Kuiper

At some point I realized that there was no reason I had to wait until retirement to realize this fantasy, and now many of my Saturdays begin with a walk to a local park, followed by several hours of reading. It's just as pleasurable as I had expected, and it's actually been surprisingly easy to make this happen now that I've made it a priority. It doesn't even take a whole day; there are plenty of Saturdays when I go out to read during the morning and still have the rest of the day free for whatever chores or social engagements are vying for my attention. I even find myself doing it on weekday afternoons evenings, especially in summer when the days are long.

Another thing that has led to me reading more books is just giving myself permission to read books in increments of 15 minutes or less during random moments of downtime. Moments on/waiting for the tram or between phone meetings that I would have spent checking Twitter on my phone can just as easily be spent reading a book. This isn't so good for certain kinds of content that you might want to devote more attention to, but I've found that I'm perfectly capable of enjoying fiction in 10-minute increments without significantly diminishing my enjoyment of it. And oftentimes, reading bits of a novel throughout the day often gives me a certain amount of momentum that makes me want to continue reading the book during my free time in the evening during time that I might have otherwise spent watching TV, browsing reddit/facebook, etc.

When I come away from an hour long video game session, my body has been physically sitting and staring at a screen as I move my fingers, so it's actually a physical state physical similar to "work" and doesn't actually leave me feeling energized and relaxed. If I spend an hour throwing darts or shooting pool (even alone at home as a solitary activity), I stand up (better for my posture) and my body feels like it's engaged in a physical task in a way that actually lets my mind relax. It leaves my brain (and mind) both feeling better. And there's also the fact that pub games lend themselves to the social "let's meet up with some friends at the pool hall" kind of activities more than video games do, at least my experience.

Other examples of "physical" hobbies might include playing a musical instrument, creating something physical (woodworking, crocheting, origami, drawing, sewing, painting, cooking), these often tend to be the kind of quiet meditative activities that give your mind a rest and actually feel like taking a break from work (as opposed to certain video games, which can actually feel more stressful on a chemical level; one of the reasons I quit playing games like Dota and Counter-Strike is that I'm pretty sure they kept my adrenaline and cortisol levels high for an unhealthy amount of time).

As an alternative to giving up video games, maybe consider playing different kinds of games. Even as I spend less time playing video games, I work in the video industry, and so I play a large variety (partly out of a sense of professional responsibility, and partly because I'm curious about what my friends in the industry are doing), but rather than spend 100 hours playing a Battlefield or Call of Duty each year I'll play a lot of smaller video games that deliver a complete experience in less than 5 hours. Playing a smaller narrative game like Night in the Woods felt like an emotionally fulfilling experience similar to watching a movie, whereas playing a multiplayer game like Battlefield or Overwatch just felt like hopping into an adrenaline-fueled meat grinder for an hour every day.

I read about five books a year, so even though it feels like I’ll read an endless number of books in the future, I actually have to choose only 300 of all the books out there to read and accept that I’ll sign off for eternity without knowing what goes on in all the rest.

...

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year.

Being in their mid-60s, let’s continue to be super optimistic and say I’m one of the incredibly lucky people to have both parents alive into my 60s. That would give us about 30 more years of coexistence. If the ten days a year thing holds, that’s 300 days left to hang with mom and dad. Less time than I spent with them in any one of my 18 childhood years.

It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.

I've heard him remark somewhat wistfully that he wishes he had been able to spend his 30's (when he was younger and had more energy) running around in the park and tossing around a frisbee or rollerblading with them, rather than struggling to keep up with them now as a 50-year-old. And mind you, he's a pretty healthy guy (was a college athlete, not currently overweight or with any chronic health problems), he can bench press more than most guys half his age, and he still wishes he'd had those younger years to spend with his kids. I've also heard him mention once (in a much more somber tone) that if his sons wait as long as he did to have kids, he might not get to see his grandkids grow up, and even if he does get to watch them grow up, he will be a very old man by the time they're old enough to swim or throw a frisbee. (If physically keeping up with your kids as a 50-year-old is tough, imagine trying to do the same thing as a 80-year-old grandparent.)

