While we're on the topic of writing styles, has anyone ever told you your writing style is very similar to Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces?
This is one of those things when freelancing in creative professions. There is a particular (business) type of customer who will always be like: "Why should I pay you so much? It only took you 4 hours!"
The thing is in certain fields it takes dekades to be able to do it in just 4 hours — or it takes dekades to do it at all. If you don't like that, go to your nephew and let him do it as an exercise.
It is worse the more people think "they could do it themselves" — e.g. graphic design is one of those fields where customer interaction can become absolutely exhausting if you have the bad luck of gaining the wrong customer base.
The longer I work on a piece of code, the simpler, more easy to read, and less error prone it becomes. None of that work is visible in the end product.
It probably looked more impressive and complex half way through.
There's the old story I've heard about the retired engineer (apocryphal, I'm sure):
This engineer worked for a corporation for 40 years, and retired.
A few months into his retirement, his old company frantically calls him, begging him to come in, and help fix an issue with the system he worked on. Apparently, the new team had managed to hose it, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
He comes in, sits down at a terminal, looks at it for five minutes, and says "Here's the issue. If you do this, it should be fixed..."
He then presents an invoice for $10,000.
The beancounters go "There's no way we can pay $10,000 for five minutes work! Itemize it!"
He sits down, scribbles a bit, and presents an invoice that says:
Time to fix bug: 5 minutes. $20
Six years of college, and forty years of experience, so I can fix a bug in five minutes: $9,980
Totally apocryphal since there are variants for everything from automotive engineers to plumbers. But it’s fantastic if that’s the point you need to make after someone can’t believe you did something so quickly and refuses to pay.
I did something for my ceo a few months ago. He was surprised I managed to do it so fast. I did tell him it's rather easy...with 7 years of experience.
It's certainly different from how I write. I do most of the repeated rewriting of each sentence in my head before typing it out, rather than after it's down. I'll go back and make edits, but generally only once a logical block is finished and I can read it all together.
That's the cool thing about this; there's normally not much way to know how other people go about the process of writing.
It looks like a fairly inefficient way to write to me. What I've learnt is that writing and editing are two different things, and you shouldn't edit as you write. So you write a first draft quickly, without worrying about the exact words too much, and then edit. The reason this is better is because writing and editing use two different brain "modes" - writing is best done in diffuse mode because it is creative, whereas editing is best done in focused mode.
Well, it's certainly different from Hemingway two-finger typing on a manual typewriter. Or, Jefferson writing on (expensive) paper with a quill pen and iron-gall ink, with only the occasional overstrike.
Supposedly, Kerouac wrote On the Road on a manual typewriter fed with a continuous paper web.
So, yeah, different. Instead of composing a sentence in your head and then writing it down, you waste a lot of time editing it in place. It seems very disorganized to me.
Direct link to the content[1] if you don't want to load twitter. Context is that this is a live view of Paul Graham writing his "Startups in 13 Sentences"[2] article in real(ish?) time.
tip to anyone following the link: you can drag the progress bar at the top, and make the playback much faster.
one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.
I was in the room when he started typing this - I walked into YC that day to be met by PG bubbling with delight about how Etherpad had implemented playback and he was about to try it out. He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left.
Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.
Ha! I once saw PG writing an essay at his home and he told me what it was about, then when it came out it was so radically different that it felt like not much must have remained. But I didn’t watch long because it does feel intrusive watching someone write. It’s like you’re reading their mind.
If you mean recorded commands, those are stored in registers, which from a quick look at the source [1] seem to just contain strings. So I would imagine their length is only bounded by memory.
So I suppose you could just qq, write your entire thing, then "qp to get the whole history. I wonder if there's a tool that replays commands in slow motion, or some neat way to add sleeps to a command sequence.
> ... He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
Was that the intent of the feature, or something else?
It seems like this might be coupled to some kind of teaching program that helps you become a more efficient writer. Maybe something that could recap your session and offer a focused lesson on, say writing a paragraph from a prompt.
