A Version 1.0

http://www.paulgraham.com/laundry.html

by marvin • 18 years ago

48 30 18 years ago

m0nty2• 18 years ago

"I probably write three to four words for every one that appears in the final version of an essay."

Writing is cutting. Most things are: a lot of crap is produced for everything worth keeping.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.)

canoebuilder2• 18 years ago

Ira Glass on a similar theme

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM

m0nty2• 18 years ago

Good quotation: "Not enough is said, about the importance of dropping crap."

keizo2• 18 years ago

A person named canoebuilder on hacker news? I thought I was the only one.

mdemare5• 18 years ago

I liked the comparison of studying the classics in the middle ages to "Alien Studies". Very revealing metaphor!

yters2• 18 years ago

pg makes a point of devaluing the classics in his essays. I don't know why.

Let's assume there are consistent patterns to how people work, and these patterns are consistent because people forget about them. So, the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history.

Now let's come back to the present day. People give this idea lip service, but no one really takes the classics seriously anymore. Because of metanarratives like evolution, we think progress happens automatically and that there is no intrinsic human nature. We don't realize this worldview is very recent and people thought it was a bad idea in the past.

Consequently, our worldview becomes a local optimum that limits us from looking for anything else. This is called hubris in classical literature. Think Oedipus.

yters2• 18 years ago

"the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history"

"ways"

I hate it when I put time into creating a good response and a grammar mistake makes my writing look retarded.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

There seem to be some clear patterns in what was cut: anything angsty, opinions lacking empirical support, personal feelings, etc. Which isn't to say that all of these weren't needed to get the thoughts down on paper.

mdemare5• 18 years ago

Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase the number of people who will consider it worth reading. But I think it's doubtful whether you're doing a service for the readers who would have liked the original version.

The same phenomenon is being played out with music and bootlegs, and movies and director's cuts. Most people want the short version, the fans want as much as they can get.

gnaritas3• 18 years ago

Nah, it's the lack of all that unsupported unnecessary fluff that makes Paul's writing enjoyable. This is a critical step in good writing, stop trying boring your reader to death and get to the damn point already, and Paul does it well, Steve Yeggi on the other hand must have missed this lesson. If you had to read all that stuff everytime, you may not come to enjoy Paul's writing as much as you do now in the first place. Fans only want more after they've become fans.

mdemare5• 18 years ago

Speak for yourself. Yegge was never terse, yet he may count me a fan.

phaedrus3• 18 years ago

I agree with your first premise - Paul Graham's writing is enjoyable because it is terse.

I can't support your second premise. Just because Steve Yeggi's writing is long, doesn't mean it's full of fluff. It may not be as compact as a PG essay, but Steve Yeggi is also expressing very complex ideas and I think he uses just as many words as he needs to, to get the whole point across.

allenbrunson• 18 years ago

i also enjoyed reading the deleted parts.

obviously pg is aiming for "terse" in most of his essays. but if he left in a few of the diversions, personal feelings, reactions to others, etc, he would seem more human. fewer people would have the occasional violent negative reactions to him that we've been seeing lately.

mdemare5• 18 years ago

I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding. It's true that you can generate much more ideas by writing, and it allows you to cast your gaze a lot further than whatever particular method you're working on. Any thoughts?

JesseAldridge• 18 years ago

I think writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself. pg can afford to write because he's made his fortune.

Simple notes to yourself should be sufficient for generating and refining ideas.

danohuiginn• 18 years ago

"writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself."

I disagree. I write a lot of stuff that nobody else sees, just to clarify my thinking. My head's full of vague ideas, and it's only when I write them down that I can pick apart the contradictions. It's no different from coding: once you actually start writing code (rather than just planning it) you suddenly notice a host of edge cases and potential bugs.

phaedrus3• 18 years ago

Sometimes when I get stuck on a code problem, I start writing an essay describing how the system works. Even if I don't have a clear idea what that should be, by the time I finish the essay, I've worked out what I should write in the code.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding ..."

Do you have a blog? ~ http://inglua.wordpress.com/ then write some interesting things up and submit them

ubudesign• 18 years ago

I think language is also a factor. English grammar is dependent on word order. a thought is more free. so transforming that into sentences that reflect the thought order is a challenge. maybe this is only true for people like me who speak a different language (Farsi) which has free word order. I can write a long sentence putting all my thoughts in it without much problem. but when I write it in English it turns into run-on sentence. The only solution I've found is short senses that follow my thoughts. While English is a simple language it's an art to be able to write well so maybe that's why Paul's well written work include revisions in the process. I'm sure there are more to this but I'm not a language expert :)

aflag• 18 years ago

I'm not sure that's really true. You tend to think more or less in the terms of the language you speak most of the time. For example, I lived in the US for one year and, when I got back to Brazil I'd often think like "I like this better", wheras in portuguese you'd say something like "I like more of this". My point being that we adapt to think how we speak and write, so that's not really the issue when writing down your thoughts.

I think the hardest thing is to be coherent, when you think you often skip steps that you look with greater care when you write. It's not uncommon that some of the steps you're skiping are crucial ones.

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