Long ago, I forget where, I saw a blog post that applied this to writing. It pointed out that if we model the quality of your writing as having a mean X and variance Y, then the only way to hit those unlikely exceptionally good texts is to write a lot. Yes, while doing so you might also come up with the same number of exceptionally bad texts, but nobody forces you to show those to anyone. Plus writing a lot will give you practice, gradually pushing up the mean.
From personal experience, I’d also err on the side of publishing even texts you’re not personally all that impressed by. I’ve noticed that I’m relatively bad at estimating what’s going to be popular. Some of my biggest hits have been blog posts I’d never have thought would be popular.
Writing massive amounts of text also helps with self-estimation as a person who can write arbitrary amounts of text. My evolution as a writer started with me going “meh, I can’t finish anything, I have all these ideas that I sometimes start but then I lose interest after a few pages”. Then I started writing collaboratively with a friend, which was so much fun that I could say, “I like writing, at least of this kind, so much that I was on Utah time in Scotland to stay up and write more, for as much as seventeen hours straight.” Then I wrote a finished novel… it was fanfiction, but I already considered worldbuilding my strength and character creation also on said list. Then I did it again. At some point I started being “a writer”, who can decide to do things like “write a book” and have books exist as a result of this decision.
I have been an aspiring writer of sorts, and wrote articles at least once a week for several years without getting much if any feedback on the quality of my writing as opposed to its content. It is fairly easy for me to look back and see a steady improvement in writing quality. I also usually (not always) have no trouble knowing which of my writing isn’t any good, and don’t remember it having been otherwise.
I could be deluding myself but I certainly think some of my writing is better and some of it is worse.
Well, I’m not an aspiring writer but as an amateur musician and visual artist I can say that I can generally tell when my works are not as good as I would like them to be, and I can generally guess ahead of time which pieces will have a better reception among my more critical friends.
In addition; I know a couple of aspiring writers and if anything I would say that they are often very self critical and judging by what they have openly shown me against what they have reluctantly shown me I would say that they did indeed have a good sense of what was good and what wasn’t.
Based on my experiences, I would say that it is fairly common for artists to have a fairly accurate awareness of their own shortcomings; whether or not they can successfully ascertain a workable procedure for overcoming them is a different issue.
Well, I’m not an aspiring writer, but as an amateur musician and visual artist I can say that I can generally tell when my works are not as good as I would like them to be and I can generally guess ahead of time which pieces will have a better reception among my more critical friends.
In addition; I know a couple of aspiring writers and if anything I would say that they are often very self critical and judging by what they have openly shown me against what they have reluctantly shown me I would say that they did indeed have a good sense of what was good and what wasn’t.
Based on my experiences, I would say that it is fairly common for artists to have a fairly accurate awareness of their own short comings; whether or not they can successfully ascertain a workable procedure for overcoming them is a different issue.
If one’s average quality is low enough that people don’t find it worth becoming regular readers, then one is probably better off practicing a lot anyway.
Yes but they assess your blog mostly on its most recent posts. So you should just be out with it and improve anyway. This way you’ll always have the best audience your skills can currently get you.
Hmm. Almost all the blogs I continue to follow update infrequently. I always assumed that that was because the bloggers had some way of telling which of their posts or posts-in-planning are really good and had a policy of only posting those, rather than posting every writing exercise they undertake.
Hmm, also, writing can be an excuse for generating ideas! The obvious thing to do would be to wait for good ideas to come into your head, then write them up for the world to see. But in my experience, writing and having my writing read boosts my ego, which somehow encourages my subconscious to throw up ideas which can be written up to derive yet more ego boosts. It’s a virtuous cycle. Which makes not writing because you can’t think up any good ideas a vicious one.
This is very true. Not only does writing help me come up with ideas of unrelated posts, writing a post often gives me ideas for further related posts as I think about the issue more.
