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Don't miss the discussion of McPhee's text editor. I would love to get more details about that. Catnip for this crowd.
I suspect a large contingent here will really hate this suggestion but here it goes: The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. That is, prompts for LLMs to write things. >in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of eac…
> Your writing can only be as good as your taste.
That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those HN types who "kinda hates LLMs").
Back when i wrote a lot, i often did something like this. I used a program called Acta [1], which was described as an outliner. Basically a text editor where paragraphs form a tree, and nodes can be collapsed. I'd start with the high-level structure and recursively flesh it out, and just keep doing that until i had nodes at the level of individual sentences. Then i'd just write a sentence for each node, and concatenate them. Often i'd take a shortcut and just write a whole paragraph. But a lot of the time, i wouldn't - a difficult passage becomes easy when you're incrementally breaking it down, reordering it, revising it, etc.
That sounds like an impressively rapid climb.
> I should say that in those nightly encounters I rarely go straight from notes to full sentences. I bridge the gap with a kind of pseudowriting. In effect it’s an outline that takes the form of paragraphs, mixed in with the raw notes. I write good full sentences, broken half-sentences, non-sentences that also include todos in them. Back when i wrote a lot, i often did something like this. I used a program called Act…
> while “writing a first draft” is intimidating, “reading through all your notes” or moving note cards around on a table, contemplating structure, is not. In fact these tasks are kind of delightful.
Thanks for sharing.
I absolutely loved this: > if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.
This is such a great piece and I admire Somers Atlantic writing. I just want to say, this process feels similar to the process Michael Lewis used in his later books, particular with "Going Infinite", where he embedded deeply and for a long time with FTX, emerging to write just as the story shifted from FTX legitimizing the world of cryptocurrency to becoming its chief villain. So I do wonder, when you dig in that dee…