25 ms·

How to edit your own lousy writing (2017)

174 points by Curiositry 3y ago

everybodyknows 3y ago
2017.
- Curiositry 3y ago
  Thanks, edited title.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jj999 3y ago
Nice font.
- tjfjr 3y ago
  Agree! Looks like ET Book, a digitization of Bembo. https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/ https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/
jiggawatts 3y ago
> To show, not tell. This is the biggest difference between poor writing and a masterpiece. For example I just watched episode 2 of the new Star Wars series Ahsoka — where two characters literally tell each other the backstory… for ten minutes. It’s like listening to two school students reading out the plot summary of a novel.
- nicbou 3y ago
  "Show, don't tell" is where artists can get really clever. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Yeah, Ashoka is terribly written. Weird how the same organization wrote the brilliant Andor!
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    They let a talented writer with a well-defined voice, Tony Gilroy, be the showrunner for Andor. It's so weird that they did that, but that's why it's good. It was not part of the Disney swamp, or at least it was on the fringes of it rather than neck deep. I assume Ahsoka is, though.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  [dead]
- drzaiusapelord 3y ago
  tbf television is a very limiting medium. If you tried "show dont tell" for that much exposition you'd be several episodes in. Ahsoka just requires too much backstory for non-Star Wars addicts. Its a show designed for casual fans, so it has to catch us up fast. Ahsoka is part of the larger canon of things like the clone war cartoons and a handful of random episodes in newer Disney shows. Most fans have no idea about her, the post-ROTJ world its set in, Thrawn, etc. Its a lot to ask to slow burn that. Also you can slow burn that if you truly wanted, but it comes at a cost. The writers weren't willing to make that sacrifice of other story elements, characters, sub-plots, etc to do this. I also would argue that 'origin story fatigue' is real. I get impatient with long origin reveals. Just get me into the story and flashback and explain whats going on. I'd rather sit through an exposition episode than a long origins narrative. Lengthy one-time exposition is perfectly acceptable in tv and film and we do it all the time. I just watched the first episode of Interview with the Vampire and there's a lengthy scene about a previous interview decades before that sets the stage. This isn't the most exciting viewing but allows us to catch up super fast on the story. Its a one-time price to pay that not only sets up the core conflicts but also introduces us to the basics of the main character, the tenor of the show, and the vampire mythologies of this universe. Novels and such have hundreds of pages to slow burn exposition. In normal script formats you have about 20-25 pages per episode for a 30 min show. Compare that to your average novel at 250-400 pages. Note those 20-25 pages are in screenwriting format, which are closer to 10 or less dense novel pages.
  - GeoAtreides 3y ago
    > television is a very limiting medium an picture is worth 1000 words
    - drzaiusapelord 3y ago
      Not in a narrative-like way. You can't get Ahsoka's long backstory by just having her pose looking sad holding a lightsaber.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  I think this is called “Maid and butler dialogue” according to Brandon Sanderson.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  It's even more noticeable if you're watching an ad-free re-run of something that was made to have adverts stuffed inside it. The scene immediately 'refreshes' and you get a character saying, almost literally, "as I told you just a moment ago..." I live in the UK and realising this has ruined a lot of TV for me — The Simpsons, for example, is particularly bad at it.
spondylosaurus 3y ago
> A great way to see your own work afresh (to read it like a reader) is to deliberately reread your own stuff in slow motion; intensely aware of the order in which the words arrive, and of what they are making happen in your head. And a great way to facilitate this (which I'm surprised the author didn't mention!) is to change the font in your word processor, or to paste your draft into a different text editing program, or anything else that physically transforms how your draft looks. When you're doing line edits, adding friction between your words and your eyeballs helps you review each sentence more deliberately; otherwise, it's too easy to glide past the same sentences you've already read a dozen times without considering how they actually sound.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > physically transforms how your draft looks Most of the time I write in markdown. I'll have a preview tab open in my editor, or generate a preview.
keiferski 3y ago
I’ve been experimenting recently with listening to my writing via a text-to-speech program as a part of the editing process. It’s great for noticing odd sentence patterns and overused words that are less obvious when reading. This is different from merely reading it out loud by yourself, which doesn’t give you enough distance.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  I’ve been doing this for many years. It’s a good strategy for catching typos like “the the” which your eye can just skip over.
- MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
  I'm going to try this. Any preferences for a low-fuss reader?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    I just use the one built into Mac OSX actually. But Hearling.com is also a quick way to download audio files.
  - voussoir 3y ago
    On Windows, I use Balabolka to do this. There's also a Python package on pypi called pyttsx3, which I used to write a very simple command line program to say whatever is on my clipboard. http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/ https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/
- JuanPosadas 3y ago
  Asking ChatGPT/claude2 about a sentence/paragraph, with context like purpose of document (including non-fiction topic or fictional genre) has worked out really well for me. What I'd really like to do is have a standard "spell/grammar/plothole/tone/etc." critique prompt and have google docs start me from the top and roll down the entire document so we work on one sentence/paragraph at a time and see if I agree with anything pointed out or suggested. Right now there's a lot of copying/pasting, contextless critiquing, but at least claude will be able to read my full document for full context.
atoav 3y ago