Thanks for the self-esteem boost in this early morning, PG. I totally needed it.
I always beat myself up that I am not a quick, efficient and articulate enough as a writer and I always to take some time to organize and reorganize my thoughts and sentences but when I see I am not alone in this and there are even native speakers who struggle with this aspect of communications despite being domain experts, I feel good about myself.
I agree with the "don't just upvote cause they're famous" sentiment, just because PG is well known here. Ignoring that, he is a good essayist (regardless of whether people do or don't agree with his opinions).
I think it's good that people can see how "messy" and human his process is, though.
It's also a humbling reminder that if you don't get it right the first time, you shouldn't get discouraged and try again!
> There's nothing particularly outstanding or intriguing about this. Most people will rewrite and rewrite while working on an essay.
I found it fascinating and insightful, I probably also edit my own writing as much as this author does but this is the first real visualization of that process I've seen that drives home just how MUCH editing goes on.
> Just because it's His Lord Majesty Paul Graham doing something mundane, doesn't mean you have to post it here. Or upvote it.
Conversely, just because Graham is the subject doesn't make it unworthy of discussion and also doesn't require derision directed at the people who found it interesting.
I don't know what software this is using, but that could be the history software considering entire edits as single deltas. Editors using CRDT or OT will commonly compress deltas like this.
could be a byproduct of the algo that's recording what he types. Instead of saving the timestamp of each keystroke, it does "every 500ms, save all the characters that have been typed in the last 500ms" or something like that.
To be clear, this is speculation. I haven't actually looked at the code that creates the recording. Just pointing out that the process of recording often alters the recording itself.
Great idea, will try it out later today, but I have to share a cheap version hack of the same principle:
I write with font size setting of 8pt. It's too small to read comfortably (thus I don't edit), but it still lets me see the overall structure and what I wrote.
I remember a blogger who used to dim her screen as much as possible when writing, which was one of the ideas that inspired me to build this thing. This helps with maintaining flow, but doesn't really touch the overall structure of the text.
Good idea! Will definitely try out Enso. Also, I was almost tempted to reach out for a quick talk and say hi! Maybe some other time I will schedule a 1-on-1! Kudos for being easily approachable. You seem like a fun and interesting person
I'm a hobby writer and like your idea a lot! I love that you also make the text downloadable in a txt file.
I always feel overwhelmed seeing the text I have written, being aware of what will await me when editing. I would love to have a program on my computer like yours (I'm using windows). Nothing special just an IDE that works exactly the way your website works (I'm not a programmer and love HN for content and comments like yours) I would even happily pay for it.
Let me know if you're planning on doing an app and need a beta tester.
Please never change the simplicity of your program!
I love that it has just four buttons: dark/light mode, download *.txt, eraser and full screen. Your piece of software made me instantly concentrate with laser sharp focus. Usually, I'm quite overwhelmed by my writing and the more I write, the more annoyed I get. So much to edit. Blah. The app achieves exactly what you've promised!
As a sidenote, something beautiful happened, I started playing around with long and short sentences. I even found some of my sentences beautiful. Something that had never happened before because I was constantly overwhelmed by all the other stuff, paragraphing, coherence and whatnot.
I was a bit irritated first that the program allowed me to erase multiple lines (it violates a bit the no-editing mindset) but later I found this option quite helpful when I needed to change the beginning of a sentence to steer in another direction that flowed better.
What I would love the program to have is, from the perspective of a writer, to know that the text I've written is somewhere safely stored on my computer like a backup file or something. That way, I wouldn't need to worry about the system breaking down and me losing all my work. For a serious writer, knowing that the text is securely stored somewhere in a backup file and readable with any program, would erase the fear and enhance the flow of writing. Furthermore, at first, I wondered if there is a limit of how many words I can write before the software breaks down or tells me I reached the maximum capacity. I think I'm allowed to write as much as I want, 100.000 words or 1.000.000 words, right? However, it would be super nice if you would communicate that.
