9 ms·

"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot

"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'" HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess." http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thompson-typing-out-work-of.html http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thomps...

dmix 6y ago
This was explained by HST in one of his letters, which was collected in the excellent three book collection of letters he sent and received to his friends. Including many famous writers. HST was always great in small rapid outputs of writing, which is captured well in his letters (similar to how his collection of articles are his most popular works, but these deserve a similar look). He obviously had some sort of ADD and later on combined with a long series of drug/alcohol addictions, so it makes sense he was better in short blurbs. Even his most famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a feeling of multiple long spurts on a typewriter. Which is always how he wrote. Always also at the very last minute of the magazine due date and/or because he was running out of money and needed the next advance. I believe this is common in creative fields. Long periods of meh and spurts of greatness. Anyway the book series is here, usually called the Gonzo Letters: https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing-letters https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing... Only the 2nd one has a Wikipedia page for some reason (the 3rd one came out in 2014) but the first one (The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955–1967) as a young writer who is often desperate and broke was most interesting IMO, even though his life or writing wasn’t yet as it would become famous for (but definitely still as wild) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America
- splatcollision 6y ago
  Still waiting for the third volume to actually drop? Can't find it available and all the amazon reviews are 5-star complaints about the delayed release :(
  - dmix 6y ago
    Oh weird, I wasn't aware they still haven't release it yet. It's been 19 years since the 2nd volume. That's really odd. They didn't fulfill the preorders in 2014 either https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684873176/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684873176/ I thought making it through the other two 700+ pages of letters was quite an achievement. I was planning to read the 3rd one at some later point in my life. I guess I'll still have to wait ... the title was really great too "The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop, 1977-2005".
- mylons 6y ago
  I find this to be true with computer programming/work for me. I’m productive in bursts.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    I'm productive in bursts as well. I have the feeling that in between bursts things are still computing in the background so it looks like you're not doing anything but the brain is still churning. This type of bursty productivity is very hard to account for in a corporate environment where one's productivity should be accounted for on a daily basis and laid down in cookie cutter time slots. I often wonder whether I have ADHD since I can hyperfocus when Im in a productive burst. Unfortunately/fortunately I don't tick other boxes so I'm in a limbo with the diagnosis
    - nicky0 6y ago
      I think it's quite common among programmers. At least, I have always been that way too. I can go week of unproductive time then suddenly several days of immersion.
taneq 6y ago
Sounds a little bit like the process of training a GPT-3 style network...
- derwiki 6y ago
  He required copious amounts of Wild Turkey and cigarettes though
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    Dunhills, if I remember correctly.
dfan 6y ago
It was very common in the past for composers to learn the craft by copying out the musical scores of the masters. This is also why I always type in all the examples from programming books instead of cutting and pasting.
daviddaviddavid 6y ago
The analogy with music is interesting. Superficially, the musical activity which looks most like typing is simply playing an instrument. And sight-reading does feel a bit like typing. But I wonder if he's talking about transcription in that quote. One can sight read complex music without learning anything about it if they happen to just be a good sight reader. But transcription really does force you to pay attention to structural nuances you otherwise wouldn't get just by listening to a piece of music.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I think the idea is that typing is much slower than reading, so one has forced downtime in which it is possible to consider structure and choices[1]. Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483 Qui scribit, bis legit (Maybe your sight-reading is quicker than your playing? Mine is nearly the opposite.) [1] Quintilian even finds value in exercising criticism of popular examples (because of course, even way back in the first century, The Old Days Were Better. Elsewhere Quintilian complains that people in his day only repeat a Cliff's Notes knowledge of greek authors instead of reading the originals in full.) > "It will even at times be of value to read speeches which are corrupt and faulty in style, but still meet with general admiration thanks to the perversity of modern tastes, and to point out how many expressions in them are inappropriate, obscure, high-flown, grovelling, mean, extravagant or effeminate, although they are not merely praised by the majority of critics, but, worse still, praised just because they are bad." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0059%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D10 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... and makes a good point about a pedagogical advantage to criticism of works other than one's own: > "I will venture to say that this particular form of exercise, if diligently pursued, will teach learners more than all the text-books of all the rhetoricians: these are no doubt of very considerable use, but being somewhat general in their scope, it is quite impossible for them to deal with all the special cases that are of almost daily occurrence. The art of war will provide a parallel: it is no doubt based on certain general principles, but it will none the less be far more useful to know the methods employed, whether wisely or the reverse, by individual generals under varying circumstances and conditions of time and place. For there are no subjects in which, as a rule, practice is not more valuable than precept. Is a teacher to declaim to provide a model for his audience, and will not more profit be derived from the reading of Cicero or Demosthenes? Is a pupil to be publicly corrected if he makes a mistake in declaiming, and will it not be more useful, and more agreeable too, to correct some actual speech? For everyone has a preference for hearing the faults of others censured rather than his own." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0059%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D14 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... Im demang tili peroba pash im demang finyish vide fit.
codeisawesome 6y ago
Would be super interesting if this holds true for 'copying out' code as well... it's all the edge case handling that can get boring to re-type out without context / comments...
- tsumnia 6y ago