On of the best editing tools in an editors toolbox is the reverse outline. When you read a text try to make a way too detailed outline for it. In a good text this will still make sense, if you text has jumpy thoughts they will show up in that reverse outline and you can fix them by removing or reshuffling things or by reducing the interuption of the inserted text (by shortening the passage, by rephrasing the sentence, by moving it into a footnote, etc.)
pringk02 3y ago
The Stinging Fly is also a fantastic magazine of new short ficton and poetry that I highly reccomend. It's one of the few I've maintained a long-running subscription to. The quality of what they print, and their willingness to print challenging and unusual things, makes them well worth checking out.
bluetomcat 3y ago
Why is this obsession with “writing”? Every second technical blog post reads like a bad attempt at fiction. To get to the gist of the content which can be fitted in a couple of paragraphs, now we have to meander through pointless metaphors, semi-relevant anecdata and manipulative rhetorical methods.
- barko 3y ago
  This post seems to be about writing stories, where the primary goal might be to evoke emotion rather than efficiently convey information. Obsessing over the craft of writing seems appropriate in that context.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Can you expand a bit on your thesis? Any specific examples you can give that demonstrate this meandering you speak of? Do you prefer reading references with dry descriptions? If so, how do you fit those into the context of the subject or problem you are trying to solve? If possible, provide some examples of your own output, or output of the style you prefer, so we can compare.
vinay_ys 3y ago
This whole process is ripe for "photoshop for writing" software that could help you assembly-line the process somewhat. Storyboarding – describing characteristics of the characters, planning the character evolution, who they meet when, how they change as a person etc, key plot elements – knowing all the well-known and famous plot "compositions" from greatest literature – and using them as templates to create your plot for your characters., checking for factual correctness within your universe, logical consistency etc. fixing your vocabulary – keeping your dictionary of words as small or as big as you want, writing style at a sentence/paragraph/chapter level – being descriptive, being easy to read from a paperback, being easy to listen as an audiobook etc. Software could help you do each of these steps – with AI – and just as a workflow that's split among many different specialized humans – and as process steps that's done in some sequential and iterative manner. I sure hope such a software already exists, if not, I wonder why nobody has already done it.
- Tomte 3y ago
  Scrivener is used for some of this. It mostly gives you tools to invent your own workflow, though. So you can use color coding for some part of plotting etc.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
The mathematician Gauss said, "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." This is what almost everyone on the internet gets wrong these days, especially writers on medium and other blogging platforms, but also writers on the BBC and the Guardian. Their articles are too long and padded. I guess I can't fully blame them. Google prioritizes lengthy texts as a signal of being authoritative and comprehensive. Most texts these days are twice as long as they need to be.
- keiferski 3y ago
  “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal Apparently also said by Locke, Franklin, and a bevy of other famous figures too. Good advice, even if the source is unclear.
  - kubanczyk 3y ago
    Source is quite clear, Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1657) (repeating after https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I feel like there has to be a way to optimize for economy the same way you can similarly write a program/code snippet that accomplishes a specific output in as few lines and operations as possible but I just can't seem to make it happen for the most part. Always the obsession to endlessly qualify, pontificate, and inabillity to settle on one simple idea with 100% conviction its necessary and sufficient and that I am "okay" for it.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    My strategy as a professional writer is to take my near-final version and then simply have a goal of reducing it to at least 75% of the original. There are always superfluous words in a text which has not yet gone through a good reduction.
riffraff 3y ago
Does anyone like the third version of the "flip it" episode? Yes, has more details in it, but does it really matter she spit the gum in the gutter? I feel the first version, was just the right amount of information, just put in the wrong order.
alex-moon 3y ago
I've started writing fiction (again for the first time in many years) as a side project cos I had an idea which I think is kind of cool. Reading this has filled me with joy and I will absolutely be using all of the techniques here, especially the big "SHITE" in red pen. ETA: the funny thing is I'm a software engineer by trade, have been for 18 years, and I gotta say, there is nothing more satisfying than deleting code. Give me a PR filled with seas of red. I love it. Makes a tonne of sense writing would be the same.
- Mawr 3y ago
  Writing is very similar to programming indeed: "There is however a way to cheat our way into getting it right the first time: instead of designing a (piece of) program once, we can design it two or three times over, compare, and keep the best approach. Nobody has to know about our embarrassing failures. This takes time and effort, but I believe all significant projects deserve it. That said, I understand why in practice most of the code I see is just a rushed first draft: stopping as soon as it “works” is just too damn tempting." [1] [1]: https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/source-of-readability https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/source-of-readability
gcanyon 3y ago
Whenever I have the chance, I put what I write through GPT or Claude with an appropriate prompt, something like "rewrite this to be to the point and engaging" Then I edit the two together.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  I find that ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude are worse writers than I am, so they’re on good for content suggestions and organization. On a sentence by sentence basis they tend to make things worse.
FreshStart 3y ago
Chat gpt write me an update on that essay:title.. Experience this tragic irony for me..