Even though I love the word count because it gives me a sense of space and time, I would like to be able to turn it off, so I can enter a true flow state. Forgetting about space, time, and word count. https://endel.io/ for example uses infinite soundscapes to create flow states. That way, the human mind doesn't get jolted out of the experience, the science says. Maybe the same approached could be applied to your program, too? Anything that gives you a sense of time and space should be avoided to enable the writer to be fully immersed in writing. Because every so often I looked at the bottom right of the screen and saw that I've written 1000 words and started to wonder if I've already written enough, but in reality, I shouldn't have to worry about those kinds of things. I should just write.
Wait, so he doesn’t print a draft, go outside with a pen and have a smoke or vape and read through it that way for flow and coherence?
Hmm, okay.
If people wonder what I’m referring to, think about it in music terms: you don’t listen to a song in just one environment usually. There are speakers, headphones, your car, etc. so it’s a good idea to mix a track and test it on a couple.
It is my perspective that coming up in a print culture the best way to slow down and be critical of self produced work is to change the medium slightly. Thus the print out. It’s the same content but you are digesting it a different way. In this regard I would consider my approach superior to Paul’s and suggest you give it a try for your next important email, letter, or essay.
I used to edit books with fanfold printouts and WordPerfect, so I'm familiar with the act.
I find it quite sufficient to compile the text to HTML and read it in the browser, while editing the source. It gives the same shift of context from writing to editing, and it's more closely equivalent to hand-proofing galley prints, since it's in the form the audience ultimately sees.
I would love an iPad app designed around the old-fashioned proof editing flow, using the stylus. I've never seen one and don't know if there's a market for it, but I'd use it every week.
A similar trick is to use the read aloud feature, to read you what you wrote back. Hearing it out loud changes the medium and makes spotting mistakes really easy.
I am a little surprised by the crazy amount of editing going on during writing. It is obvious that this way of writing is not possible (or at least practical) if the medium is pen and paper. Is that a good thing or not? I personally try to resist the urge to rewrite during the writing proper and postpone editing until after I am done putting down the main ideas. At least on a paragraph by paragraph basis.
But each to his own. PG is obviously a prolific and successful writer, so for him this works.
When I wrote frequently, I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t make myself keep going down a road once I knew it wasn’t leading where I wanted to end up. It was like I’d get halfway to where I wanted to go and then realize I wanted to go somewhere better.
If I tried to just write it all and edit it after, it would feel like I forced myself to a conclusion. I wrote not just to express what I thought but to figure out what I thought. Putting the words on the page just has this way of clarifying my thinking, and I never end up where I thought I was going to when I started.
It might of been Vonnegut who divided writers into bashers and swoopers...this is bashing -- swoopers tend to free write and edit later. But bashers can also edit later, too.
For a writer, the computer (or not) is simply a matter of process just like bashing or swooping. And the world is entirely different for a full time professional writer than for ordinary people who write (I have made the statistical assumption that you are not a full time professional writer).
I mean the waste basket full of the morning's failed pages is a real thing, and if your goal is 500 good words a day, you're potentially in the novel-a-year range.
For what it's worth, the main ideas can go into an outline -- a step the computer encourages skipping. Here it looks like Graham was working from an outline via the ten idea structure. Maybe all first drafts are not equal?
> divided writers into bashers and swoopers...this is bashing -- swoopers tend to free write and edit later
It’s fascinating to see such a similar structure in so many things.
For example, in programming: breadth-first vs depth-first when navigating a tree structure, or in nature: the cycles of the slime mold looking for food.
Or in programming, the people who first swoop out a more-or-less complete program that's closer to pseudocode than something that's meant to compile, and then fix things until hopefully the program works, versus the bashers who only write mostly correct code.
Being old enough to have gotten through college writing papers on pen and paper, you can still do some editing along the way. Use index cards, as an example - you write an outline in a notebook, you write out sentences and paragraphs for each point on an index card, and then you can shuffle the cards around until you nail down the order in which you want to present the content. Once you have it down, you re-write it all onto paper. And often, then mark up your draft and re-write it again with corrections.