  It does hold out! Here is a link to my research on retyping code [1]. To summarize my findings, students that regularly completed typing exercises earned higher course grades and submitted less erroneous code. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177
  - codeisawesome 6y ago
    Interesting - thanks!
m463 6y ago
Reminds me ... in a computer nerd way ... of "python the hard way" (which used to be very open/free, now it has changed) You would not read or download the lessons. You typed all the python in word by word. I think it really helped the learning process to type it out. It was slow and deliberate, even to mistyping and making mistakes (and fix them).
- kyuudou 6y ago
  I still have a directory tree around from doing those lessons. Given how picky python is about indent spacing, I agreed somewhat with the philosophy behind those lessons, particular for people new to coding.
- tsumnia 6y ago
  Yup! To learn music, cooking, martial arts, etc., you start by following someone else to build the muscle memory on doing the skill. As a follow-up, my own research [1] on retyping code showed students earned higher grades and submitted less erroneous code. Replicating technical skills is a common practice technique that seems to have been "lost" in current CS education. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177
dredmorbius 6y ago
Agreed that you learn much about a work (I've retyped a few articles and books simply to get a usable copy). But copying is not the same as creating --- you'll see the finished product, and may intuit hints as to how it was created, but what you're not getting is the creation process itself: research (especially for nonfiction), structure, plotting and character (for fiction), editing, rewriting, restructuring and reordering content, additions and deletions. Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc. And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works. I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths. The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting. I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works. Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself and what you like, what you don't, what you feel is worthwhile even if you dislike it, etc. Ultimately, there's something to be learned from everything. Even the book you read that purports to teach you someething that you find worthless for the task should be illustrative of either what things are not useful for you in learning that, or how to structure something in such a way that it's hard for you to take away good meaning from it, and ultimately, some hints about what to look for next time that doesn't have the same problems. So, copying isn't necessarily creating, but it should be an act of learning, and learning should hopefully help in creating, even if it's something totally divorced from what you were originally copying.
whymauri 6y ago
This is how I first learned technical writing. Found a few exceptional papers in my field, sat down, and literally just typed them out. The downside is that it's easy to 'overfit' and lose your own voice.
atulatul 6y ago
Here is a Stephen Fry Oxford union video where he talks about trying to write from memory a scene from The Great Gatsby: https://youtu.be/oSdLfPas8dw?t=546 https://youtu.be/oSdLfPas8dw?t=546
ponker 6y ago
Important to note that it was on a manual typewriter. The key is making it slow, so you can observe how the author is doing what they're doing. Reading is very fast ... typing on a manual typewriter is slow enough to give you time to observe.
yesenadam 6y ago
> Amazingly it's like music. Maybe he means like jazz musicians? (I'm one.) Every musician I know has transcribed solos. You pick some solo you like but have no idea what they're doing, transcribe it, and learn to play it along with them. Bits and pieces perhaps will rub off in your own playing. You don't want to sound like them, but it's good to be able to if you want – and for that you need to absorb their style, so your body can just go into that mode, without having to think about it. I'm a piano player but have also transcribed sax, trumpet, bass lines, gospel songs, reggae, funk, .. even taps dripping, babies crying etc etc.
- mantap 6y ago
  In language learning there's something called the "Input hypothesis" which states that we learn languages primarily by reading and listening (consuming input), rather than production of language. The reasoning is that when you produce output you are by definition producing something at your own level, so little improvement occurs. When you consume input (and transcription is a great way to do it), you are consuming input of a native speaker - or in the case of Jazz, a master player - which is at a much higher quality level than what you could produce yourself. So input drives the learning process. The exception is for motor e.g. pronunciation or playing technique, which do benefit from practice.
- mikorym 6y ago
  > transcribe solos Do you mean learn other people's songs from sheet music, or do you mean write down, from the sheet music, the same song again on blank sheet paper? Edit: Or do you mean write down the song via hearing?
  - gnat 6y ago
    Transcription is the latter -- create a paper version from a recording. Same as medical transcription is typing up dictated notes.
  - SirLuxuryYacht 6y ago
    Ear training gives you this skill e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhyyjRcrn84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhyyjRcrn84
sndwnm 6y ago
For this to actually work you probably need to put the original text away, try to recreate a piece of it from memory, and repeat until you get it close to right. AKA the Benjamin Franklin method. Just like anyone can trace or copy a picture drawn by a master, copying text won't grant understanding. What actually matters for a creator is the ability to produce content from higher level ideas, eg from whatever mental representation you used to hold the writing or drawing in memory.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
junon 6y ago
> Amazingly it's like music Programming is the exact same way. If ever I'm in doubt of someone's design and I have an inkling of respect for them, I'll try to design the code from scratch in my head, or sometimes even redesign a toy version myself. This usually surfaces some weird property of the problem that explains their code. You can also go through their thought processes and see exactly how they made decisions along the way. I'd argue you can even infer philosophical viewpoints in some cases, too - all without actually communicating with the author. I love that about humans. One of the things I really admire about us.
mistersquid 6y ago
This is myth and it is wrong. Writing does not proceed letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph. Earlier writing is deleted, moved, revised. Passages are moved earlier or later. Key passages are rewritten. Etc. Typing character-by-character an entire novel will likely teach you little about the act of literary creation.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  I'm not sure the sources in the parent comment are making the argument that you are countering. Neither suggests to me the claim that using a touch typing website, in our case, replicates the complete process of writing literature. The second quote in the parent comment is "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it." - the focus is learning more about the finished product. And I read "I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that well." as about experiencing the quality of the finished product.

