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.