The idea is that by deleting something you condemn everything that was in it as useless. Even that incredibly catchy metaphor about cats and trash compactors. Or the perfectly good first page that is followed by 10 pages of dross. It’s useful to keep a backlog of things you’ve done and discarded. When you have distanced enough from the work enough, you can return and analyse, and learn not only from your mistakes, but also from the gems that may be found among them.If you delete your writing, you retain only the feeling of not being satisfied with it, unless you have perfect memory.
Alternatively, a backlog of truly horrible writing attempts gives you a chance to compare your various efforts and see how you’ve grown and, possibly, where you’ve gone wrong recently. Personally I keep most of my things on my laptop, including seperate files for various versions of the same story, ideas that never went past a single paragraph, various abandoned-in-progress things and stories that I felt were excellent at time of writing, but are actually weak.
It won’t directly motivate to write, but it does help improve over time, and quality tends to contribute to motivation somewhat.
“But surely it’s better to delete what you do nothing but cringe at, while keeping writing that’s mostly bad but has a couple good points! When you come back...”
“Stop. What you’re defending is what you already do. [wordless] Faced with a choice either to change one’s mind or to prove there’s no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. Domain experts are telling you you’re wrong. [/wordless] Change your mind.”
“I changed my mind! I’m such a good rationalist! Can I go brag on LW?”
“Knock yourself out. Maybe you can rationalize it by saying you need to show agreement more, and promoting a norm of publicly changing one’s mind in response to evidence, or something.”
I wouldn’t necessarily call “Why?” as presenting a choice, but point taken. I guess my real reason why I began not deleting everything is that I’ve lost a lot of my early writing and regret doing so.
What I wrote above still occasionally applies.
Huh, I might have been unclear. I was explaining why I changed my mind to agree with you, not criticizing you!
I deleted everything because after working on something for long enough, I start hating it and seeing the flaws in it and being ashamed of it and hating my past self for wanting to show it to everyone. I hear this is normal, so when in doubt I wait a few months then reread… and it looks even worse.
The idea is that by deleting something you condemn everything that was in it as useless. Even that incredibly catchy metaphor about cats and trash compactors. Or the perfectly good first page that is followed by 10 pages of dross. It’s useful to keep a backlog of things you’ve done and discarded. When you have distanced enough from the work enough, you can return and analyse, and learn not only from your mistakes, but also from the gems that may be found among them.If you delete your writing, you retain only the feeling of not being satisfied with it, unless you have perfect memory.
Alternatively, a backlog of truly horrible writing attempts gives you a chance to compare your various efforts and see how you’ve grown and, possibly, where you’ve gone wrong recently. Personally I keep most of my things on my laptop, including seperate files for various versions of the same story, ideas that never went past a single paragraph, various abandoned-in-progress things and stories that I felt were excellent at time of writing, but are actually weak. It won’t directly motivate to write, but it does help improve over time, and quality tends to contribute to motivation somewhat.
“But surely it’s better to delete what you do nothing but cringe at, while keeping writing that’s mostly bad but has a couple good points! When you come back...”
“Stop. What you’re defending is what you already do. [wordless] Faced with a choice either to change one’s mind or to prove there’s no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. Domain experts are telling you you’re wrong. [/wordless] Change your mind.”
“I changed my mind! I’m such a good rationalist! Can I go brag on LW?”
“Knock yourself out. Maybe you can rationalize it by saying you need to show agreement more, and promoting a norm of publicly changing one’s mind in response to evidence, or something.”
“Yay!”
I wouldn’t necessarily call “Why?” as presenting a choice, but point taken. I guess my real reason why I began not deleting everything is that I’ve lost a lot of my early writing and regret doing so. What I wrote above still occasionally applies.
Why do you delete everything?
Huh, I might have been unclear. I was explaining why I changed my mind to agree with you, not criticizing you!
I deleted everything because after working on something for long enough, I start hating it and seeing the flaws in it and being ashamed of it and hating my past self for wanting to show it to everyone. I hear this is normal, so when in doubt I wait a few months then reread… and it looks even worse.