14 ms·

I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)

249 points by o4c 4mo ago

ortusdux 4mo ago
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
- stackghost 4mo ago
  >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.
  - bpavuk 4mo ago
    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.
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > 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 :)
  - billypilgrim 4mo ago
    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.
- justonceokay 4mo ago
  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.
  - drtz 4mo ago
    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.
    - sokka_h2otribe 4mo ago
      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.
      - ajb 4mo ago
        I don't know if it's specifically UK terminology, but here we don't call bathroom silicone "caulk" - we use that term for decorators caulk, which is much more sticky; so needs to be treated differently to silicone. Definitely true that the little tools are amazing for bathroom silicone, not sure what you do with the other stuff
- jonahx 4mo ago
  > 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
- koolba 4mo ago
  The software version of this (pre-LLM!) was to write tons of software till the patterns just click. I don’t see that continuing though. Does anyone truly think we’ll have another generation of nerds hacking away for hours by hand to hone their trade? Or will it turn into a craft like woodworking?
  - MobiusHorizons 4mo ago
    Why not? People have lots of hobbies.
    - knuckle 4mo ago
      If I'm being honest, software was a hobby before it was a profession. I just thought computers were fun from about age 10 or so. In college I wanted to study Civil engineering, but shifted to Computer engineering and then it turned out the world wanted software so bad they'd let me do whatever I wanted as long as I gave them a little software along the way. I see my sons tinkering with software now in the same way I did. They want to play games and make games and build their own tools. I don't know whether they'll wind up building software as a profession, but I'm sure they'll have the base skills needed to.
  - hombre_fatal 4mo ago
    I don’t see how “artisanal” software would make sense since what matters is the end result. One of the worst parts of software is that you develop this deep expertise in something that has less to show for it to people than a guy dicking around on a guitar or someone who made a stool after 40 hours of experience. People aren’t decompiling their iPhone apps to admire your handiwork and evaluate how thoughtfully you modeled the domain. Will artisanal human-driven taxi drivers exist in the future? No, Waymo is even more expensive yet people prefer it. The human aspect turns out to be a liability and less of a human expression people would go out of their way to experience.
- utopiah 4mo ago
  > your taste is why your work disappoints you. Damn, on point. So hard to go over that hump but so worth it, every time, in retrospect.
kitchi 4mo ago
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.
- jvanderbot 4mo ago
  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.
  - jltsiren 4mo ago
    Old papers were essentially essays. When there were fewer researchers publishing fewer papers, you were expected to read everything relevant you came across. It made sense to optimize the papers for reading. Today there is much more research being done and published, and fully reading a paper is a special case. Papers are now more structured, and the primary use case is quickly skimming over the paper to determine if it merits more thorough reading. (Usually it doesn't.)
  - bonoboTP 4mo ago
    In math they often still skip those motivation, related work overview stuff and just do some math. But I actually do think it's good to force people to think about the "why" question a lot.
    - jvanderbot 4mo ago
      Maybe! But also maybe niche research can just be for the niche researchers. The work is funded, and therefore the "why" hoops have been jumped through, right? And anyway, aren't reviewers themselves supposed to be able to connect dots? When I was an active reviewer I tried not to ever say "Who cares" in so many words and just focus on the technical contributions. There's enough overinflation/fraud in papers that we dont need to be encouraging it by asking them to over-over inflate a possible reason for the work that is beyond the obvious ones that reviewers in the same field would appreciate. All IMHO. There's no "right", just "preferred".
readthenotes1 4mo ago
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.
- HPsquared 4mo ago
  Science is like that too, it's mostly very tedious and repetitive work.
  - readthenotes1 4mo ago
    Generally someone comes out with something other than keep trying from a scientific experiment though, right? Like an hypothesis and a test and stuff like that
- eikenberry 4mo ago
  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.
- indoordin0saur 4mo ago
  With a little practice you too can write a short essay on an interesting topic while not actually saying anything meaningful or useful!
  - UncleSlacky 4mo ago
    Works for ChatGPT!
acheron 4mo ago
“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 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11
- wahern 4mo ago
  "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Richard Guindon, Michigan So Far, 1991. The comic has been quoted online many times, but I had to buy an old copy of Michigan So Far on eBay to actually see the comic: https://25thandClement.com/~william/links/img/Writing-Guindon-1991.jpg https://25thandClement.com/~william/links/img/Writing-Guindo...