Here's a question: would you rather spend your 30's globetrotting (or otherwise "living life on your own terms"), and then be raising kids into your 50's? Or would you rather spend your 30's raising kids, and then have your 50's to go on globetrotting adventures? Everything I've heard from parents tells me that raising kids takes immensely more energy than touring Europe.

Another thing that might go overlooked is that although I've seen some parents abandon hobbies to spend more time with their kids, I've seen some people with hobbies that they've gotten to share with kids that have been a great bonding experience, be it something like woodworking or playing a musical instrument or a martial art or running a side business on Etsy. And even if it's something that doesn't involve the kid, parents still get to have lives; I have a friend who has a full time job, is raising three kids, and still managed to write a novel in the past year. Modern American society has burdened parents (and kids) with lots of obligations like soccer practice/youth sports league of your choice, a constant regiment of scheduled afterschool activities and an attitude that says if you let your kids play in the park unsupervised you're a neglectful parent, but most of the anecdata I've observed tells me that both parents and kids seem to enjoy themselves more and have better relationships when they have large amounts of unscheduled time during the week; one of the things I'm most grateful to my parents for is the large amounts of time that they left me to entertain myself and discover my own hobbies.

Here's another thing: after your kids grow up, you (hopefully) get to be friends with them. My parents (now mid-late 50's) are empty nesters, and one thing that I'm constantly struck by is how much I enjoy being friends with them, traveling back to their part of the country once a year to go on vacations together once a year, calling them every week to commiserate about the trials of adult life, and so on. We have the kind of incredibly tight familial bond that you only get from living under the same roof with someone for 18 years and they're also incredibly good friends. If all goes well, I'll be able to spend the next several decades with my parents continuing to be a part of my life, and that's something that I'm immensely grateful for. The earlier you have kids, the more years of your life that you get to spend with them, and the more years of their life they get to spend with you.

As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible.

Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.'

The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy.

The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).

Larger calculations like "how much did I spend last month on groceries" are easily assessed simply by looking at a credit card statement. Being financially responsible does not necessarily entail knowing the exact dollar-to-calorie or dollar-to-weight ratio of every item in your shopping cart.

The funny thing is that some of the asked are all arithmetic are constructed in such a way that you will get a "wrong" answer if you treat them as practical financial questions as opposed to purely arithmetic ones. For example, one of the sample questions in the article is "If a litre of cola costs $3.15, how much will you pay for a third of a litre?" This seems to be asking you to take $3.15 and divide it by three, but as a practical matter, it would be folly for me to take the price of a 20 oz soda bottle and then assume that I could calculate the cost of a 12 oz can simply by multiplying by 0.6. This question isn't a test of practical or financial literacy; it's purely arithmetic.

Having a steady supply of contract work kind of sapped my motivation to continue doing any writing on spec; the appeal of toiling away privately on a novel with the hopes that it will one day get published becomes a lot less attractive when you have offers from people who are willing to pay you to write right now. Once the contract work started, I also sort of rationalized procrastinating on sending out query letters for my unsold novel with the reasoning that my query letters would be a lot more impressive when I could start them with a paragraph listing the visual novels I'd worked on as a contractor, along with information about the number of copies they'd sold.

That being said, although I never sold that novel, the time I spent working on it certainly wasn't wasted -- most of my early gigs in the visual novel space came as a direct result of the strength of my portfolio, which included parts of the original manuscript. So, while I didn't sell the manuscript, it did help with the first few critical steps of my writing career.

In an interesting quirk of fate, the editor that I'm working with for one of my current visual novel projects is also a senior editor at Tor, so despite never sending out those query letters, I somehow managed to stumble my way into a working relationship with someone at the publisher. Perhaps the moral of this story is that all roads lead to Tor. :)

I actually put a version of this into practice several years ago when I was a looking at how to break into the world of trade publishing -- I had a manuscript for a fantasy novel, and decided my ideal outcome was to get published by Tor (a name that appeared on the spine of many of my favorite fantasy novels growing up). I went to the bookstore and compiled a list of books that had Tor's name on the spine, then went through the books and identified the ones that were most similar to my own manuscript in terms of subject matter/tone, length, and target demographic. Then I opened each book, flipped to the "acknowledgments" section, where most authors take the time to thank their agent. This game me a list of agents who A) represented books similar to mine, and B) had successfully sold books to Tor.