174 points by Curiositry 3y ago

everybodyknows 3y ago

2017.

Curiositry 3y ago
Thanks, edited title.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jj999 3y ago

Nice font.

tjfjr 3y ago
Agree! Looks like ET Book, a digitization of Bembo. https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/ https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/

jiggawatts 3y ago

> To show, not tell. This is the biggest difference between poor writing and a masterpiece. For example I just watched episode 2 of the new Star Wars series Ahsoka — where two characters literally tell each other the backstory… for ten minutes. It’s like listening to two school students reading out the plot summary of a novel.

nicbou 3y ago
"Show, don't tell" is where artists can get really clever. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag
BurningFrog 3y ago
Yeah, Ashoka is terribly written. Weird how the same organization wrote the brilliant Andor!
- karaterobot 3y ago
  They let a talented writer with a well-defined voice, Tony Gilroy, be the showrunner for Andor. It's so weird that they did that, but that's why it's good. It was not part of the Disney swamp, or at least it was on the fringes of it rather than neck deep. I assume Ahsoka is, though.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
[dead]
drzaiusapelord 3y ago
tbf television is a very limiting medium. If you tried "show dont tell" for that much exposition you'd be several episodes in. Ahsoka just requires too much backstory for non-Star Wars addicts. Its a show designed for casual fans, so it has to catch us up fast. Ahsoka is part of the larger canon of things like the clone war cartoons and a handful of random episodes in newer Disney shows. Most fans have no idea about her, the post-ROTJ world its set in, Thrawn, etc. Its a lot to ask to slow burn that. Also you can slow burn that if you truly wanted, but it comes at a cost. The writers weren't willing to make that sacrifice of other story elements, characters, sub-plots, etc to do this. I also would argue that 'origin story fatigue' is real. I get impatient with long origin reveals. Just get me into the story and flashback and explain whats going on. I'd rather sit through an exposition episode than a long origins narrative. Lengthy one-time exposition is perfectly acceptable in tv and film and we do it all the time. I just watched the first episode of Interview with the Vampire and there's a lengthy scene about a previous interview decades before that sets the stage. This isn't the most exciting viewing but allows us to catch up super fast on the story. Its a one-time price to pay that not only sets up the core conflicts but also introduces us to the basics of the main character, the tenor of the show, and the vampire mythologies of this universe. Novels and such have hundreds of pages to slow burn exposition. In normal script formats you have about 20-25 pages per episode for a 30 min show. Compare that to your average novel at 250-400 pages. Note those 20-25 pages are in screenwriting format, which are closer to 10 or less dense novel pages.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  > television is a very limiting medium an picture is worth 1000 words
  - drzaiusapelord 3y ago
    Not in a narrative-like way. You can't get Ahsoka's long backstory by just having her pose looking sad holding a lightsaber.
jimbob45 3y ago
I think this is called “Maid and butler dialogue” according to Brandon Sanderson.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
It's even more noticeable if you're watching an ad-free re-run of something that was made to have adverts stuffed inside it. The scene immediately 'refreshes' and you get a character saying, almost literally, "as I told you just a moment ago..." I live in the UK and realising this has ruined a lot of TV for me — The Simpsons, for example, is particularly bad at it.