  - susiecambria 4mo ago
    Or, as prep school teachers and college professors told students who asked the question "How long does the paper have to be?", "Short if you have a lot of time and long if you don't. I (now) fondly remember getting my first English paper back as a hs freshman with an F. Shook me to my core. I had, after all, gotten into this good school as one of the select few. That was a good lesson and it's served me pretty well.
- charlie90 4mo ago
  Heh, I've always thought this too. The most value I got out of writing assignments was making the research and outline. The step to turn the outline into the essay mostly involved adding BS fluff and transitions.
QuantumNoodle 4mo ago
So "be bad until git gud" through iterations and refining.
jalev 4mo ago
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.
teddyh 4mo ago
See also: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.
- PandaRider 4mo ago
  The goat. Probably a required reading for all academics. However, I wonder if this workshop is still relevant in the age of LLMs...?
bawolff 4mo ago
Well that was anticlimactic. I thought there would be at least a little more insight than just practise more.
- tstrimple 4mo ago
  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."
  - bawolff 4mo ago
    Yes, because literally everyone has the same advice about all fields of endeavor.
    - robocat 4mo ago
      "1% of luck" is so meaningless. Did you have to be born to the right parents at the right time, or just avoid a car accident? And the ability or desire to work hard has some very soft dependencies.
      - komali2 4mo ago
        Yeah 50/50 feels more accurate. The great success is equally dependant on both things. Actually probably more on luck since I know plenty of lazy but lucky successful people, but no hard working unlucky successful people.
      - probably_wrong 4mo ago
        Based on my experience it's more about being able to recognize an opportunity when it shows up and being good enough at your craft to take it. But no one can tell you what that chance will look like. Maybe it's a smart question to the right person during a hackathon, or maybe it's being really into graph theory and applying to a small newcomer company called Google. For a concrete example: in his book "On writing" Stephen King details his life up until the point he hit it big with "Carrie". You could say he was lucky for the book to sell as good as it did, but that would require ignoring that he had been writing (and getting rejected!) non-stop for roughly 20 years.
phyzix5761 4mo ago
The post doesn't actually describe any kind of science to writing. That was disappointing.
- jansan 4mo ago
  The science seems to be 1. Write stuff 2. Make it better 3. Continue with step 2 It even is an algorithm.
  - UncleSlacky 4mo ago
    Something like Feynman's algorithm: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the solution.
- UncleSlacky 4mo ago
  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.
huijzer 4mo ago
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
- rekabis 4mo ago
  > plus you constantly have to compromise on most of the text until it says almost nothing With science writing, in terms of published papers, this makes perfect sense. You want to avoid imparting your own biases and interpretations in favour of letting the data speak for itself. That means the author needs to quite severely “step aside” from a literary perspective.
  - huijzer 4mo ago
    In theory you are right, but in practice that’s not how it goes.
undershirt 4mo ago
I don't even know what science is anymore.
iLemming 4mo ago
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.
- zeusdclxvi 4mo ago
  >our family group channel in Telegram what country do you live in where this is a normal thing?
  - iLemming 4mo ago
    What does country have to do with that? We just don't use whatsapp, instagram or facebook but still need a way to communicate. Unlike something like WeeChat, Telegram is pretty popular in both hemispheres.
  - throawayonthe 4mo ago
    is the family groupchat a regional thing? where do you live?
qzgrid37 4mo ago
[dead]
kesor 4mo ago
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 (proving your point). - Profit and glory!
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
robmn 4mo ago
Unfortunately AI > your skills sub 2 years
- fullstackchris 4mo ago
  except AI writing is near 100% detectable. check out something like pangram. no matter what you generate, the cadence of their word choices, sentance structures, etc. are always the same and often blantently visible in the prose. in fact i doubt an LLM of any size now and into the future can properly write without a "fingerprint". real writing, in almost any language, given the possible combination of writing even just a few sentences, even given valid grammar, already exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. because LLMs are transformers, they will always leave behind clues.
jamesgill 4mo ago
It's not a science. At best, there are best practices--and some of the best, most famous writing has ignored them. "Writing" is broad, means a lot of things, and defies algorithms.
vkou 4mo ago
This article took ~8 million words to get to a point. 'Write shit. Edit it. Repeat.' What a disappointment.
- imp0cat 4mo ago
  "Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." - JAKE THE DOG
webnrrd2k 4mo ago
As far as I can tell, according to the article, the "science" is get feedback and listen to it. Ok, that was perfectly fine advice, I guess.
pessimizer 4mo ago