I’ve seen at least one professional writer refer to creativity as a muscle—it gets stronger the more you use it. This seems right in my experience.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. I keep a folder for this very purpose; whenever an interesting thought comes to mind I type it up along with as many of the related strands of thought as I can as quickly as possible and then save it to the folder and move on. I’ve found that this is a fairly useful procedure for organizing my thoughts and documenting my progress in my various areas of interest.
Wouldn’t doing that (instead of writing up the whole argument in a full text) make you feel as if you’ve already achieved the materialization of the idea, hence reducing your motivation to write it in the future (which might lead to never actually writing the text)?
I’m only talking about rough sketches, very short, maybe three or four paragraphs. The material in and of itself is not something I would even want use in the future. Think of it as an artist’s sketch pad; I practice (1) the purely technical aspect of my writing (2) my ability to quickly convey ideas (3) I consolidate information that was previously floating about in my skull into a nice package by anchoring it to a single event.
It’s much the same with guitar or visual art (a least for myself): I may work creatively on one technique by using it to write some nice riffs on guitar or I may try to consolidate the technique of pointillism into my repertoire by using it to draw a face or a land scape. The outcomes of each of these mini-studies is not an end in itself, but rather a stepping stone to mastery.
Won it twice, though those “stories” were pretty solid garbage and I suspect it taught me a bunch of bad habits. It was good for showing that I can do things if I put in enough effort in them, though.
Yeah—but the idea isn’t to write something brilliant—it’s to get into the practice of writing every day. If you won—then you did that perfectly :)
Also—if you really are interested in taking it further, read Steven King’s “On writing” in which he points out that every first draft is terrible. You make a real book after the first draft is over. In fact—if you haven’t already, you night be interested in picking up the NaNoWriMo handbook “No plot, No problem!”—all made a lot more sense after I read that.
Though it should be noted that while “every first draft is terrible” may be correct for Stephen King, it’s not necessarily correct for everyone. There are writers who only do minor revisions to their first draft, while others do several drafts before it gets great.
That’s true—though I think it’d be safe to say that “every first draft is terrible” is something you could say about the vast majority of writers… for sure there are mozarts in the world of writing—but I’d be very surprised if there were many.
Most of my short stories tend to be first drafts, not counting minor edits like changing individual words or making occasional refinements to sentence structure. But then my short stories really are pretty short, so I don’t know to what degree this will generalize to novels yet.
As for my non-fiction books, the process has usually been such that the concept of a first draft isn’t really valid. I don’t write them straight through and then refine, instead I’ll write parts of one chapter and then another in non-linear order, then revise some of what I’ve already written, toss out parts of the book to be replaced with something better, and so forth. By the time I finally have a “first draft” of the whole book, large parts of the content have already been edited several times.
From my (limited) experience, novels are very different to short stories. You can hold the whole concept of a short story in your head at one time.. but novels are big and slippery. Things change and develop as you write—so you often have to go back and rewrite or even delete huge swathes of things to fit the new pattern and flow.
There are some people who can do without this—but IMO they’re either brilliant writing geniuses (to whom we should not compare ourselves) or they’re incredibly experienced writers who started out by going through the major-overhaul process… but who have now honed their talent so much they no longer need it… leaving us still in need, generally, of rewriting.
This is not to say that maybe you’re an exception—or maybe you’re much better at planning (and sticking to the plan) than me :)
Personally I would have put the main idea as the ‘plus’. Perhaps overstated but clearly not wrong.
If the quality of works is distributed around a mean then more works you produce the more likely it is for a high quality work to emerge. The most remarkable works will come from the very best authors when they are having a really good day (or month or year). Producing more from the same distribution will obviously give more chances for you to produce something that is outstanding.
On a related note a ‘one hit wonder’ can be said to be regressing to his mean when his other works flop.
Not ‘just wrong’. It’s just obvious and less important overall than the training effect.
Long ago, I forget where, I saw a blog post that applied this to writing. It pointed out that if we model the quality of your writing as having a mean X and variance Y, then the only way to hit those unlikely exceptionally good texts is to write a lot. Yes, while doing so you might also come up with the same number of exceptionally bad texts, but nobody forces you to show those to anyone. Plus writing a lot will give you practice, gradually pushing up the mean.
