- Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
- Ira Glass
- Well that was anticlimactic. I thought there would be at least a little more insight than just practise more.
- “I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!”
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11
- If you have kids or if you ever get kids, consider what I have done years ago. When my kids were in middle school (and I think I should have asked them to do that in elementary) I forced them to write a single or a couple of paragraphs about their day, every day, and post into our family group channel in Telegram. "It doesn't have to be perfect or even beautiful", I said. "Just write something, anything. Every single day". It was tough in the beginning. They'd forget, but I was strict - the rule was set, and a rule is a rule. I'd wake them up to fill the gap if they'd go to bed without writing. My wife would get mad at me. Like many other parents I fell into that trap - I was reflecting my own fears (non-native English speaker, etc.), forcing my children to fight the anxiety they have now long forgotten.
That turned out to be the best life experiment we ever did together. They are teens now and dealing with far more writing every day than just a couple of paragraphs. The other day I found some cards they've written for Father's Day and other holidays over the years, and I can't even tell you how impressed and proud a parent I feel whenever I see their writing. That single skill manifested in improved overall literacy and discipline. My daughter received the Presidential Award of Academic Excellence. My son was accepted to an elite college with a scholarship. He's a competetive swimmer with dozens of medals. His team competed at the state level and even set state records. They are going to be fine. And the only thing I had to do is to teach them to face the thing they hated doing. One paragraph a day.
- A few years ago I was also like this. I wrote fiction but never tried pursuing it as a "real" hobby because I wasn't perfect at it first try. Why bother at all, right? ;)
"Good" Fiction writing is an inaccurate science but has a similar trajectory to what the author went through. To become good at it you _need_ to read other people's works (the good AND the bad stuff) to figure out for yourself what makes that writing stick out to you, and you need to learn to love to edit, and to show people what you did.
The most time consuming portion of the writing process is the editing process in my opinion. It's also my most favourite part. You take a half-formed idea and you cut. And you tweak. And then you cut some more, until paragraphs start to take the shape of the story you actually wanted to tell, and sentences become so load bearing you can't remove any of them without altering everything around it. It's a puzzle with no real "solution" other than what I feel works.
Really, it's only after I kept at this for a while (and put things out there and didn't get bad comments at all!) that I started to get a little more confident in myself and begin to go to writing groups and such. It's hard work but it's worth it, just like any skill.
by articsputnik
0 subcomment
- For me, it was like this until I discovered the language English. I hated writing when I had to do it in school, "high German", I’m a Swiss. We talk Swiss German, and this is not a written language. So I had to kind of write in a foreign language. But later in life, when I did a mini-retirement in Denmark to learn proper English, all of a sudden I loved reading more, started listening to podcasts, and started writing.
It was through the language of English that I got to love writing and reading (mostly Audible). It was Writing in a Foreign Language again, but this time, it fitted more to my style, also because it’s straight to the point and you have so many of the same words to explain a specific sentence so well. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/brain/writing-in-a-foreign-language just in case of interest.
- Academic writing is surprisingly hard. Distilling months or years of work into its essential ideas is almost as challenging (for me anyway) as the research itself.
Often it forces a clarity that only comes from writing ideas down in a way that's necessary to explain your results to your peers.
The process itself sucks, but the outcomes are often quite satisfying and rewarding.
- It's not a science. At best, there are best practices--and some of the best, most famous writing has ignored them. "Writing" is broad, means a lot of things, and defies algorithms.
by thelastgallon
0 subcomment
- Writing is a forcing function for thinking. These days, most people are using AI to generate lots and lots of content, the 'writer' loses an opportunity to learn and understand, and creates garbage content for others consumption.
- How did this article (1) Get published in Science (2) Get 200+ upvotes on HN, with no explanation of the supposed science behind writing?
What's the null hypothesis? Is it possible to disprove your assertion?
- I have been writing for the past few months since starting my new job, and this writing is a huge encouragement to me. It makes me realize once again that I need to practice consistently rather than blaming my lack of ability. I think I was too fixated on the concept of 'talent.'
by GarnetFloride
1 subcomments
- I help run a writer's symposium. We get about 200 presenters and 1200 attendees a year. No one's journey is the same. What worked for one; failed for another. You have to find what works for you. Writer's rules are more like tools, and try use the appropriate tool for the job.
Some things that I have learned from of them:
Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time.
Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around.
Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice.
Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.
- As far as I can tell, according to the article, the "science" is get feedback and listen to it. Ok, that was perfectly fine advice, I guess.
by phyzix5761
2 subcomments
- The post doesn't actually describe any kind of science to writing. That was disappointing.
- The art of writing clickbait article headlines:
- Use a word like "science" to lure in the geeks
- (you don't even need to know what science is, its ok)
- Some of the geeks will push your headline to top of HN just because it had the right word in it
- Put some filler about life being hard in the article, so those who actually read it have to waste ten minutes of their lives (proving your point).
- Profit and glory!
by user____name
0 subcomment
- I found writing techniques employed by fiction writers to be surpisingly relevant for nonfiction.
by readthenotes1
3 subcomments
- Nice of her not to divulge the science of it and just say it's a lot of iterations.
That would not make me hate writing less.
- I finished my PhD and still hate (or at least severely dislike scientific writing). It just feels so pointless most of the time plus you constantly have to compromise on most of the text until it says almost nothing
by QuantumNoodle
0 subcomment
- So "be bad until git gud" through iterations and refining.
- See also: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.
- > How could I know what was good if there was no objectively right answer?
Except there usually is a right answer, only it tends to be buried under several layers of “how do you want this to be interpreted?”
The one thing I have learned about writing is that the same sentence can have wildly different interpretations between people if it’s written sloppily enough. Your core meaning could still very well be there, but because the prose was sloppy, it opened the door to alternative interpretations that you cannot control.
Now sometimes there is no way to refine it further. But most of the time it can be.
And then, even after sharpening the prose, you need to take your reader into account. What works for an adult might not work for a teenager. When I was a kid, I remember having a doctor in the hospital ask me if I was nauseous, and I replied, “there is nothing wrong with my nose”. I had never come across that word before, and associated the sound that went into its pronunciation with the closest other word I knew - the word for nose. The doc had failed to take into account people with a more limited vocabulary, setting up a chance for medical misinterpretation - I had indeed been sick to my stomach, but because he didn’t ask about it in those simpler words, he almost didn’t learn about it.
Writing is even more bereft of context, and so you need to not only sharpen the prose to cut off undesirable paths of interpretation, but also write for what your audience knows. And sometimes this can be one hell of a rabbit hole in of itself.
by undershirt
0 subcomment
- I don't even know what science is anymore.
by pessimizer
0 subcomment
- I have no idea how this was published or why it has generated discussion. The "surprising" discovery that the author made is that you don't just write something all the way through without stopping, you go back and edit it.
I always thought that even very small children knew that. If someone wasn't aware of this for years even after many attempts, I wouldn't trust them to do any sort of research.
Somebody should have put a red line through every word of this.
disclosure: I used the science of editing this comment after writing it.
- That is a anticlimactic. There should be a new flag called AI slop to flag these faster.
- This article took ~8 million words to get to a point.
'Write shit. Edit it. Repeat.'
What a disappointment.
by orhansavash
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- [dead]
- TL;dr
Make a first draft that is bad, and improve it from there.
- Unfortunately AI > your skills sub 2 years
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