spondylosaurus 3y ago

> A great way to see your own work afresh (to read it like a reader) is to deliberately reread your own stuff in slow motion; intensely aware of the order in which the words arrive, and of what they are making happen in your head. And a great way to facilitate this (which I'm surprised the author didn't mention!) is to change the font in your word processor, or to paste your draft into a different text editing program, or anything else that physically transforms how your draft looks. When you're doing line edits, adding friction between your words and your eyeballs helps you review each sentence more deliberately; otherwise, it's too easy to glide past the same sentences you've already read a dozen times without considering how they actually sound.

cratermoon 3y ago
> physically transforms how your draft looks Most of the time I write in markdown. I'll have a preview tab open in my editor, or generate a preview.

keiferski 3y ago

I’ve been experimenting recently with listening to my writing via a text-to-speech program as a part of the editing process. It’s great for noticing odd sentence patterns and overused words that are less obvious when reading. This is different from merely reading it out loud by yourself, which doesn’t give you enough distance.

earthboundkid 3y ago
I’ve been doing this for many years. It’s a good strategy for catching typos like “the the” which your eye can just skip over.
MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
I'm going to try this. Any preferences for a low-fuss reader?
- keiferski 3y ago
  I just use the one built into Mac OSX actually. But Hearling.com is also a quick way to download audio files.
- voussoir 3y ago
  On Windows, I use Balabolka to do this. There's also a Python package on pypi called pyttsx3, which I used to write a very simple command line program to say whatever is on my clipboard. http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/ https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/
JuanPosadas 3y ago
Asking ChatGPT/claude2 about a sentence/paragraph, with context like purpose of document (including non-fiction topic or fictional genre) has worked out really well for me. What I'd really like to do is have a standard "spell/grammar/plothole/tone/etc." critique prompt and have google docs start me from the top and roll down the entire document so we work on one sentence/paragraph at a time and see if I agree with anything pointed out or suggested. Right now there's a lot of copying/pasting, contextless critiquing, but at least claude will be able to read my full document for full context.

atoav 3y ago

On of the best editing tools in an editors toolbox is the reverse outline. When you read a text try to make a way too detailed outline for it. In a good text this will still make sense, if you text has jumpy thoughts they will show up in that reverse outline and you can fix them by removing or reshuffling things or by reducing the interuption of the inserted text (by shortening the passage, by rephrasing the sentence, by moving it into a footnote, etc.)

pringk02 3y ago

The Stinging Fly is also a fantastic magazine of new short ficton and poetry that I highly reccomend. It's one of the few I've maintained a long-running subscription to. The quality of what they print, and their willingness to print challenging and unusual things, makes them well worth checking out.

bluetomcat 3y ago

Why is this obsession with “writing”? Every second technical blog post reads like a bad attempt at fiction. To get to the gist of the content which can be fitted in a couple of paragraphs, now we have to meander through pointless metaphors, semi-relevant anecdata and manipulative rhetorical methods.