I think the lesson is that if you don't know the specific way forward, it's often as simple as starting at the goal and working your way backward -- want to know which publicists are on good terms with Rolling Stone? Ask Rolling Stone. Want to find out which agents have sold books to a specific publisher? Grab some books by that publisher and open them up.

One Alison Wolf's main conclusions is that the inventions that actually resulted in women spending less time on domestic tasks were mainly those relating to cooking and food preparation (such as TV dinners and fast food in the 1950's), because the result of a x10 efficiency gain in food preparation isn't that people start eating x10 as many meals, but that the same number of meals get produced with 10% of the time investment.

Had I understood the concept of saving web pages (or even copy and pasting text), I could have stored the stories I wanted to share as plaintext files, put them on a floppy disk, and then transferred them to the Laser 486 to print. The idea that the text could be transferred from one machine to the other didn't really register with me, so what I did instead was to read Zelda fanfic online, then rush upstairs to the other computer with enough of the story still fresh in my head and re-construct the stories as best I could from memory. Usually, I tried to imitate the style and structure of the original fanfiction, but sometimes I would inject my own personal style or intentionally change details in places where I felt like my own imagination could improve over what I recalled of the original story. The longer I did this, the more I found myself re-writing others' stories rather than aiming to simply reproduce them, sometimes to the point where my "imitation" could barely be distinguished as an attempt to copy.

I started writing fiction professionally in my 20's (which I'd consider to be a fairly young age), and I think a big part of what allowed me to go pro so young is that under the Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours of practice" model I ended up getting most of my practice in pretty early (at the time not even acting with the intention of practicing fiction writing), so perhaps my inability to copy and paste text was ultimately responsible for kicking off my career as a storyteller. In retrospect, re-writing fan fiction was the modern equivalent of apocrypha (non-canon stories) repeated and passed down through oral tradition.

It's the last Kindle made before someone got the bright idea that people would rather have a touch screen instead of buttons. Because apparently, when I'm reading a book, the thing I want to do is use my thumb to cover up the screen (you know, the thing that is displaying the text that I'm reading), and hold the device in a very specific way such that I can press the page when I need to while avoiding accidental touches before I've reached the end of the page.

Recently, they decided to re-introduce the majestic "button" feature into some of the newer Kindle models. You can get it if you opt for the premium deluxe "Kindle Oasis" which for some reason has an asymmetrical bezel and costs $250. (The Kindle 4 originally retailed for $80, which is where pricing for current Kindle models also starts.)

I love my Kindle 4. I use it every day and take it with me everywhere, and whenever I misplace it and need to buy a replacement, I find myself going to ebay to look for a used version of the old model so I can have a device with buttons.

I think this is, in its own way, a kind of shared struggle: meeting with groups of expats provided you with a group that you could bond with over the shared experiences and modern "hardships" of adapting to life in a new city.

I've found that competitive gaming has been pretty good for this, with the stipulation that it mainly applies to 1v1 games which are usually played at live events (such as fighting games like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros Melee, or card games like Magic: The Gathering), rather than games which tend to have more of an online presence (MOBAs like League of Legends and digital card games like Hearthstone are less good for this). Pretty much any game that has an active local scene will have at least one local business (usually a game store or an arcade) that runs weekly events for a nominal entry fee.

The immediate benefit to playing a competitive game that has an active local scene is that you'll find yourself in the same space and spending time with the same group of people for several hours at a time on a weekly basis, so at the very least you'll become acquainted with most of the locals. Attend enough of these weekly events and it's usually pretty easy to get plugged in with people who run smaller, less-official events on the other days of the week. One of the things I like about Magic: The Gathering is that I can move to any major city, go to a Friday Night Magic event, and quickly get plugged into a local network of people who share my interests.

