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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

>And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [...] We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

I think most of us have experienced this. I consider myself an above-average writer and I absolutely hate everything I write.

But the problem, for me anyway, is that it's exceedingly difficult to know what to work on next in order to improve. In that regard writing is entirely unlike a lot of sports.

My throws are bad? Better throw 100 passes a day, every day, until my muscle memory is there. I'm getting beat deep? Better work on my fitness. Maybe I'll never get to where I want to be, but at least I know why.

But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.

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> But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.

In the beginning it's great to practice your art by yourself with lots of safety, but sooner or later you're gonna want to to ask the public/community at large what they think of what you do, so you can get external feedback from people other's who love the same thing. I think this is probably the only way to actually get better, you need to connect with other people around it, and get their point of view. I've found this true for any creative endeavor I've tried to get better at.

Receiving criticism is probably as hard to get good at as giving criticism, so don't let the harsher stuff get into your skin as some people aren't so good at giving criticism, but you'll find lots of other useful advice that you'll agree with, and find directly actionable :)

The thoughts you are having about this show me that you are at a local maximum, but you will find your way out if you keep trying everything. There is no single thing that will help. Read novels, copy them word by word, translate them, write short stories, dissect stories, stop movies halfway and ask yourself how you would continue them. Read a ton of writing advice, try them out but don’t take it as gospel.

Even if you don’t improve for 100 days straight, small successes accumulate. In a decade you will have transformed yourself.

There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day.

What helped me was the saying “your first million words are gonna be shit”. I still distinctly remember, four or five years into writing every day, when things finally clicked, my voice came through, and my sentences became fun. It is delayed gratification to the max.

> There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day

Thank you for this.

one concrete thing I can name is "widening" your view on writing. force different styles upon yourself, different constraints. the results will keep being shit for a while, but at least it will be very fun to tonally cosplay Shakespear before the mirror! you won't notice how time will pass :)

listening to narrations of vast variety of poetry and narrating something yourself will help you develop your specific voice and read with more intent.

you may not even need the "science of writing" this article describes. let yourself just... be with text.

People here are saying you must write a lot to get good. Makes sense. But what about also reading a lot to learn from masters?

How do LLMs do it? They don't learn by writing a lot they learn by reading a lot.

> How do LLMs do it? They don't learn by writing a lot they learn by reading a lot.

Literally they learn by both, training process is filled with "exercises" for the weights to be shaped by, not just "seeing" tokens :) At least the typical LLM that outputs tokens have to actually "practice" doing so.

True. Just saying we learn not only by lots of trial and error, but also by trying to imitate others.

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