I have no idea how this was published or why it has generated discussion. The "surprising" discovery that the author made is that you don't just write something all the way through without stopping, you go back and edit it. I always thought that even very small children knew that. If someone wasn't aware of this for years even after many attempts, I wouldn't trust them to do any sort of research. Somebody should have put a red line through every word of this. disclosure: I used the science of editing this comment after writing it.
chopete3 4mo ago
That is a anticlimactic. There should be a new flag called AI slop to flag these faster.
GarnetFloride 4mo ago
I help run a writer's symposium. We get about 200 presenters and 1200 attendees a year. No one's journey is the same. What worked for one; failed for another. You have to find what works for you. Writer's rules are more like tools, and try use the appropriate tool for the job. Some things that I have learned from of them: Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time. Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around. Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice. Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.
- __patchbit__ 4mo ago
  An option is to signup to a journalism school writing course done remotely and to follow at your own pace at set exercises with guidance from an assigned tutor. You'll sample more of the writing trade landscape than DIY and with luck discover your unique voice.
kirtivr 4mo ago
TL;dr Make a first draft that is bad, and improve it from there.
thelastgallon 4mo ago
Writing is a forcing function for thinking. These days, most people are using AI to generate lots and lots of content, the 'writer' loses an opportunity to learn and understand, and creates garbage content for others consumption.
kirtivr 4mo ago
How did this article (1) Get published in Science (2) Get 200+ upvotes on HN, with no explanation of the supposed science behind writing? What's the null hypothesis? Is it possible to disprove your assertion?
- happyrock 4mo ago
  A content-free article
orhansavash 4mo ago
[flagged]
articsputnik 4mo ago
For me, it was like this until I discovered the language English. I hated writing when I had to do it in school, "high German", I’m a Swiss. We talk Swiss German, and this is not a written language. So I had to kind of write in a foreign language. But later in life, when I did a mini-retirement in Denmark to learn proper English, all of a sudden I loved reading more, started listening to podcasts, and started writing. It was through the language of English that I got to love writing and reading (mostly Audible). It was Writing in a Foreign Language again, but this time, it fitted more to my style, also because it’s straight to the point and you have so many of the same words to explain a specific sentence so well. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/brain/writing-in-a-foreign-language https://www.ssp.sh/brain/writing-in-a-foreign-language just in case of interest.
user____name 4mo ago
I found writing techniques employed by fiction writers to be surpisingly relevant for nonfiction.
offaxis 4mo ago
I have been writing for the past few months since starting my new job, and this writing is a huge encouragement to me. It makes me realize once again that I need to practice consistently rather than blaming my lack of ability. I think I was too fixated on the concept of 'talent.'
rekabis 4mo ago
> How could I know what was good if there was no objectively right answer? Except there usually is a right answer, only it tends to be buried under several layers of “how do you want this to be interpreted?” The one thing I have learned about writing is that the same sentence can have wildly different interpretations between people if it’s written sloppily enough. Your core meaning could still very well be there, but because the prose was sloppy, it opened the door to alternative interpretations that you cannot control. Now sometimes there is no way to refine it further. But most of the time it can be. And then, even after sharpening the prose, you need to take your reader into account. What works for an adult might not work for a teenager. When I was a kid, I remember having a doctor in the hospital ask me if I was nauseous, and I replied, “there is nothing wrong with my nose”. I had never come across that word before, and associated the sound that went into its pronunciation with the closest other word I knew - the word for nose. The doc had failed to take into account people with a more limited vocabulary, setting up a chance for medical misinterpretation - I had indeed been sick to my stomach, but because he didn’t ask about it in those simpler words, he almost didn’t learn about it. Writing is even more bereft of context, and so you need to not only sharpen the prose to cut off undesirable paths of interpretation, but also write for what your audience knows. And sometimes this can be one hell of a rabbit hole in of itself.
synergy7 4mo ago
I was drawn in by the "there’s a science to it" in the title, but I don't see that implicit promise (telling us something about the science of writing) fulfilled anywhere in the article, which is puzzling. Storytelling is something that connects science and the science of writing for me. I've received advice to tell a story when writing scientific papers, but I haven't heard a concrete and sufficiently complete explanation of what that really means. For example, when describing a new model, what is the story you tell and how do you tell it? A book I find useful on the structure of storytelling is "Beginnings, Middles & Ends" by Nancy Kress. It helps me think about how to tell a story in a scientific paper, even though the book has nothing to do with that.

