
Raganwald: Zen in the Art of Rewriting - charzom
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/zen-in-art-of-rewriting.html
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chris_l
Can we stop misusing the word "Zen" already? I practice Zazen and I rewrite
code... they don't have that much in common!

~~~
jamesbritt
I thought Zen was something one applied to circumstances, or had a bearing on
how one dealt with events or activities.

Question: Do you think Zen has something in common with archery?

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chris_l
I do realise where this flood of bad titles comes from: Eugen Herigel went to
Japan and learnt archery from a "Zen Master"... here the author is quoting
some wacky Zen story in the prelude to make the story sound better, that's
all.

~~~
raganwald
You are exchanging cause and effect: you describe my writing as if I wrote a
post about the similarity between rewriting essays and rewriting code, then
realized it needed spice and inserted a zen story as a preamble.

What _actually_ happened is that someone made a very disparaging remark about
my writing in a previous post. I tried to look for the deep truth in what they
were saying and realized that I also thought my writing fell far short of
describing how I felt. Around the same time I was reading "Zen Shorts" to my
son, and read the story of the robe and the moon again...

I sat down and wrote a post that quoted the story and ended an emotional
paragraph afterwards, simply lamenting the fact that my writing is so poor.
Yes, the original version of the post was little more than the story.

After an hour or so, the analytical part of my brain took over and I thought
of one major reason my writing is not better, the lack of enough rewriting
(not that rewriting would make it great, or even good, but certainly it would
make it better).

I then added the rest to the post. So, you see, I did not actually add a wacky
zen story to make a post about rewriting better. Although, to be fair, the way
I arrived at the post does not in any way make it better than if I had
proceeded as you suggested.

But, and I doubt you will understand this, the way I arrived at the post has
very deep consequences for me.