I would never go back to that process, of course. It was painful then, and would feel even worse now. But it was possible.
Not OP, but having some similar experience I'd say being more grueling, it forced the writer to accumulate experience faster. I'd add that besides the management of the aforementioned snippets that could be copied in at same point, part of the snippet-level editing, that nowadays goes on the computer, before it was just done mentally.
Not the OC, but for me what I lost was the identification of a set of clear, discrete points (with references) that I initially thought contributed to the essay/document.
Sometimes I discarded the nuggets as better ones came along. Sometimes the thesis subtly changed as I gathered these nuggets. Sometimes the layout changed drastically as I shuffled my index cards. All before I even committed to my essay structure.
It would be really interesting to have this slowed down and annotated, like DVD commentary. I saw a few things that were like little flashes of insight into PG's mind, and it would be really cool to hear them elaborated. Simple example: changing a word to "claiming" instead of just "saying". I think he rightly assumed that people would feel he was less invested in what he was saying with the original term.
Multiply insights like that by every edit he makes, and assume most edits are significantly less obvious, and you end up with some seriously interesting content.
Reminds me a bit of Hunter S Thompson famously typing out a The Great Gatsby in full, just so he could feel what it was like to write a masterpiece.
Writing is also souding ideas out, so typically the first thing a reader of mine reads was the last thing I wrote, since part of the service of writing is having done that work for them.
The addition I would make to this process is that I sometimes let comments sit, go do something else, and if I don't feel awesome about reading them when I've forgotten them, I delete them. Usually on controversial topics that I know I've been provoked into responding to, but also on other things. The key is to write something I don't cringe at reading after. Write in the voice of the person you would like to become, and then read it to reflect on whether you aimed high enough.
Debug aloud like you're explaining the situation to an engineer sitting right next to you. Replace that engineer with a rubber duck. Write as though you're talking to your reader sitting right next to you. Replace that reader with a rubber duck.
118 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadSaying "stay mad" is VERY common troll behaviour.
That’s what I thought!
Here the case is, from the first sentence, it gets rewritten 20,000 times.
I should rewrite the last paragraph it's a bit wonky but I'm on mobile and I got kids to put to bed. Such is life.
Idea: animated documents. It starts with the core points. and if you have more reading time you move the slider and more detail appears, highlighted.
That sounds like visibility cycling in org-mode (?)
The thing is in certain fields it takes dekades to be able to do it in just 4 hours — or it takes dekades to do it at all. If you don't like that, go to your nephew and let him do it as an exercise.
It is worse the more people think "they could do it themselves" — e.g. graphic design is one of those fields where customer interaction can become absolutely exhausting if you have the bad luck of gaining the wrong customer base.
Except that in this case your clients are other developers.
The longer I work on a piece of code, the simpler, more easy to read, and less error prone it becomes. None of that work is visible in the end product.
It probably looked more impressive and complex half way through.
This engineer worked for a corporation for 40 years, and retired.
A few months into his retirement, his old company frantically calls him, begging him to come in, and help fix an issue with the system he worked on. Apparently, the new team had managed to hose it, and couldn't figure out how to fix it.
He comes in, sits down at a terminal, looks at it for five minutes, and says "Here's the issue. If you do this, it should be fixed..."
He then presents an invoice for $10,000.
The beancounters go "There's no way we can pay $10,000 for five minutes work! Itemize it!"
He sits down, scribbles a bit, and presents an invoice that says:
https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/
https://ncase.me/nutshell/
That's the cool thing about this; there's normally not much way to know how other people go about the process of writing.
Supposedly, Kerouac wrote On the Road on a manual typewriter fed with a continuous paper web.
So, yeah, different. Instead of composing a sentence in your head and then writing it down, you waste a lot of time editing it in place. It seems very disorganized to me.
[1] https://byronm.com/13sentences.html
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.
