alt Hacker NewsI hated writing–until I learned there's a science to it(2024)
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I don't even know what science is anymore.
“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!”
Well that was anticlimactic. I thought there would be at least a little more insight than just practise more.
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.
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
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.
The post doesn't actually describe any kind of science to writing. That was disappointing.
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.
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.
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