Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

rolandasb.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 95 posts

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#41

Post by ghaff »

nickjj wrote: post #35
tyre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them. Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.

My blog posts and course scripts aren't just documenting code. I very rarely know what I'm going to write until I start writing. I don't even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go. I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts. If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson…

I agree with all that. If something really isn't working and you just keep flinging words and other content onto the page, that's a pretty good recipe for having a lot of throwaway work. I don't usually polish drafts as I'm writing them unless I do so for something to do while I'm mulling where to take the piece.

I'm not really a big outline person either for either writing or presentations. I almost always have some idea where I'm going though it's not unusual for that to diverge.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#43

Post by munmaek »

tyre wrote: post #32
munmaek wrote: post #28

I do something like this from time to time, just with pen and paper. I often have thoughts for blog posts, and I'll write out as much as I can in a dedicated notebook. After ~2-6 days, I'll look at it again with fresh eyes and type up a first rough draft, doing edits, writing more, and rearranging everything to be more cohesive. Again, after 2-6 days I'll take another look and polish the draft. Generally by that poin…

I think you'd enjoy "Draft No. 4" by John McFee. He talks about a very similar approach to writing. You might pick some things up from him talking in depth about the same :)

If you mean this [0], that was a very good read.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#44

Post by derefr »

nickjj wrote: post #35
tyre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them. Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.

My blog posts and course scripts aren't just documenting code. I very rarely know what I'm going to write until I start writing. I don't even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go. I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts. If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson…

That's not what the parent comments are saying. The difference with technical writing isn't that you have a plan for what you're going to write. It's that you already have the domain knowledge that you're going to compile into prose. It's a communication process, rather than an invention process.

A good way to think of creative writing, if you're a technical writer, is to imagine attempting to write a textbook when you don't know the subject at all, and the "demand" from each new paragraph causes you to do the research necessary to acquire the knowledge necessary to write it.

How would you even structure a thing like that, in advance?

How would it ever attain a sensible shape if done a paragraph at a time, when something you learned while doing the research necessary to write paragraph 100 invalidates everything you wrote before it, or causes a complete restructuring of your mental model such that you realize the topic should be presented in an entirely different order? (And then you realize that again, and again, and again...)

A similar thing occurs in investigative journalism. How would you know how to present a story—know what story you're telling, really—before you know all the key facts? In est, before you've completed your investigation? You could certainly write notes about what you might write, but those have little to do with drafting the final story.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#45

Post by paulddraper »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

This conversation is simply the English-equivalent of TDD conversations.

* Conventional development = writing, then editing

* Test-driven development = writing and editing simultaneously

The preferences are endless and neither removes the most difficult part which is the conceptual architecture.

Personally, I like to splatter a whole bunch of ideas down first and then later go back and commit.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#46

Post by rpastuszak »

Ha, this is so cool!

I'm working on a very similar problem atm: https://ulysses.sonnet.io/

My approach is slightly different though:

- you can see the previous lines (the last 4 lines of text), i.e. they don't fade, so you can still keep some context

- you cannot select, edit (the UX makes it hard). I'm still working on making the UX around it more explicit, curious to hear feedback.

There are several reasons for that (or use cases):

- I use it to foster a better writing habit

- During the day, I keep it on split screen and write to organise my thoughts when I work on more complex problems

- I use it as a diary (and paste the text to the Notes app)

Do you use it in a similar manner? Did working on the app change your writing habits in any way? The reason I ask is because in my case writing this way feels somehow more natural. I ended up writing 800 words per day on average (with spikes to 2-3k).

Also, I'm following the same `div.fade` approach to mask text in my app. The main reason for that was incorrect colour correction/mixing on Firefox (banding or shifting the colour by 1 point).

PS. I'll send over some of the apps here to my partner (a writer) and see which one suits her needs better. I'll let you know if I get any feedback.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#47

Post by mbrock »

mynameiskyleok wrote: post #37
mbrock wrote: post #19

Here’s my attempt at a tool for writing not even a draft but a stream of consciousness that evaporates like a daydream or prayer. https://swa.sh It doesn’t work on mobile, but you should use it with a proper keyboard anyway. There’s nothing sent from the JavaScript to any server; it’s a static page hosted on Netlify with very simple code. It’s just an index.html with style and script tags, 39 lines total. I use it in…

This is great. I often write just to clear my head. There's never an output/deliverable. It's just meditation. Thanks for sharing!

Glad you like it! Feel free to save it to your disk and modify it. I forgot to put a free software license, will do later...

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#48

Post by 13415 »

john-radio wrote: post #26
nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

It is not very good advice for creative writing either, though. The general advice given by agencies and professional authors is to write "to the final version" and roughly edit after every writing session or before the next one. (I'm also talking from personal experience, have written eight novels in German and didn't follow this advice in the beginning.)

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#49

Post by signal11 »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

Among professional authors, John Scalzi has said many times that he edits as he goes along[1].

For shorter academic and work pieces (and back when I blogged) I’ve done this as well, but I do an outline for longer papers first, and then edit as I go. Of course I wasn’t anywhere near nickjj’s level of output.

[1] https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/science-fiction-and-fanta...

Post reply on HN