And a lesson I got from the edit that made me laugh: don't tell people what you're not saying, just tell them what you're saying.
(Or, more succinctly: Don't equivocate.)
The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336 - Feb 2009 (126 comments)
Watch Paul Graham write his latest essay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 - April 2009 (22 comments)
https://etherpad.fileplanet.com
I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left.
Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.
Waiting with bated breath for the continuation. Not often you see dang write about things which aren't moderation.
edit: After seeing the continuation I'm just nodding along. Very few things could make me abandon Vim.
(I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)
Now I'm wondering if there's a length limit to vim macros...
So I suppose you could just qq, write your entire thing, then "qp to get the whole history. I wonder if there's a tool that replays commands in slow motion, or some neat way to add sleeps to a command sequence.
[1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/src/register.c
Was that the intent of the feature, or something else?
It seems like this might be coupled to some kind of teaching program that helps you become a more efficient writer. Maybe something that could recap your session and offer a focused lesson on, say writing a paragraph from a prompt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495348
I always beat myself up that I am not a quick, efficient and articulate enough as a writer and I always to take some time to organize and reorganize my thoughts and sentences but when I see I am not alone in this and there are even native speakers who struggle with this aspect of communications despite being domain experts, I feel good about myself.
I think it's good that people can see how "messy" and human his process is, though.
It's also a humbling reminder that if you don't get it right the first time, you shouldn't get discouraged and try again!
I found it fascinating and insightful, I probably also edit my own writing as much as this author does but this is the first real visualization of that process I've seen that drives home just how MUCH editing goes on.
> Just because it's His Lord Majesty Paul Graham doing something mundane, doesn't mean you have to post it here. Or upvote it.
Conversely, just because Graham is the subject doesn't make it unworthy of discussion and also doesn't require derision directed at the people who found it interesting.
Nowhere does it say it's outstanding. It's definitely intriguing to watch, according to me and the HN people who voted it to the front page.
Why do you title him His Lord Majesty?
To be clear, this is speculation. I haven't actually looked at the code that creates the recording. Just pointing out that the process of recording often alters the recording itself.
It's the complete opposite of the site shared in the post, but people seem to like it.
I write with font size setting of 8pt. It's too small to read comfortably (thus I don't edit), but it still lets me see the overall structure and what I wrote.
I remember a blogger who used to dim her screen as much as possible when writing, which was one of the ideas that inspired me to build this thing. This helps with maintaining flow, but doesn't really touch the overall structure of the text.
I'm a hobby writer and like your idea a lot! I love that you also make the text downloadable in a txt file.
I always feel overwhelmed seeing the text I have written, being aware of what will await me when editing. I would love to have a program on my computer like yours (I'm using windows). Nothing special just an IDE that works exactly the way your website works (I'm not a programmer and love HN for content and comments like yours) I would even happily pay for it.
Let me know if you're planning on doing an app and need a beta tester.
I am, will do!
What features does the web app miss?
I love that it has just four buttons: dark/light mode, download *.txt, eraser and full screen. Your piece of software made me instantly concentrate with laser sharp focus. Usually, I'm quite overwhelmed by my writing and the more I write, the more annoyed I get. So much to edit. Blah. The app achieves exactly what you've promised!
As a sidenote, something beautiful happened, I started playing around with long and short sentences. I even found some of my sentences beautiful. Something that had never happened before because I was constantly overwhelmed by all the other stuff, paragraphing, coherence and whatnot.
I was a bit irritated first that the program allowed me to erase multiple lines (it violates a bit the no-editing mindset) but later I found this option quite helpful when I needed to change the beginning of a sentence to steer in another direction that flowed better.
What I would love the program to have is, from the perspective of a writer, to know that the text I've written is somewhere safely stored on my computer like a backup file or something. That way, I wouldn't need to worry about the system breaking down and me losing all my work. For a serious writer, knowing that the text is securely stored somewhere in a backup file and readable with any program, would erase the fear and enhance the flow of writing. Furthermore, at first, I wondered if there is a limit of how many words I can write before the software breaks down or tells me I reached the maximum capacity. I think I'm allowed to write as much as I want, 100.000 words or 1.000.000 words, right? However, it would be super nice if you would communicate that.