If you ever take your game beyond the local level, then you'll also probably end up forming more social connections with people in the local scene, as traveling to events becomes much more economical when you do it with a group of people to split the cost of hotel room and gas. When you travel to an event with a group, you end up spending a lot of time with the same group of 3-4 people over a period of a weekend, which can be a great bonding experience. There's also the fact that traveling to events like this has the effect of making you feel like you're competing together as a "team," even if you're all competing individually; it's fun to root for people from your own city, and it's these sorts of experiences that really offer the kind of "struggle" that I think is good for facilitating bonding. Part of the benefit of traveling to an event as a group is having people to commiserate with after you get knocked out of the tournament.

The "commiserate with and/or root for people I recognize from my own city" can also apply to people you didn't travel with, and in fact having serendipitous encounters with people you know but didn't travel with can also be a great bonding experience. When you drive four hours to an event and then see someone you recognize from home, it can make for a great, "Hey, good to see us!" moment, and even if it's not someone you know really well, you always have "so how's your tournament run going?" as an icebreaker. These moments can often end in making dinner plans where you get all of the dozen or so people from your home city to meet up at a bar or diner, and a lot of the most memorable experiences I have from competitive gaming come from those late-night dinners.

I've found that any hobby that offers "casual regular events on a weekly basis, plus occasional group trips for the people who take it more seriously" is a great recipe for bonding; I played competitive Pokemon for several years despite not enjoying the game particularly simply because of the great social experiences that I had with playing it. I have friends who are into cosplay and anime conventions who have had analogous experiences. Competitive gaming is the main one that I engage in that I consider "strictly recreational," but I've also had some similar experiences with the local game dev scene and with local writing groups, which are adjacent to my professional life. Some of my favorite experiences in game development have come from going to a big event like PAX and just having friends (both from internet and from back home) stop by my booth to chat. There's just something great about traveling across the country to an unfamiliar city and seeing a familiar face that I find really special, and events like these can also be a great chance to turn "internet friends" into "real friends."

He never claimed to be a traffic or transportation engineer, in fact the fine cited him for use of the phrase "electronics engineer." He is an EE: He has an electrical engineering degree from his home country (Sweden) and he has worked as an electrical engineer for decades.

>I am a registered professional traffic engineer. As such, I feel that registration is very important and serves to protect the public at large from people producing work with little to no relevant experience.

"PE" (professional engineer) does have a legal distinction in the jurisdiction of Oregon, but he never claimed to be a registered PE in the state of Oregon. "Engineer" is not a legal distinction. He never made any false declarations about his credentials.

>the State Board did not censor what he was saying, they asked him to stop representing himself as an engineer.

They "asked him" by issuing a $500 fine in response to his letter for committing the apparent crime of sending a letter in which he (factually) stated that he is an engineer. Telling citizens "you are not allowed to write a letter to the government in which you use the word 'engineer' (a term with no legal distinctions) when describing yourself" sounds like censorship to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle

You'll not hear me argue against the point that 'fast' debate is extremely rigorous and filled with smart people. At its core, debate is a game, and certain people have figured out (and more critically, achieved mastery of) the skillset required to win it--that requires intelligence and a lot of hard work.

If my comment came across as negatively characterizing this kind of 'fast' debate, it's mainly because the intent of my post was to say, 'here's what an outsider/layperson might not know about high school debate.' The fact that debates can be won with cogent arguments, and the fact that it's a competition that attracts a lot of hardworking and smart students, are not surprising to most people. However, other aspects of the competition--the incredibly fast pace of speech, and the fact that debates can sometimes be won with absurd arguments based on the "rules" of debate--are probably not consistent with what most people think of when they hear "high school debate."

I don't think this necessarily points to any inherent flaw with the competition, either. The goal of a debate participant is not to discover the "truth," it is to defend the side of the debate you are assigned (and over the course of several rounds against multiple opponents, you will inevitably find yourself alternating between sides). It's similar to arguing in a courtroom: as a defense attorney, your goal is not to discover the "truth," but to get a "not guilty" verdict for your client, even if you believe (or know) them to be guilty.