249 points by o4c 4mo ago

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

stackghost 4mo ago
>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.
- bpavuk 4mo ago
  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.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > 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 :)
- billypilgrim 4mo ago
  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.
justonceokay 4mo ago
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.
- drtz 4mo ago
  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.
  - sokka_h2otribe 4mo ago
    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.
    - ajb 4mo ago
      I don't know if it's specifically UK terminology, but here we don't call bathroom silicone "caulk" - we use that term for decorators caulk, which is much more sticky; so needs to be treated differently to silicone. Definitely true that the little tools are amazing for bathroom silicone, not sure what you do with the other stuff
jonahx 4mo ago
> 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
koolba 4mo ago
The software version of this (pre-LLM!) was to write tons of software till the patterns just click. I don’t see that continuing though. Does anyone truly think we’ll have another generation of nerds hacking away for hours by hand to hone their trade? Or will it turn into a craft like woodworking?
- MobiusHorizons 4mo ago
  Why not? People have lots of hobbies.
  - knuckle 4mo ago
    If I'm being honest, software was a hobby before it was a profession. I just thought computers were fun from about age 10 or so. In college I wanted to study Civil engineering, but shifted to Computer engineering and then it turned out the world wanted software so bad they'd let me do whatever I wanted as long as I gave them a little software along the way. I see my sons tinkering with software now in the same way I did. They want to play games and make games and build their own tools. I don't know whether they'll wind up building software as a profession, but I'm sure they'll have the base skills needed to.
- hombre_fatal 4mo ago
  I don’t see how “artisanal” software would make sense since what matters is the end result. One of the worst parts of software is that you develop this deep expertise in something that has less to show for it to people than a guy dicking around on a guitar or someone who made a stool after 40 hours of experience. People aren’t decompiling their iPhone apps to admire your handiwork and evaluate how thoughtfully you modeled the domain. Will artisanal human-driven taxi drivers exist in the future? No, Waymo is even more expensive yet people prefer it. The human aspect turns out to be a liability and less of a human expression people would go out of their way to experience.
utopiah 4mo ago
> your taste is why your work disappoints you. Damn, on point. So hard to go over that hump but so worth it, every time, in retrospect.

kitchi 4mo ago

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.

jvanderbot 4mo ago
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.
- jltsiren 4mo ago
  Old papers were essentially essays. When there were fewer researchers publishing fewer papers, you were expected to read everything relevant you came across. It made sense to optimize the papers for reading. Today there is much more research being done and published, and fully reading a paper is a special case. Papers are now more structured, and the primary use case is quickly skimming over the paper to determine if it merits more thorough reading. (Usually it doesn't.)
- bonoboTP 4mo ago
  In math they often still skip those motivation, related work overview stuff and just do some math. But I actually do think it's good to force people to think about the "why" question a lot.
  - jvanderbot 4mo ago
    Maybe! But also maybe niche research can just be for the niche researchers. The work is funded, and therefore the "why" hoops have been jumped through, right? And anyway, aren't reviewers themselves supposed to be able to connect dots? When I was an active reviewer I tried not to ever say "Who cares" in so many words and just focus on the technical contributions. There's enough overinflation/fraud in papers that we dont need to be encouraging it by asking them to over-over inflate a possible reason for the work that is beyond the obvious ones that reviewers in the same field would appreciate. All IMHO. There's no "right", just "preferred".

readthenotes1 4mo ago

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.

HPsquared 4mo ago
Science is like that too, it's mostly very tedious and repetitive work.
- readthenotes1 4mo ago
  Generally someone comes out with something other than keep trying from a scientific experiment though, right? Like an hypothesis and a test and stuff like that
eikenberry 4mo ago
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.
indoordin0saur 4mo ago
With a little practice you too can write a short essay on an interesting topic while not actually saying anything meaningful or useful!
- UncleSlacky 4mo ago
  Works for ChatGPT!

acheron 4mo ago

“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 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11

wahern 4mo ago
"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -- Richard Guindon, Michigan So Far, 1991. The comic has been quoted online many times, but I had to buy an old copy of Michigan So Far on eBay to actually see the comic: https://25thandClement.com/~william/links/img/Writing-Guindon-1991.jpg https://25thandClement.com/~william/links/img/Writing-Guindo...
- susiecambria 4mo ago
  Or, as prep school teachers and college professors told students who asked the question "How long does the paper have to be?", "Short if you have a lot of time and long if you don't. I (now) fondly remember getting my first English paper back as a hs freshman with an F. Shook me to my core. I had, after all, gotten into this good school as one of the select few. That was a good lesson and it's served me pretty well.
charlie90 4mo ago
Heh, I've always thought this too. The most value I got out of writing assignments was making the research and outline. The step to turn the outline into the essay mostly involved adding BS fluff and transitions.

