already done.

It's not a strategy I use in my own work now, but it taught me something interesting about the psychology of clients. I think there are better ways to let them know they got their money's worth, like writing full explanations of your choices and thought processes. But intentionally sabotaging your first draft is definitely a well-worn method in the art and design world.

Every ad / design agency I’ve worked for engages in this practice. Futhermore, in the large corporate rebranding exercises I’ve witnessed approximately 75% of the engagement consists of make-work designed to justify the price.

From a purely psychological perspective I find it fascinating. If you want to get a handle on how it looks IDEO is a company that publishes and speaks on ”process” quite prolifically. Keyword: “Design Thinking.”

Funny to hear you validate this. What's even funnier is catching my own junior designers trying to do it to me, and totally calling them on it.

This is pretty chilling to hear.

One of my big quarrels in my professional life is how clients/bosses want exposure to creative process but can't really handle it, if it's anything but linear, which, in actual reality, it never is.

Going through the creative process without exposing the bossman to it and then playing "creative process theater" for them is a solution to the problem, because the theater caters to their unrealistic expectations, not to reality.

But, the more tightly controlling they are, and the shorter the reporting interval, the more difficult it becomes to execute on this charade. This is particularly poignant, because the point applies not just to ad agencies and design work, but also other types of creative endeavor like software engineering. I really pity the wretched souls having to do daily standups, who end up getting caught in the crossfire there.

In particular: Bosses have unrealistic expectations of what creative process looks like. Those unrealistic expectations get reinforced because so much of the creative process they witness is "creative process theater". And then the poor soul who finds themselves in a situation where they have no other choice but to expose their boss to real creative process obviously can't deliver on their boss's expectations.

Most bosses have never gone through the creative processes that are being discussed here. Or if the boss did it for bread they won’t know how to apply the process to cars. A corporate rebranding is done many times by an agency but once or twice, ever, by the individuals on the client personnel. The boss who knows how it’s actually done will get less theater than the uncertain or over-eager boss who’s doing their first agency rebrand. And, sometimes, the marketing exec is party to the theater because they know a straight up offer to their upline won’t get accepted.

Put another way: I’ve done rebrands for agencies themselves. They’re still prone to the errors even though they know how the sausage is made. It’s an innate human tendency.

And btw — nothing is pretty. Branding, marketing, coding, project management, budgeting. It doesn’t have to be bullshit, but process is not often going to be pretty.

I got a general contractor talking shop once and he confessed to me that they overwhelm the customers with cosmetic choices on purpose. People need to put a certain amount of energy into a process to feel they have done their due diligence, and it often doesn't really matter how that energy is spent, just that it is.

In his case it was to distract the customer from worrying about things they can't control, like physics and building codes. The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance. Trying to fight that can snowball an entire project.

Easy decisions that you ultimately question leave a sliver of doubt and regret in your mind. I could have done more. I should have said something. Things you work your ass of on and still don't succeed, you can say you did your best.

This is exactly the “Important Corollary Four” from Joel Spolsky’s old blog post The Iceberg Secret, Revealed from 2002: <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...>

> The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance

Why not just tell the customer that instead. I'd rather pay for someone to tell it to me straight, than someone who wants to purposefully overload the customer with trivial decisions.

Because you don’t get paid for arguing with customers. Neither the physical time nor the stress.

If you don’t deal with it all day you may have no idea/empathy for the sorts of coping mechanisms people develop to reduce trauma. People can be the worst. They pay you for copper and expect gold.

Also as I stated above, until the customer has invested a certain amount of energy into the process, they will second guess themselves and you. Reviews are often tainted by how the customer feels about themselves. Ultimately the same problem the Duck is solving. They need to pee on it to mark it as theirs.

This is a bit like the age-old tale about the contractor that adds waits at the end of each function in his codebase, then when the client complains about performance in one area, he just removes the wait, then bills them more money for "optimizations."

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

I remember reading here on HN of some web or ad agency intentionally adding a duck to a page before a demo to the customer. The customer eventually said, it's all OK but please remove the duck. They directed the customer's need to fix something to an obvious target. The customer is happy to have made a difference, the agency is happy not to have to do some extra work on something expensive to fix.

One origin of that approach is from Battle Chess - aka a duck feature: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/.

I would just re-write my one-and-final draft by intentionally-poor hand because I knew no one was gonna call that bluff.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

> Duck: a feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.

In animation they called it “the thumb on the frame” for obvious reasons.

I am also a Basher. But I've always suspected it as a sort of perfectionism that ultimately holds you back from getting better. I have a couple of pastimes where I've gone out of my way to try to avoid this. I find it is often easier to 'change your ways' in one context than globally. But it's also a sort of 'end of the beginning' rather than 'beginning of the end' in spending more energy on doing and less on fussing about doing it well. Take that too more and you're trying to do well on your first try.

If you ever played board games with someone who operates this way, it's exhausting. The fact that it's meant to be fun probably amplifies that experience, but I do wonder sometimes how people experience me and whether they think the same sorts of things I think about a perfectionist gamer.

Fellow Basher here. I’ve heard the advice to “just get it all on the page and edit later” so many times and it has never really made sense to me. I write something like Shlemiel the painter’s algorithm from this old Joel on Software article [0]. Write a bit, reread everything, tweak, write some more, reread everything again, tweak. The re-reading cycles aren’t always back to the very beginning, sometimes it’s just the current paragraph or sentence. But I’d definitely say I edit as I go. I’ve tried not doing this, but I never get very far with that before it starts to stress me out that the writing isn’t coming out right.

And then afterwards, read the thing another 50 times just in case, especially if it’s an email.