barko 3y ago
This post seems to be about writing stories, where the primary goal might be to evoke emotion rather than efficiently convey information. Obsessing over the craft of writing seems appropriate in that context.
cratermoon 3y ago
Can you expand a bit on your thesis? Any specific examples you can give that demonstrate this meandering you speak of? Do you prefer reading references with dry descriptions? If so, how do you fit those into the context of the subject or problem you are trying to solve? If possible, provide some examples of your own output, or output of the style you prefer, so we can compare.

vinay_ys 3y ago

This whole process is ripe for "photoshop for writing" software that could help you assembly-line the process somewhat. Storyboarding – describing characteristics of the characters, planning the character evolution, who they meet when, how they change as a person etc, key plot elements – knowing all the well-known and famous plot "compositions" from greatest literature – and using them as templates to create your plot for your characters., checking for factual correctness within your universe, logical consistency etc. fixing your vocabulary – keeping your dictionary of words as small or as big as you want, writing style at a sentence/paragraph/chapter level – being descriptive, being easy to read from a paperback, being easy to listen as an audiobook etc. Software could help you do each of these steps – with AI – and just as a workflow that's split among many different specialized humans – and as process steps that's done in some sequential and iterative manner. I sure hope such a software already exists, if not, I wonder why nobody has already done it.

Tomte 3y ago
Scrivener is used for some of this. It mostly gives you tools to invent your own workflow, though. So you can use color coding for some part of plotting etc.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

The mathematician Gauss said, "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length." This is what almost everyone on the internet gets wrong these days, especially writers on medium and other blogging platforms, but also writers on the BBC and the Guardian. Their articles are too long and padded. I guess I can't fully blame them. Google prioritizes lengthy texts as a signal of being authoritative and comprehensive. Most texts these days are twice as long as they need to be.

keiferski 3y ago
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal Apparently also said by Locke, Franklin, and a bevy of other famous figures too. Good advice, even if the source is unclear.
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  Source is quite clear, Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1657) (repeating after https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)
Obscurity4340 3y ago
I feel like there has to be a way to optimize for economy the same way you can similarly write a program/code snippet that accomplishes a specific output in as few lines and operations as possible but I just can't seem to make it happen for the most part. Always the obsession to endlessly qualify, pontificate, and inabillity to settle on one simple idea with 100% conviction its necessary and sufficient and that I am "okay" for it.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  My strategy as a professional writer is to take my near-final version and then simply have a goal of reducing it to at least 75% of the original. There are always superfluous words in a text which has not yet gone through a good reduction.

riffraff 3y ago

Does anyone like the third version of the "flip it" episode? Yes, has more details in it, but does it really matter she spit the gum in the gutter? I feel the first version, was just the right amount of information, just put in the wrong order.

alex-moon 3y ago

I've started writing fiction (again for the first time in many years) as a side project cos I had an idea which I think is kind of cool. Reading this has filled me with joy and I will absolutely be using all of the techniques here, especially the big "SHITE" in red pen. ETA: the funny thing is I'm a software engineer by trade, have been for 18 years, and I gotta say, there is nothing more satisfying than deleting code. Give me a PR filled with seas of red. I love it. Makes a tonne of sense writing would be the same.

Mawr 3y ago
Writing is very similar to programming indeed: "There is however a way to cheat our way into getting it right the first time: instead of designing a (piece of) program once, we can design it two or three times over, compare, and keep the best approach. Nobody has to know about our embarrassing failures. This takes time and effort, but I believe all significant projects deserve it. That said, I understand why in practice most of the code I see is just a rushed first draft: stopping as soon as it “works” is just too damn tempting." [1] [1]: https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/source-of-readability https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/source-of-readability

gcanyon 3y ago

Whenever I have the chance, I put what I write through GPT or Claude with an appropriate prompt, something like "rewrite this to be to the point and engaging" Then I edit the two together.

earthboundkid 3y ago
I find that ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude are worse writers than I am, so they’re on good for content suggestions and organization. On a sentence by sentence basis they tend to make things worse.

FreshStart 3y ago

Chat gpt write me an update on that essay:title.. Experience this tragic irony for me..