To understand just how fast these kids are talking, spend a few seconds watching a debate video (this was the first thing that came up when I searched "policy debate" on Youtube, and it's consistent with my own experiences): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4MzZ_WS_Ww#t=1m45s

Debaters started formulating outlandish arguments. The more apocalyptic the outcome the better, with little care for the argument’s probability or real-world application. “A new retirement program will trigger a nuclear war.” “Prison overcrowding would cause the destruction of the ozone layer.” High school debate had come to this.

If anyone thinks this is hyperbolic, I can assure you from my 4 years of experience on the California high school debate circuit during the 00's it is not. The premise of the competition, that "failing to respond to an argument means you concede the argument" means that it doesn't matter whether you have effective talking points; simply that you have talking points of any sort. Volume over effectiveness, speed over eloquence.

However, there was always a stark difference between local debate competitions and invitational or state-level competitions--at higher-level competitions, many judges are former participants, and will take notes on the "flow" of the debate, which allows them to confirm, "Yes, the affirmative side made ten arguments, and the negation side only responded to nine of them," turning into a game of scoring points.

Converesly, at many local/league competitions (which might include volunteer judges with no debate experience, e.g. parents of kids at the schools participating, or faculty at the school hosting the event), many judges lack both the familiarity and the inclination to effectively recognize teams that have "won" based on this technicality, and weight was often given to students who were able to talk "like real people" at a reasonable pace that the judges were able to follow. The "negative" side of this is that sometimes debates were decided by who was a better orator or came across as more charismatic rather than which side had the better logical argument (though you could make an argument that there's value in that as well). Granted, this is based on my experience in the Yosemite Forensics League; I'm sure the tenor at "local" competitions varies on a league-to-league basis, and YAL does include a lot of California's more "rural" counties (think Bakersfield, not San Jose).

I think my experience does get toward a different point, which is that the kind of competition you see at high levels may not be reflective of what some (or even most) kids experience when they simply go to tournaments several Saturdays out of the year and never advance to a larger state tournament. If you're going to a prep school that is renowned for having a champion debate team, then sure, you're going to get fast-talking spreading, but for some kids who aren't hyper-competitive, never advance (and are okay with that), there's still plenty to get out of the program (and arguably more to be gained from a personal enrichment standpoint, even if there's no accolades). That being said, my best experiences with the National Forensics League programs were more on the "individual events" (which features events explicitly score based on oratory ability, e.g. "dramatic interpretation" or "original oratory"), rather than the debate side of things. (At my school, both were coached under the same umbrella program.)

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-thrill-of-lo...

Low-end franchise with captive audience seems to be a winning combination, and sometimes you can even get a captive audience with low rent: One example of a McDonalds franchise that was reportedly doing quite well is a small rural town (population ~1500) whose biggest feature was the nearby prison (population ~2000), got a significant amount of its traffic from travelers coming to visit inmates. Location kept rent (and labor) costs quite low.

On the other end of the cost spectrum, you have airport eateries, which are high-cost real estate that more than make up for it in volume. Fast food franchise are especially advantaged (compared to other types of eateries) in airport venues, partly because there are a ton of airport-related restrictions (all dangerous utensils like knives have to be tethered to cooking stations, lack of gas lines at many airports) that tend to affect them less due to the way they handle food prep. And fast food's best features (convenience, low turnaround time) is at a premium for folks in airport terminals, such that they're willing to pay inflated prices for low-end food.

Junk food is not engineered to leave you feeling satisfied--in fact, it's quite the opposite. Junk food is designed to give you a brief and fleeting pleasure only for as long as it is in your mouth, and then leave you feeling empty and unsatisfied afterward--that's why "you can't eat just one," and people will eat through an entire bag of potato chips and still want another bag. It is momentary, fleeting pleasure--and the fact that it leaves you feeling unsatisfied is exactly the thing that makes it addictive.

I'd compare Dan Brown's books to addictive junk food: the act of consuming it is unsatisfying, and that's a feature, not a bug. The page you're reading isn't satisfying, but he does a great job of creating this sense of anticipation that, on the next page, some amazing mystery is about to be unraveled. They're "page-turners:" you don't really get a ton of satisfaction from the page you're currently reading, but you want so badly to see what is on the next page that you speed through the page, usually reading quickly enough that you don't really notice how unsatisfying it is.

