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.
I am a handyman and have a lot of weird, specific physical skills. Like being able to paint around an electrical outlet, caulking, leveling concrete, juggling, cartwheels, tying cherry stems in my mouth, etc. The life of an embodied worker.
When I am teaching anyone any of these skills, the first thing I say is “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?” Sometimes it catches people off guard. On the other hand, if someone says “yes” then I know that they are going to be a good learner.
I had an electrician come out, it was a younger guy who owned the business and his crew.
And they had these minor-superhero things they could do.
Like he could hammer around a corner. You would think it wasn't a big deal, but he could put wire staples places where a beginner or a fancy staple gun couldn't reach.
Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.
I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.
Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.
I'm not a handyman, but I am a man who happens to be handy.
I have done quite a bit of painting and caulking for a guy who's not in the profession. I despise both with a passion, though, especially caulking, and I have never once been satisfied with a single paint or caulk job I've done. I feel like I'm the embodiment of "be bad at this for a long time," although I'm objectively probably halfway decent at it.
That is to say I think Ira Glass' quote of "You've just gotta fight your way through" to get where you want to be seems especially meaningful in the context of something like painting, where most everyone _can_ do it (or writing / storytelling in Ira's case), but very few are actually good at it.
You need a silicone caulking tool, and a video. I have spent many years caulking like a fool listening to other fools who spray water and use their thumbs. Don't. Use the tool. Use the kind with a little oval tip usually (I mean, there are exceptions with harder caulks but for softer e.g bathroom caulks this is more superior.)
There's one UK guy on YouTube that convinced me of the evils of water/iso sprays and the beauty of the proper silicone caulking tool.
The little wedge shaped caulking tools btw are not enough, as you need some stick to it so you can get around certain angles/items.
>And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [...] We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.
I think most of us have experienced this. I consider myself an above-average writer and I absolutely hate everything I write.
But the problem, for me anyway, is that it's exceedingly difficult to know what to work on next in order to improve. In that regard writing is entirely unlike a lot of sports.
My throws are bad? Better throw 100 passes a day, every day, until my muscle memory is there. I'm getting beat deep? Better work on my fitness. Maybe I'll never get to where I want to be, but at least I know why.
But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.
The thoughts you are having about this show me that you are at a local maximum, but you will find your way out if you keep trying everything. There is no single thing that will help. Read novels, copy them word by word, translate them, write short stories, dissect stories, stop movies halfway and ask yourself how you would continue them. Read a ton of writing advice, try them out but don’t take it as gospel.
Even if you don’t improve for 100 days straight, small successes accumulate. In a decade you will have transformed yourself.
There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day.
What helped me was the saying “your first million words are gonna be shit”. I still distinctly remember, four or five years into writing every day, when things finally clicked, my voice came through, and my sentences became fun. It is delayed gratification to the max.
> But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.
In the beginning it's great to practice your art by yourself with lots of safety, but sooner or later you're gonna want to to ask the public/community at large what they think of what you do, so you can get external feedback from people other's who love the same thing. I think this is probably the only way to actually get better, you need to connect with other people around it, and get their point of view. I've found this true for any creative endeavor I've tried to get better at.
Receiving criticism is probably as hard to get good at as giving criticism, so don't let the harsher stuff get into your skin as some people aren't so good at giving criticism, but you'll find lots of other useful advice that you'll agree with, and find directly actionable :)
one concrete thing I can name is "widening" your view on writing. force different styles upon yourself, different constraints. the results will keep being shit for a while, but at least it will be very fun to tonally cosplay Shakespear before the mirror! you won't notice how time will pass :)
listening to narrations of vast variety of poetry and narrating something yourself will help you develop your specific voice and read with more intent.
you may not even need the "science of writing" this article describes. let yourself just... be with text.
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.
“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!”
The least prolific very successfull author in the world was perhaps Juan Rulfo. He only wrote 300 pages in his whole life and lived to be 68. It is really hard to explain how was he able to produce such master works.
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.
I admire the old papers.
"In this manuscript we derive XYZ from ABC and show that EFG still holds"
followed immediately by something akin to "We begin by showing ... "
Nowadays the intro/motivation/problem statement / related work (citation tax) / formulation/<actual results> / simulations / conclusions / futurework format is just soul crushing.
It's essentially saying that you start with an outline, then progressively fill in the sections, iterating and providing more detail at each iteration. I do something similar, which is why I prefer to work in outline mode (e.g. in MS Word) as it is the most flexible and "minimalist" mode for structured writing.
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
I am a handyman and have a lot of weird, specific physical skills. Like being able to paint around an electrical outlet, caulking, leveling concrete, juggling, cartwheels, tying cherry stems in my mouth, etc. The life of an embodied worker.
When I am teaching anyone any of these skills, the first thing I say is “are you ready to be bad at this for a long time?” Sometimes it catches people off guard. On the other hand, if someone says “yes” then I know that they are going to be a good learner.
I had an electrician come out, it was a younger guy who owned the business and his crew.
And they had these minor-superhero things they could do.
Like he could hammer around a corner. You would think it wasn't a big deal, but he could put wire staples places where a beginner or a fancy staple gun couldn't reach.
Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.
I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.
Flat surfaces seem like such a modern obsession. I feel the attraction, but defiantly try to oppose the gravity.
At least you limited yourself to human scale hand-y work.