QuantumNoodle 4mo ago

So "be bad until git gud" through iterations and refining.

jalev 4mo ago

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.

teddyh 4mo ago

See also: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.

PandaRider 4mo ago
The goat. Probably a required reading for all academics. However, I wonder if this workshop is still relevant in the age of LLMs...?

bawolff 4mo ago

Well that was anticlimactic. I thought there would be at least a little more insight than just practise more.

tstrimple 4mo ago
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."
- bawolff 4mo ago
  Yes, because literally everyone has the same advice about all fields of endeavor.
  - robocat 4mo ago
    "1% of luck" is so meaningless. Did you have to be born to the right parents at the right time, or just avoid a car accident? And the ability or desire to work hard has some very soft dependencies.
    - komali2 4mo ago
      Yeah 50/50 feels more accurate. The great success is equally dependant on both things. Actually probably more on luck since I know plenty of lazy but lucky successful people, but no hard working unlucky successful people.
    - probably_wrong 4mo ago
      Based on my experience it's more about being able to recognize an opportunity when it shows up and being good enough at your craft to take it. But no one can tell you what that chance will look like. Maybe it's a smart question to the right person during a hackathon, or maybe it's being really into graph theory and applying to a small newcomer company called Google. For a concrete example: in his book "On writing" Stephen King details his life up until the point he hit it big with "Carrie". You could say he was lucky for the book to sell as good as it did, but that would require ignoring that he had been writing (and getting rejected!) non-stop for roughly 20 years.

phyzix5761 4mo ago

The post doesn't actually describe any kind of science to writing. That was disappointing.

jansan 4mo ago
The science seems to be 1. Write stuff 2. Make it better 3. Continue with step 2 It even is an algorithm.
- UncleSlacky 4mo ago
  Something like Feynman's algorithm: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the solution.
UncleSlacky 4mo ago
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.

huijzer 4mo ago

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

rekabis 4mo ago
> plus you constantly have to compromise on most of the text until it says almost nothing With science writing, in terms of published papers, this makes perfect sense. You want to avoid imparting your own biases and interpretations in favour of letting the data speak for itself. That means the author needs to quite severely “step aside” from a literary perspective.
- huijzer 4mo ago
  In theory you are right, but in practice that’s not how it goes.

undershirt 4mo ago

I don't even know what science is anymore.

iLemming 4mo ago

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.

zeusdclxvi 4mo ago
>our family group channel in Telegram what country do you live in where this is a normal thing?
- iLemming 4mo ago
  What does country have to do with that? We just don't use whatsapp, instagram or facebook but still need a way to communicate. Unlike something like WeeChat, Telegram is pretty popular in both hemispheres.
- throawayonthe 4mo ago
  is the family groupchat a regional thing? where do you live?

qzgrid37 4mo ago

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kesor 4mo ago

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 (proving your point). - Profit and glory!

deleted 4mo ago
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robmn 4mo ago

Unfortunately AI > your skills sub 2 years

fullstackchris 4mo ago
except AI writing is near 100% detectable. check out something like pangram. no matter what you generate, the cadence of their word choices, sentance structures, etc. are always the same and often blantently visible in the prose. in fact i doubt an LLM of any size now and into the future can properly write without a "fingerprint". real writing, in almost any language, given the possible combination of writing even just a few sentences, even given valid grammar, already exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. because LLMs are transformers, they will always leave behind clues.

jamesgill 4mo ago

It's not a science. At best, there are best practices--and some of the best, most famous writing has ignored them. "Writing" is broad, means a lot of things, and defies algorithms.

vkou 4mo ago

This article took ~8 million words to get to a point. 'Write shit. Edit it. Repeat.' What a disappointment.

imp0cat 4mo ago
"Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." - JAKE THE DOG

webnrrd2k 4mo ago

As far as I can tell, according to the article, the "science" is get feedback and listen to it. Ok, that was perfectly fine advice, I guess.

pessimizer 4mo ago

I have no idea how this was published or why it has generated discussion. The "surprising" discovery that the author made is that you don't just write something all the way through without stopping, you go back and edit it. I always thought that even very small children knew that. If someone wasn't aware of this for years even after many attempts, I wouldn't trust them to do any sort of research. Somebody should have put a red line through every word of this. disclosure: I used the science of editing this comment after writing it.

chopete3 4mo ago

That is a anticlimactic. There should be a new flag called AI slop to flag these faster.