dmix 6y ago

This was explained by HST in one of his letters, which was collected in the excellent three book collection of letters he sent and received to his friends. Including many famous writers. HST was always great in small rapid outputs of writing, which is captured well in his letters (similar to how his collection of articles are his most popular works, but these deserve a similar look). He obviously had some sort of ADD and later on combined with a long series of drug/alcohol addictions, so it makes sense he was better in short blurbs. Even his most famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a feeling of multiple long spurts on a typewriter. Which is always how he wrote. Always also at the very last minute of the magazine due date and/or because he was running out of money and needed the next advance. I believe this is common in creative fields. Long periods of meh and spurts of greatness. Anyway the book series is here, usually called the Gonzo Letters: https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing-letters https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing... Only the 2nd one has a Wikipedia page for some reason (the 3rd one came out in 2014) but the first one (The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955–1967) as a young writer who is often desperate and broke was most interesting IMO, even though his life or writing wasn’t yet as it would become famous for (but definitely still as wild) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America

splatcollision 6y ago
Still waiting for the third volume to actually drop? Can't find it available and all the amazon reviews are 5-star complaints about the delayed release :(
- dmix 6y ago
  Oh weird, I wasn't aware they still haven't release it yet. It's been 19 years since the 2nd volume. That's really odd. They didn't fulfill the preorders in 2014 either https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684873176/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684873176/ I thought making it through the other two 700+ pages of letters was quite an achievement. I was planning to read the 3rd one at some later point in my life. I guess I'll still have to wait ... the title was really great too "The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop, 1977-2005".
mylons 6y ago
I find this to be true with computer programming/work for me. I’m productive in bursts.
- grugagag 6y ago
  I'm productive in bursts as well. I have the feeling that in between bursts things are still computing in the background so it looks like you're not doing anything but the brain is still churning. This type of bursty productivity is very hard to account for in a corporate environment where one's productivity should be accounted for on a daily basis and laid down in cookie cutter time slots. I often wonder whether I have ADHD since I can hyperfocus when Im in a productive burst. Unfortunately/fortunately I don't tick other boxes so I'm in a limbo with the diagnosis
  - nicky0 6y ago
    I think it's quite common among programmers. At least, I have always been that way too. I can go week of unproductive time then suddenly several days of immersion.