From personal experience, I’d also err on the side of publishing even texts you’re not personally all that impressed by. I’ve noticed that I’m relatively bad at estimating what’s going to be popular. Some of my biggest hits have been blog posts I’d never have thought would be popular.
Writing massive amounts of text also helps with self-estimation as a person who can write arbitrary amounts of text. My evolution as a writer started with me going “meh, I can’t finish anything, I have all these ideas that I sometimes start but then I lose interest after a few pages”. Then I started writing collaboratively with a friend, which was so much fun that I could say, “I like writing, at least of this kind, so much that I was on Utah time in Scotland to stay up and write more, for as much as seventeen hours straight.” Then I wrote a finished novel… it was fanfiction, but I already considered worldbuilding my strength and character creation also on said list. Then I did it again. At some point I started being “a writer”, who can decide to do things like “write a book” and have books exist as a result of this decision.
Maybe so, but I’m not going to keep watching someone’s blog or eir user page here unless eir average quality is quite high.
There’s a difference between average quality produced and average quality published. Ideally you sit on the stuff that isn’t any good.
We are talking about writing. Do you really think that most writers who need to improve know which of their writings isn’t any good?
I have been an aspiring writer of sorts, and wrote articles at least once a week for several years without getting much if any feedback on the quality of my writing as opposed to its content. It is fairly easy for me to look back and see a steady improvement in writing quality. I also usually (not always) have no trouble knowing which of my writing isn’t any good, and don’t remember it having been otherwise.
I could be deluding myself but I certainly think some of my writing is better and some of it is worse.
I see. Thanks.
Well, I’m not an aspiring writer but as an amateur musician and visual artist I can say that I can generally tell when my works are not as good as I would like them to be, and I can generally guess ahead of time which pieces will have a better reception among my more critical friends.
In addition; I know a couple of aspiring writers and if anything I would say that they are often very self critical and judging by what they have openly shown me against what they have reluctantly shown me I would say that they did indeed have a good sense of what was good and what wasn’t.
Based on my experiences, I would say that it is fairly common for artists to have a fairly accurate awareness of their own shortcomings; whether or not they can successfully ascertain a workable procedure for overcoming them is a different issue.
Well, I’m not an aspiring writer, but as an amateur musician and visual artist I can say that I can generally tell when my works are not as good as I would like them to be and I can generally guess ahead of time which pieces will have a better reception among my more critical friends.
In addition; I know a couple of aspiring writers and if anything I would say that they are often very self critical and judging by what they have openly shown me against what they have reluctantly shown me I would say that they did indeed have a good sense of what was good and what wasn’t.
Based on my experiences, I would say that it is fairly common for artists to have a fairly accurate awareness of their own short comings; whether or not they can successfully ascertain a workable procedure for overcoming them is a different issue.
If one’s average quality is low enough that people don’t find it worth becoming regular readers, then one is probably better off practicing a lot anyway.
Yes but they assess your blog mostly on its most recent posts. So you should just be out with it and improve anyway. This way you’ll always have the best audience your skills can currently get you.
Hmm. Almost all the blogs I continue to follow update infrequently. I always assumed that that was because the bloggers had some way of telling which of their posts or posts-in-planning are really good and had a policy of only posting those, rather than posting every writing exercise they undertake.
Hmm, also, writing can be an excuse for generating ideas! The obvious thing to do would be to wait for good ideas to come into your head, then write them up for the world to see. But in my experience, writing and having my writing read boosts my ego, which somehow encourages my subconscious to throw up ideas which can be written up to derive yet more ego boosts. It’s a virtuous cycle. Which makes not writing because you can’t think up any good ideas a vicious one.
This is very true. Not only does writing help me come up with ideas of unrelated posts, writing a post often gives me ideas for further related posts as I think about the issue more.
I’ve seen at least one professional writer refer to creativity as a muscle—it gets stronger the more you use it. This seems right in my experience.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. I keep a folder for this very purpose; whenever an interesting thought comes to mind I type it up along with as many of the related strands of thought as I can as quickly as possible and then save it to the folder and move on. I’ve found that this is a fairly useful procedure for organizing my thoughts and documenting my progress in my various areas of interest.