An engineer type can go down some dark yak holes trying to find solutions to achieve inhuman flatness
Id love to develop the skill for drywall, but then amount of mess and dust it creates is too much for me and my SO. Even if I did it off site, taking a shower and changing clothes every time is a hassle.
I'm not a handyman, but I am a man who happens to be handy.
I have done quite a bit of painting and caulking for a guy who's not in the profession. I despise both with a passion, though, especially caulking, and I have never once been satisfied with a single paint or caulk job I've done. I feel like I'm the embodiment of "be bad at this for a long time," although I'm objectively probably halfway decent at it.
That is to say I think Ira Glass' quote of "You've just gotta fight your way through" to get where you want to be seems especially meaningful in the context of something like painting, where most everyone _can_ do it (or writing / storytelling in Ira's case), but very few are actually good at it.
You need a silicone caulking tool, and a video. I have spent many years caulking like a fool listening to other fools who spray water and use their thumbs. Don't. Use the tool. Use the kind with a little oval tip usually (I mean, there are exceptions with harder caulks but for softer e.g bathroom caulks this is more superior.)
There's one UK guy on YouTube that convinced me of the evils of water/iso sprays and the beauty of the proper silicone caulking tool.
The little wedge shaped caulking tools btw are not enough, as you need some stick to it so you can get around certain angles/items.
> But there is this gap... it’s just not that good.... But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.
That is, verifying a solution is much easier than finding it!
P != NP
>And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [...] We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.
I think most of us have experienced this. I consider myself an above-average writer and I absolutely hate everything I write.
But the problem, for me anyway, is that it's exceedingly difficult to know what to work on next in order to improve. In that regard writing is entirely unlike a lot of sports.
My throws are bad? Better throw 100 passes a day, every day, until my muscle memory is there. I'm getting beat deep? Better work on my fitness. Maybe I'll never get to where I want to be, but at least I know why.
But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.
The thoughts you are having about this show me that you are at a local maximum, but you will find your way out if you keep trying everything. There is no single thing that will help. Read novels, copy them word by word, translate them, write short stories, dissect stories, stop movies halfway and ask yourself how you would continue them. Read a ton of writing advice, try them out but don’t take it as gospel.
Even if you don’t improve for 100 days straight, small successes accumulate. In a decade you will have transformed yourself.
There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day.
What helped me was the saying “your first million words are gonna be shit”. I still distinctly remember, four or five years into writing every day, when things finally clicked, my voice came through, and my sentences became fun. It is delayed gratification to the max.
> But improving one's writing is seemingly impenetrable, to me. I read what I write and it sucks but I have zero intuition about how to un-suck it. I fucking wish I could write like Heller, or Didion, or Tolkien. Not even in terms of writing novels but just the quality of their prose.
In the beginning it's great to practice your art by yourself with lots of safety, but sooner or later you're gonna want to to ask the public/community at large what they think of what you do, so you can get external feedback from people other's who love the same thing. I think this is probably the only way to actually get better, you need to connect with other people around it, and get their point of view. I've found this true for any creative endeavor I've tried to get better at.
Receiving criticism is probably as hard to get good at as giving criticism, so don't let the harsher stuff get into your skin as some people aren't so good at giving criticism, but you'll find lots of other useful advice that you'll agree with, and find directly actionable :)
one concrete thing I can name is "widening" your view on writing. force different styles upon yourself, different constraints. the results will keep being shit for a while, but at least it will be very fun to tonally cosplay Shakespear before the mirror! you won't notice how time will pass :)
listening to narrations of vast variety of poetry and narrating something yourself will help you develop your specific voice and read with more intent.
you may not even need the "science of writing" this article describes. let yourself just... be with text.
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
- Profit and glory!
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.
>our family group channel in Telegram
what country do you live in where this is a normal thing?
“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
Well that was anticlimactic. I thought there would be at least a little more insight than just practise more.
The most prolific author in the world, Ryoki Inoue, published over 1000 books. He has basically the same advice.
> "The secret of the creative process is in 98% of sweat, 1% of talent and 1% of luck."
The least prolific very successfull author in the world was perhaps Juan Rulfo. He only wrote 300 pages in his whole life and lived to be 68. It is really hard to explain how was he able to produce such master works.
Yes, because literally everyone has the same advice about all fields of endeavor.
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 don't even know what science is anymore.
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.
I admire the old papers. "In this manuscript we derive XYZ from ABC and show that EFG still holds" followed immediately by something akin to "We begin by showing ... "
Nowadays the intro/motivation/problem statement / related work (citation tax) / formulation/<actual results> / simulations / conclusions / futurework format is just soul crushing.
The post doesn't actually describe any kind of science to writing. That was disappointing.
It's essentially saying that you start with an outline, then progressively fill in the sections, iterating and providing more detail at each iteration. I do something similar, which is why I prefer to work in outline mode (e.g. in MS Word) as it is the most flexible and "minimalist" mode for structured writing.
The science seems to be
1. Write stuff
2. Make it better
3. Continue with step 2
It even is an algorithm.
Something like Feynman's algorithm:
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the solution.
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.
Didn't sound like any science was involved. There were no observing, hypothesizing and testing steps to be found. Can't have science without those.
With a little practice you too can write a short essay on an interesting topic while not actually saying anything meaningful or useful!
Works for ChatGPT!
Science is like that too, it's mostly very tedious and repetitive work.