taneq 6y ago

Sounds a little bit like the process of training a GPT-3 style network...

derwiki 6y ago
He required copious amounts of Wild Turkey and cigarettes though
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Dunhills, if I remember correctly.

dfan 6y ago

It was very common in the past for composers to learn the craft by copying out the musical scores of the masters. This is also why I always type in all the examples from programming books instead of cutting and pasting.

daviddaviddavid 6y ago

The analogy with music is interesting. Superficially, the musical activity which looks most like typing is simply playing an instrument. And sight-reading does feel a bit like typing. But I wonder if he's talking about transcription in that quote. One can sight read complex music without learning anything about it if they happen to just be a good sight reader. But transcription really does force you to pay attention to structural nuances you otherwise wouldn't get just by listening to a piece of music.

082349872349872 6y ago
I think the idea is that typing is much slower than reading, so one has forced downtime in which it is possible to consider structure and choices[1]. Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483 Qui scribit, bis legit (Maybe your sight-reading is quicker than your playing? Mine is nearly the opposite.) [1] Quintilian even finds value in exercising criticism of popular examples (because of course, even way back in the first century, The Old Days Were Better. Elsewhere Quintilian complains that people in his day only repeat a Cliff's Notes knowledge of greek authors instead of reading the originals in full.) > "It will even at times be of value to read speeches which are corrupt and faulty in style, but still meet with general admiration thanks to the perversity of modern tastes, and to point out how many expressions in them are inappropriate, obscure, high-flown, grovelling, mean, extravagant or effeminate, although they are not merely praised by the majority of critics, but, worse still, praised just because they are bad." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0059%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D10 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... and makes a good point about a pedagogical advantage to criticism of works other than one's own: > "I will venture to say that this particular form of exercise, if diligently pursued, will teach learners more than all the text-books of all the rhetoricians: these are no doubt of very considerable use, but being somewhat general in their scope, it is quite impossible for them to deal with all the special cases that are of almost daily occurrence. The art of war will provide a parallel: it is no doubt based on certain general principles, but it will none the less be far more useful to know the methods employed, whether wisely or the reverse, by individual generals under varying circumstances and conditions of time and place. For there are no subjects in which, as a rule, practice is not more valuable than precept. Is a teacher to declaim to provide a model for his audience, and will not more profit be derived from the reading of Cicero or Demosthenes? Is a pupil to be publicly corrected if he makes a mistake in declaiming, and will it not be more useful, and more agreeable too, to correct some actual speech? For everyone has a preference for hearing the faults of others censured rather than his own." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0059%3Abook%3D2%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D14 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... Im demang tili peroba pash im demang finyish vide fit.

codeisawesome 6y ago

Would be super interesting if this holds true for 'copying out' code as well... it's all the edge case handling that can get boring to re-type out without context / comments...

tsumnia 6y ago
It does hold out! Here is a link to my research on retyping code [1]. To summarize my findings, students that regularly completed typing exercises earned higher course grades and submitted less erroneous code. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177
- codeisawesome 6y ago
  Interesting - thanks!

m463 6y ago

Reminds me ... in a computer nerd way ... of "python the hard way" (which used to be very open/free, now it has changed) You would not read or download the lessons. You typed all the python in word by word. I think it really helped the learning process to type it out. It was slow and deliberate, even to mistyping and making mistakes (and fix them).

kyuudou 6y ago
I still have a directory tree around from doing those lessons. Given how picky python is about indent spacing, I agreed somewhat with the philosophy behind those lessons, particular for people new to coding.
tsumnia 6y ago
Yup! To learn music, cooking, martial arts, etc., you start by following someone else to build the muscle memory on doing the skill. As a follow-up, my own research [1] on retyping code showed students earned higher grades and submitted less erroneous code. Replicating technical skills is a common practice technique that seems to have been "lost" in current CS education. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177

dredmorbius 6y ago

Agreed that you learn much about a work (I've retyped a few articles and books simply to get a usable copy). But copying is not the same as creating --- you'll see the finished product, and may intuit hints as to how it was created, but what you're not getting is the creation process itself: research (especially for nonfiction), structure, plotting and character (for fiction), editing, rewriting, restructuring and reordering content, additions and deletions. Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc. And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works. I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths. The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting. I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.

