This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2609-how-i-write-a-lot
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Cool article! I think it’ll be helpful for my progress. It’s similar to Write How You Speak which I’ve said multiple times has helped me write more. I definitely write a lot faster than I did before I started posting on the forum.
I think people should study grammar before debating advanced topics and being confident. If you’re debating for fun, learning and practice, while not being very confident you’re right, that’s fine.
I think I’ve had an attitude that debates are super important so I should be really skilled and I should put lots of effort into it. I should think more about learning opportunities with lower-stakes debates. I think I learned a lot in my discussion with actually_thinking.
Also, in general, I think you should try to fix writing errors primarily by changing how you think. Change your ideas that are the root cause of those errors.
That’s interesting. Seems like a good approach.
But even if you don’t, if you’re reading this, I bet you’re the kind of person who will pick up on some problems and make improvements even with no organized attempt to do so. If you think your writing is pretty much perfect, then reviewing for errors and getting more feedback from others would help. But most people reading this probably already see plenty of imperfections in their writing,
Yes, I do notice mistakes.
Do you rewrite a lot in programming too? Like rewrite functions more than other programmers do?
Thank you for sharing your ideas about how to write a lot and get better at writing.
Quoting from the article:
The libertarian psychiatry critic Thomas Szasz, who wrote a lot (over 30 books and around 700 papers and articles), told me that he only has an outline in his head, not on paper, when writing a book or article.
Thanks for sharing that Szaz story. It’s inspiring how prolific Szasz (and you!) was/are.
Each time I write a new draft about a topic, I might come up with a new idea, a new connection between existing ideas, or a new way of explaining part of the topic.
That seems like a huge advantage that rewriting has that editing doesn’t. And, more generally, that seems like one of the big benefits of freewriting about a topic.
In the past, I would’ve thought that rewriting would be a huge hassle. But now, it seems like the author can get more personal benefit from rewriting than they can from editing. Editing is done for the benefit of others, whereas rewriting can help one to discover new ideas and connections. So it’s the selfish thing to do lol.
Lesson: Rewriting is more personally beneficial than editing.
When I abandon a draft and start another, I see the prior draft as part of my process of thinking the topic through and organizing my thoughts.
Wow, that’s a really great perspective. I really like that. Before reading this article, I thought that writing multiple drafts would be repetitive and a waste.
Also, in general, I think you should try to fix writing errors primarily by changing how you think.
I like this idea a lot. I’ve noticed a similar thing myself: If I understand a topic well, then I can easily write about it. Whereas if I doesn’t understand a topic well, then I will struggle to write about it. So it’s not just that I’m bad at writing per se, but that I don’t understand the topic well enough.
It reminds me of the “Feynman” technique (which apparently isn’t from Feynman) which I learned about because it was mentioned in this post. I liked the idea a lot. I might try it sometime.
Overall, I think writing time is more productive than editing time in terms of thinking and learning about your topic.
Makes total sense (given your explanations). This is one of the big new ideas I learned from this article.
Related: I’ve been listening to a biography of Isaac Newton (by James Gleick) in the background and apparently he wrote millions and millions of words of private writing about stuff he was researching.
(I ommitted a numbered footnote):
He [Newton] opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this).
By then he had written more than a million words and published almost none. He wrote for himself, careless of food and sleep. He wrote to calculate, laying down numbers in spidery lines and broad columns. He computed as most people daydream. The flow of his thought slipped back and forth between English and Latin. He wrote to read, copying out books and manuscripts verbatim, sometimes the same text again and again. More determined than joyful, he wrote to reason, to meditate, and to occupy his febrile mind.
As his health declined, he kept writing.
Incidentally, that quote about Newton’s “reading notes” mutating “seamlessly into original research … (though he did not know this)” reminded me of something ET said (IIRC) about how he unwittingly invented new ideas to fill the gaps in Deutsch’s ideas while studying/learning Deutsch’s ideas.
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I really liked this article. The theme of quantity over quality I think applies to improving at writing music too. Like how it applies with pottery or photography. There are some differences I can see like, what does the role of a draft play in music writing? Something for me to think about.
I think I’ve gotten myself confused with the CF ideas about practise, and aiming for high accuracy when practising things, like with typing, and this approach, which focusses on lots of experience. I think I’m conflicted about doing lots of low quality things, but doing it to gain experience. But I sense that the difference is what goal you should be trying to succeed at. With typing, you cant work on speed directly, you have to work on accuracy. With writing, or photography, or music, other things, you perhaps have to work on quality similarly indirectly.
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Not having high accuracy at something means you can’t considered it finished and ready to build multiple layers of other skills on top of. You can skip ahead with plans to revisit it later.
With typing, I don’t think goal accuracy should affect quantity (number of hours practiced). Being below your goal accuracy shouldn’t prevent you from practicing. It can result in fewer words typed per hour of practice, but I think that’s OK as long as it’s still a lot of words typed. If you spend the majority of your practice time making plans for how to be a great typist, and debating typing strategies, instead of actually typing, that would be a problem.
Yeah true. I guess for some reason I think like you should avoid skipping ahead. I know you’ve written about cycling between prerequisites and trying higher level things, though.
Yeah and if anything you should practise more if you aren’t accurate. Or at least yeah it shouldn’t prevent you practising. In the same way, being a low quality writer should mean you should be writing a lot (provided of course you want to get better at writing.)
Yeah sure I get that. Things like that aren’t usually what stop me practising things more, I think. It’s usually more like finding no way to do something relevant to the skill that feels fun and easy to do.
That being said, I could be putting a lot more effort into finding relevant alternatives. Or building that skill itself.
Actually, I think I do sometimes spend more time trying to think of/plan a good approach to learning something, at the expense of actually just trying it a bunch. Sometimes I feel like I really need to find the right way to approach something, and when I can’t find what seems like a good approach, I can be discouraged.