Wouldn’t doing that (instead of writing up the whole argument in a full text) make you feel as if you’ve already achieved the materialization of the idea, hence reducing your motivation to write it in the future (which might lead to never actually writing the text)?
I’m only talking about rough sketches, very short, maybe three or four paragraphs. The material in and of itself is not something I would even want use in the future. Think of it as an artist’s sketch pad; I practice (1) the purely technical aspect of my writing (2) my ability to quickly convey ideas (3) I consolidate information that was previously floating about in my skull into a nice package by anchoring it to a single event.
It’s much the same with guitar or visual art (a least for myself): I may work creatively on one technique by using it to write some nice riffs on guitar or I may try to consolidate the technique of pointillism into my repertoire by using it to draw a face or a land scape. The outcomes of each of these mini-studies is not an end in itself, but rather a stepping stone to mastery.
Have you tried NaNoWriMo ?
It’s really good for putting this into practice :)
Won it twice, though those “stories” were pretty solid garbage and I suspect it taught me a bunch of bad habits. It was good for showing that I can do things if I put in enough effort in them, though.
Yeah—but the idea isn’t to write something brilliant—it’s to get into the practice of writing every day. If you won—then you did that perfectly :)
Also—if you really are interested in taking it further, read Steven King’s “On writing” in which he points out that every first draft is terrible. You make a real book after the first draft is over. In fact—if you haven’t already, you night be interested in picking up the NaNoWriMo handbook “No plot, No problem!”—all made a lot more sense after I read that.
Thanks. Maybe I should look into those.
Though it should be noted that while “every first draft is terrible” may be correct for Stephen King, it’s not necessarily correct for everyone. There are writers who only do minor revisions to their first draft, while others do several drafts before it gets great.
That’s true—though I think it’d be safe to say that “every first draft is terrible” is something you could say about the vast majority of writers… for sure there are mozarts in the world of writing—but I’d be very surprised if there were many.
Most of my short stories tend to be first drafts, not counting minor edits like changing individual words or making occasional refinements to sentence structure. But then my short stories really are pretty short, so I don’t know to what degree this will generalize to novels yet.
As for my non-fiction books, the process has usually been such that the concept of a first draft isn’t really valid. I don’t write them straight through and then refine, instead I’ll write parts of one chapter and then another in non-linear order, then revise some of what I’ve already written, toss out parts of the book to be replaced with something better, and so forth. By the time I finally have a “first draft” of the whole book, large parts of the content have already been edited several times.
From my (limited) experience, novels are very different to short stories. You can hold the whole concept of a short story in your head at one time.. but novels are big and slippery. Things change and develop as you write—so you often have to go back and rewrite or even delete huge swathes of things to fit the new pattern and flow. There are some people who can do without this—but IMO they’re either brilliant writing geniuses (to whom we should not compare ourselves) or they’re incredibly experienced writers who started out by going through the major-overhaul process… but who have now honed their talent so much they no longer need it… leaving us still in need, generally, of rewriting.
This is not to say that maybe you’re an exception—or maybe you’re much better at planning (and sticking to the plan) than me :)
Come to think of it, “every book is terrible” may also be correct for Steven King.
But that’s just wrong. If you’re doing it right your mean creeps steadily upward and that’s how you hit high points.
Not all that wrong it would seem.
The “plus” is right, the main idea is wrong.
Personally I would have put the main idea as the ‘plus’. Perhaps overstated but clearly not wrong.
If the quality of works is distributed around a mean then more works you produce the more likely it is for a high quality work to emerge. The most remarkable works will come from the very best authors when they are having a really good day (or month or year). Producing more from the same distribution will obviously give more chances for you to produce something that is outstanding.
On a related note a ‘one hit wonder’ can be said to be regressing to his mean when his other works flop.
Not ‘just wrong’. It’s just obvious and less important overall than the training effect.