GarnetFloride 4mo ago

I help run a writer's symposium. We get about 200 presenters and 1200 attendees a year. No one's journey is the same. What worked for one; failed for another. You have to find what works for you. Writer's rules are more like tools, and try use the appropriate tool for the job. Some things that I have learned from of them: Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time. Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around. Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice. Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.

__patchbit__ 4mo ago
An option is to signup to a journalism school writing course done remotely and to follow at your own pace at set exercises with guidance from an assigned tutor. You'll sample more of the writing trade landscape than DIY and with luck discover your unique voice.

kirtivr 4mo ago

TL;dr Make a first draft that is bad, and improve it from there.

thelastgallon 4mo ago

Writing is a forcing function for thinking. These days, most people are using AI to generate lots and lots of content, the 'writer' loses an opportunity to learn and understand, and creates garbage content for others consumption.

kirtivr 4mo ago

How did this article (1) Get published in Science (2) Get 200+ upvotes on HN, with no explanation of the supposed science behind writing? What's the null hypothesis? Is it possible to disprove your assertion?

happyrock 4mo ago
A content-free article

orhansavash 4mo ago

[flagged]

articsputnik 4mo ago

For me, it was like this until I discovered the language English. I hated writing when I had to do it in school, "high German", I’m a Swiss. We talk Swiss German, and this is not a written language. So I had to kind of write in a foreign language. But later in life, when I did a mini-retirement in Denmark to learn proper English, all of a sudden I loved reading more, started listening to podcasts, and started writing. It was through the language of English that I got to love writing and reading (mostly Audible). It was Writing in a Foreign Language again, but this time, it fitted more to my style, also because it’s straight to the point and you have so many of the same words to explain a specific sentence so well. I wrote more at https://www.ssp.sh/brain/writing-in-a-foreign-language https://www.ssp.sh/brain/writing-in-a-foreign-language just in case of interest.

user____name 4mo ago

I found writing techniques employed by fiction writers to be surpisingly relevant for nonfiction.

offaxis 4mo ago

I have been writing for the past few months since starting my new job, and this writing is a huge encouragement to me. It makes me realize once again that I need to practice consistently rather than blaming my lack of ability. I think I was too fixated on the concept of 'talent.'

rekabis 4mo ago

> How could I know what was good if there was no objectively right answer? Except there usually is a right answer, only it tends to be buried under several layers of “how do you want this to be interpreted?” The one thing I have learned about writing is that the same sentence can have wildly different interpretations between people if it’s written sloppily enough. Your core meaning could still very well be there, but because the prose was sloppy, it opened the door to alternative interpretations that you cannot control. Now sometimes there is no way to refine it further. But most of the time it can be. And then, even after sharpening the prose, you need to take your reader into account. What works for an adult might not work for a teenager. When I was a kid, I remember having a doctor in the hospital ask me if I was nauseous, and I replied, “there is nothing wrong with my nose”. I had never come across that word before, and associated the sound that went into its pronunciation with the closest other word I knew - the word for nose. The doc had failed to take into account people with a more limited vocabulary, setting up a chance for medical misinterpretation - I had indeed been sick to my stomach, but because he didn’t ask about it in those simpler words, he almost didn’t learn about it. Writing is even more bereft of context, and so you need to not only sharpen the prose to cut off undesirable paths of interpretation, but also write for what your audience knows. And sometimes this can be one hell of a rabbit hole in of itself.

synergy7 4mo ago

I was drawn in by the "there’s a science to it" in the title, but I don't see that implicit promise (telling us something about the science of writing) fulfilled anywhere in the article, which is puzzling. Storytelling is something that connects science and the science of writing for me. I've received advice to tell a story when writing scientific papers, but I haven't heard a concrete and sufficiently complete explanation of what that really means. For example, when describing a new model, what is the story you tell and how do you tell it? A book I find useful on the structure of storytelling is "Beginnings, Middles & Ends" by Nancy Kress. It helps me think about how to tell a story in a scientific paper, even though the book has nothing to do with that.