If you ask people why they find it impossible to put Dan Brown's books down, you'll always get some answer indicating this, like "I just had to see what would happen next!" This is also why many people read "page-turners" like Dan Brown's in a single sitting: each chapter ends on a cliffhanger. There's no logical stopping points, because the "effectiveness" of each page is predicated on the anticipation of the page that follows.

http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-norris-lived-in-a-van-...

The article is from 2015 so kind of moot at this point.

I want to disabuse you of a few notions. Writing is not about inspiration. Writing is not about ideas. Writing, or more specifically, getting published, is not about luck. What is writing about, then? Writing is about skill. And today I want to try and prove this to you.

When someone sits down to play piano for you, how quickly can you tell if they're a good pianist or not? Basically everybody in this room can judge a pianist's level of skill within a minute or two of play. Not exactly, but you can know if this is someone who's good at piano, or if this is someone who's still an amateur at the piano. You can probably tell if this is a master versus someone who's just pretty good.

Editors, published writers, people who know what they're doing, can do the same thing with one page of your writing in the exact same way. That is why it's not about inspiration, ideas or luck, because in one page I can judge how good a writer you are. People wonder why can editors reject manuscripts or, in this new age, where we're sometimes bypassing editors, how come the readers just put something down after one page when they haven't given it a real shot.

You guys can judge this too. You've read enough, you know enough, you can judge if something is going to work for you pretty quickly. Perhaps not as quickly as most editors can, but you'll know. You'll read a chapter and you'll know if that person is a master, if they're in that medium grade where they've got some good things going on (it's still readable, but they're obviously not a master), or if this is someone's first novel they wrote when they were 12. You can tell all these things. So how do you develop this skill? Practice.

He goes on to note that ideas/inspiration are important, but not the most central part of what makes writing effective.

Many "creative" disciplines like writing, sculpting, and film are more about practiced and skilled craftsmanship than inspiration and ideas, whereas in some other fields, like maths and scientific discovery, breakthroughs really are about inspiration and ideas.

I've heard people who work in radio describe the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident as a watershed moment. Not only did weeks of meetings and memos about "standards and practices" follow, but to this day it remains a moment in their careers that sticks out as a clear "before/after" point, a "life will never be the same" event."

At first, I thought they were exaggerating and being facetious or joking, but it actually was a major event for everyone in their industry: before the Janet Jackson incident, every radio program at their station broadcast live. If a caller on the air started swearing or saying "obscene" things, they would chide the caller and apologize to the listeners. Now, every program broadcasts with a 20-second delay, and they have a board operator with a "dump button" in case anything "obscene" is said. (As one talk show personality sardonically remarked, "What, are they afraid we're going to start talking about Janet Jackson's nipple?")

This seems a lot better than older traditional advertising models, where you have people writing reviews for TVs while the publication is getting paid advertising dollars directly from companies like Sony or LG. A classic example of this happened back in 2007, when a video game publisher was running ads for Kane and Lynch on Gamespot, which is a video games review site. Jeff Gerstmann wrote a negative review of the game which ran on the site, and he ended up getting fired as a result (as Gamespot's ownership didn't want to bite the hand that was feeding them).

>"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect."

These two approaches are often referred to as "outlining" vs "discovery writing." My view is that these approaches don't describe two categories of writers so much as they describe two points along a spectrum, and most writers lie somewhere between the two extremes.

For example, Brandon Sanderson says that he extensively plans/outlines his plots and fantasy settings, but he tends to "discovery write" his characters: he will frequently write multiple versions of the opening chapters of a book to see which character fits best for the story he is writing, sort of like auditioning different actors for the role. Brandon didn't plan the Mistborn trilogy with a female protagonist; rather, he tried several different versions of the opening chapters, each featuring a different character in the role of protagonist, and he found that the story worked best with a girl in the lead role. He went on to make several significant adjustments to the events of the story to fit with his character choice (he has sometimes jokingly described Mistborn book 1 as "Lord of the Rings meets My Fair Lady"), but the world and the overarching plot structure still matched his original plan for the series.