kbenson 6y ago
> And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works. Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself and what you like, what you don't, what you feel is worthwhile even if you dislike it, etc. Ultimately, there's something to be learned from everything. Even the book you read that purports to teach you someething that you find worthless for the task should be illustrative of either what things are not useful for you in learning that, or how to structure something in such a way that it's hard for you to take away good meaning from it, and ultimately, some hints about what to look for next time that doesn't have the same problems. So, copying isn't necessarily creating, but it should be an act of learning, and learning should hopefully help in creating, even if it's something totally divorced from what you were originally copying.

whymauri 6y ago

This is how I first learned technical writing. Found a few exceptional papers in my field, sat down, and literally just typed them out. The downside is that it's easy to 'overfit' and lose your own voice.

atulatul 6y ago

Here is a Stephen Fry Oxford union video where he talks about trying to write from memory a scene from The Great Gatsby: https://youtu.be/oSdLfPas8dw?t=546 https://youtu.be/oSdLfPas8dw?t=546

ponker 6y ago

Important to note that it was on a manual typewriter. The key is making it slow, so you can observe how the author is doing what they're doing. Reading is very fast ... typing on a manual typewriter is slow enough to give you time to observe.

yesenadam 6y ago

> Amazingly it's like music. Maybe he means like jazz musicians? (I'm one.) Every musician I know has transcribed solos. You pick some solo you like but have no idea what they're doing, transcribe it, and learn to play it along with them. Bits and pieces perhaps will rub off in your own playing. You don't want to sound like them, but it's good to be able to if you want – and for that you need to absorb their style, so your body can just go into that mode, without having to think about it. I'm a piano player but have also transcribed sax, trumpet, bass lines, gospel songs, reggae, funk, .. even taps dripping, babies crying etc etc.

mantap 6y ago
In language learning there's something called the "Input hypothesis" which states that we learn languages primarily by reading and listening (consuming input), rather than production of language. The reasoning is that when you produce output you are by definition producing something at your own level, so little improvement occurs. When you consume input (and transcription is a great way to do it), you are consuming input of a native speaker - or in the case of Jazz, a master player - which is at a much higher quality level than what you could produce yourself. So input drives the learning process. The exception is for motor e.g. pronunciation or playing technique, which do benefit from practice.
mikorym 6y ago
> transcribe solos Do you mean learn other people's songs from sheet music, or do you mean write down, from the sheet music, the same song again on blank sheet paper? Edit: Or do you mean write down the song via hearing?
- gnat 6y ago
  Transcription is the latter -- create a paper version from a recording. Same as medical transcription is typing up dictated notes.
- SirLuxuryYacht 6y ago
  Ear training gives you this skill e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhyyjRcrn84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhyyjRcrn84

sndwnm 6y ago

For this to actually work you probably need to put the original text away, try to recreate a piece of it from memory, and repeat until you get it close to right. AKA the Benjamin Franklin method. Just like anyone can trace or copy a picture drawn by a master, copying text won't grant understanding. What actually matters for a creator is the ability to produce content from higher level ideas, eg from whatever mental representation you used to hold the writing or drawing in memory.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

junon 6y ago

> Amazingly it's like music Programming is the exact same way. If ever I'm in doubt of someone's design and I have an inkling of respect for them, I'll try to design the code from scratch in my head, or sometimes even redesign a toy version myself. This usually surfaces some weird property of the problem that explains their code. You can also go through their thought processes and see exactly how they made decisions along the way. I'd argue you can even infer philosophical viewpoints in some cases, too - all without actually communicating with the author. I love that about humans. One of the things I really admire about us.

mistersquid 6y ago

This is myth and it is wrong. Writing does not proceed letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph. Earlier writing is deleted, moved, revised. Passages are moved earlier or later. Key passages are rewritten. Etc. Typing character-by-character an entire novel will likely teach you little about the act of literary creation.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago
I'm not sure the sources in the parent comment are making the argument that you are countering. Neither suggests to me the claim that using a touch typing website, in our case, replicates the complete process of writing literature. The second quote in the parent comment is "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it." - the focus is learning more about the finished product. And I read "I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that well." as about experiencing the quality of the finished product.