Yes. One of the primary purposes of this exercise is to teach me to overcome my writer’s molasses—which is like writer’s block, only instead of not writing, you write very sloooowly. So far, this exercise has been a smashing success.
The most important observation I have ever heard about writer’s block is that it doesn’t stem from being unable to write, but from holding yourself to too high a standard. You can always write a sentence—if necessary you could type gibberish—if you lower your standards far enough; thus all writer’s block stems from having standards higher than you can type at.
Yes, there are all kinds of wonderful effects of using real-world examples instead of parables. But these would take more words, and as you can see, commenters already think my posts are too long. And furthermore, it would take more time, and the whole reason I’m writing blog posts is because—for some strange reason—I can write blog posts much faster than I can write anything else. Probably because I can bring myself to lower my standards, and because I can pump a post out the door, get it published, instead of tweaking it for months.
If anyone wants to write about rationality differently, they are, of course, welcome to do so; it’s a big Internet, and who knows, maybe you could even get it published on Overcoming Bias. Meanwhile, I am here, above all, to teach myself speed. I don’t intend this to excuse me from such requirements as good grammar, good structure, good spelling, or even brevity. But when it comes to things like using parables instead of carefully looking up and explaining examples from the real world, I plead guilty and will go right on doing it.
“to pump out one a day”
Is that what you intend to do—pump out one a day?
Yes. One of the primary purposes of this exercise is to teach me to overcome my writer’s molasses—which is like writer’s block, only instead of not writing, you write very sloooowly. So far, this exercise has been a smashing success.
The most important observation I have ever heard about writer’s block is that it doesn’t stem from being unable to write, but from holding yourself to too high a standard. You can always write a sentence—if necessary you could type gibberish—if you lower your standards far enough; thus all writer’s block stems from having standards higher than you can type at.
Yes, there are all kinds of wonderful effects of using real-world examples instead of parables. But these would take more words, and as you can see, commenters already think my posts are too long. And furthermore, it would take more time, and the whole reason I’m writing blog posts is because—for some strange reason—I can write blog posts much faster than I can write anything else. Probably because I can bring myself to lower my standards, and because I can pump a post out the door, get it published, instead of tweaking it for months.
If anyone wants to write about rationality differently, they are, of course, welcome to do so; it’s a big Internet, and who knows, maybe you could even get it published on Overcoming Bias. Meanwhile, I am here, above all, to teach myself speed. I don’t intend this to excuse me from such requirements as good grammar, good structure, good spelling, or even brevity. But when it comes to things like using parables instead of carefully looking up and explaining examples from the real world, I plead guilty and will go right on doing it.