Even though I love the word count because it gives me a sense of space and time, I would like to be able to turn it off, so I can enter a true flow state. Forgetting about space, time, and word count. https://endel.io/ for example uses infinite soundscapes to create flow states. That way, the human mind doesn't get jolted out of the experience, the science says. Maybe the same approached could be applied to your program, too? Anything that gives you a sense of time and space should be avoided to enable the writer to be fully immersed in writing. Because every so often I looked at the bottom right of the screen and saw that I've written 1000 words and started to wonder if I've already written enough, but in reality, I shouldn't have to worry about those kinds of things. I should just write.
Does this help?
Hmm, okay.
If people wonder what I’m referring to, think about it in music terms: you don’t listen to a song in just one environment usually. There are speakers, headphones, your car, etc. so it’s a good idea to mix a track and test it on a couple.
It is my perspective that coming up in a print culture the best way to slow down and be critical of self produced work is to change the medium slightly. Thus the print out. It’s the same content but you are digesting it a different way. In this regard I would consider my approach superior to Paul’s and suggest you give it a try for your next important email, letter, or essay.
I find it quite sufficient to compile the text to HTML and read it in the browser, while editing the source. It gives the same shift of context from writing to editing, and it's more closely equivalent to hand-proofing galley prints, since it's in the form the audience ultimately sees.
I would love an iPad app designed around the old-fashioned proof editing flow, using the stylus. I've never seen one and don't know if there's a market for it, but I'd use it every week.
But each to his own. PG is obviously a prolific and successful writer, so for him this works.
For me, if I edit while I'm writing, self doubt gets in the way and I can't get a draft finished.
If I tried to just write it all and edit it after, it would feel like I forced myself to a conclusion. I wrote not just to express what I thought but to figure out what I thought. Putting the words on the page just has this way of clarifying my thinking, and I never end up where I thought I was going to when I started.
Why'd you stop? I always enjoyed your thinking.
For a writer, the computer (or not) is simply a matter of process just like bashing or swooping. And the world is entirely different for a full time professional writer than for ordinary people who write (I have made the statistical assumption that you are not a full time professional writer).
I mean the waste basket full of the morning's failed pages is a real thing, and if your goal is 500 good words a day, you're potentially in the novel-a-year range.
For what it's worth, the main ideas can go into an outline -- a step the computer encourages skipping. Here it looks like Graham was working from an outline via the ten idea structure. Maybe all first drafts are not equal?
It’s fascinating to see such a similar structure in so many things.
For example, in programming: breadth-first vs depth-first when navigating a tree structure, or in nature: the cycles of the slime mold looking for food.
I would never go back to that process, of course. It was painful then, and would feel even worse now. But it was possible.
Sometimes I discarded the nuggets as better ones came along. Sometimes the thesis subtly changed as I gathered these nuggets. Sometimes the layout changed drastically as I shuffled my index cards. All before I even committed to my essay structure.
Multiply insights like that by every edit he makes, and assume most edits are significantly less obvious, and you end up with some seriously interesting content.
Reminds me a bit of Hunter S Thompson famously typing out a The Great Gatsby in full, just so he could feel what it was like to write a masterpiece.
The addition I would make to this process is that I sometimes let comments sit, go do something else, and if I don't feel awesome about reading them when I've forgotten them, I delete them. Usually on controversial topics that I know I've been provoked into responding to, but also on other things. The key is to write something I don't cringe at reading after. Write in the voice of the person you would like to become, and then read it to reflect on whether you aimed high enough.
While writing, I constantly let my IRD read what I have, as if it's a stranger reading for the first time. Then I adjust until it's out of complaints.
I don't know if this is a common technique, but it's really worked for me.