0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

The iconic example of a Swooper is Jack Kerouac, who typed up "On the Road" on a scroll of paper, so he would not disrupt his flow by having to switch pages: https://www.npr.org/2007/07/05/11709924/jack-kerouacs-famous...

But contrary to legend, it appears that said scroll did not represent the first draft, but the final product of numerous editing iteration.

>by removing sentences and generally making it worse.

Can I offer another POV? If those sentences weren't needed, they weren't needed. You didn't really make it worse.

I think they meant they were needed and removing them _did_ make it worse, because they were needed.

I just submitted the same draft all three times. I might make minor changes based on feedback but generally there wasn't any backlash from teachers for not changing enough things, if your initial draft was already high quality.

Someone should make the enso for bashers! Not sure what that would look like. Maybe a text editor is enough.

I am not much of a writer at all but if I write a blog post I am both basher and swooper. Swooping happens after I publish. Something psychological about someone might read it motivates the swoop.

Today I learned I swoop the outline of my texts and then bash the sentences.

It’s less about flow but more about a practical problem faced by some writers:

Some writers have the trouble stopping themselves from constant editing of the words they’ve just write, to the extent that significantly impact their ability to produce an actual draft. Lots of the editing are useless anyway, since when you are really editing the draft later, most likely you are going to throw away many pages and paragraphs of work, so all the time spent on micro-editing are wasted.

The biggest contrast between sculpting and writing is that sculpting is non-revocable. You can negotiate over a single paragraph for hours, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. There is no redo button for chiseling.

> ”since when you are really editing the draft later, most likely you are going to throw away many pages and paragraphs of work”

It seems relevant that I also do not write like this.

When I wrote my first novel, I wrote the draft and gave to my beta readers. Most of the feedback I got was that I needed to add stuff. Develop a character more, take more time to get to the resolution of a problem, add a new perspective.

From the first draft to the final version, it got probably around 30% bigger. Very few paragraphs were cut after that initial draft.

I hate to invoke the tired "plotters and pantsers" dichotomy, but this does seem like one of those things that comes down to whether you set out to write with some kind of scaffold in mind (or on paper) or whether you're more inclined to let the blank page take you wherever it takes you.

I'm definitely in the former camp, and have the same line-by-line editing habits that you describe, both in my professional and personal writing. And like you, end up throwing away very little, because anything I included the first time around was included deliberately.

OTOH it stresses me out a little imagining what it's like to write more spontaneously, without even a vague sense of where you're headed—what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

> what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

Quite literally, yes! :)

That sounds so frustrating! But I admire and maybe even envy your ability to do it. And with a smile, no less.

Keep writing. You can always go back and add or change details as needed later on.

It's rare to hit a complete dead end, but if it happens, yes, backtrack and try again.

But it's not like it's all going to be wasted. I've explored one branch of something that doesn't work, but I've explored. Some plots/character developments/scenes/places can still be reused in a different way when I try again.

> what happens when you hit a dead end and need to backtrack? Do you just throw out hours and hours of work and try again?

If it’s good, you put it aside and can maybe reuse it at a later point in a different context.

Or you do like Neil Gaiman: write everything by hand the first time, and edit at the same time you type it. That way when you have to throw away a bunch of pages which don’t really fit you no longer feel like you’ve wasted effort but that you’re saving effort.

We all have different processes. I write short stories, and almost always have to axe/rewrite/move whole sections when editing. I usually edit my draft in 3 tiers: structural editing, then language editing, and finally copyediting.

This just made me think... what would be really interesting would be a destructive, non-revocable writing app. You start with a giant pile of GPT garbage and just remove things.

Sudowrite, an AI tool for fiction writing, sort of has this philosophy. I interviewed with them and the analogy they used is that they want to “provide the clay so you can mold it”. They generate some basic text for you and then you edit it.

> so all the time spent on micro-editing are wasted.

True. On the other hand, there's sometimes the satisfaction of a well-written sentence you can sneak in elsewhere, even if the rest of the scene gets the ax.

This varies greatly between writers. I've self published two scifi novels, and I found I wrote faster when I didn't edit as I went (even when subsequent editing was factored in), but fast isn't always what you're going for. And I don't personally need (or want) tools to push me not to edit.

But where editing really kills you are for those who get stuck in "endless" polishing of the smallest little details before they have anything, and as a result never get anywhere. Then having tools to push you past that can be useful.

On the Basher/Swooper working style, I believe there value for each type to incorporate a little of the other type. Through most of my education, I was a Basher. I didn't write drafts, I wrote start to finish, but it was never as good as I'd wished.

Later in life I began to deliberately practice some of the Swooper techniques, and my writing got more satisfying.

It's possible the difference is somewhat generational as well, because the Basher style is suitable for writing with the somewhat cranky typewriter on paper, because rework is harder. Today, it's almost trivial to mix and mash our writing because all it takes is ctrl-C ctrl-V.

Unless you're William S. Burrows, in which case, just don't get too near me with those scissors. https://www.faena.com/aleph/cut-up-the-creative-technique-us...

I think it's the same analogy, the tool is supposed to separate it so that you can get the rough shape in before you try to perfect the hand, (then realise it's facing the wrong way.)

This kind of tool is great for outline-level rough drafts. Much like steam of consciousness journaling to see where your mind goes. Then decide how much if any of that to bring into the rough draft in an edit-friendly editor.

^This.Maybe part of the problem is that I've been around a while, and already have a bunch of habits around writing, and one of them is that I like to edit while I write, because writing is an attempt to work out what I actually think.

Having something that blocks me from editing as I write would be a huge downgrade. Zero interest.

I'm with you, although any writing I do is technical. I find that immediately micro-editing the fragment/sentence/paragraph I just wrote is easier than coming back as a separate step. Maybe it's because my first cut is so bad!

It's same for me. But now I think maybe it's good to try other way.

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