
Stop starting from scratch when you write - 0898
http://www.ianharris.com/dont-start-from-scratch/
======
CPLX
This is pretty good advice. I've been a professional writer in some manner or
another for 20 years or so, and I've become keenly aware of how useless I can
be when confronted with a blank sheet/screen and a mandate. Yet, once it's
started it tends to finish very quickly, usually with just one draft.

I used to sort of solve this problem by writing it in my head over the course
of a day or three and then spitting out some basic language to start things
off.

Lately I've come to the realization that almost any level of first draft, no
matter how awful or off the mark, is sufficient for me to dive right in and
finish writing it quickly. So my go-to tactic is to verbally run down what I
need written to someone else, like an assistant or someone who works for me
who knows the topic, and then start with whatever they come up with and go
from there, effectively eliminating the blank screen problem.

The basic premise of this is insightful, there's really no reason why writing
has to start with an empty page. I think that's the more interesting
observation than the specifics of how he gets the ball rolling, which could
easily vary from person to person.

~~~
zck
> Lately I've come to the realization that almost any level of first draft, no
> matter how awful or off the mark, is sufficient for me to dive right in and
> finish writing it quickly.

Dan Harmon (the creator of Community, and Rick and Morty) has phrased it as
"prove you suck". From his reddit AMA
([https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5azrwi/im_dan_harmon_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5azrwi/im_dan_harmon_executive_producer_and_star_of/d9l3sxr/))
(paragraph breaks added; nothing edited):

> ...if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly,"
> you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what,
> man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of
> confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with
> ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers.

> We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the
> bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that
> terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the
> possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we
> suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a
> fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of
> sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by
> some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant.

> It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And
> then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's
> no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being
> absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you
> suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that
> sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole.

> So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one
> day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of
> shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty
> critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second
> draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling
> at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe
> everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they
> think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less
> time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because
> medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn't make
> abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester.

~~~
mlboss
Awesome advice :)

------
whiddershins
I am a professional musician and composer and I never, ever, start from
prepackaged drum loops or anything of the sort.

One of the super fun and satisfying things of being a competent musician is
how quickly I can create basic components for my compositions.

That said, musicians tend to have a mental library of ideas and techniques
they can employ to flesh out an inspired idea.

I also have a library of partially finished unused themes and ideas that I
wrote, which I can bring in to start or expand a piece I'm working on.

So a library of my own partially finished writings would be far more analogous
to how I work than a bunch of anecdotes and quotes from other people.

The anecdotes and quotes would be more analogous to other people's music which
I've heard and internalized, but would never literally reference while I am
composing. The last thing I want is those sorts of cut and paste elements to
come anywhere near my work.

~~~
zupreme
Have you considered the possibility that you're actually "copying and pasting"
at the subconscious level?

For example when you "create" a drum pattern are you really "creating" it or
are you simply remembering a drum pattern you've heard or played before that
works well with the song or composition you are making. As you probably know
brand new drum patterns are rare. Most of the time the specific instrument
choices change but the pattern itself is familiar.

~~~
scarecrowbob
To a certain extent, it's not possible to produce something that is both
recognizable as "music" (much less as a specific genera) and which is devoid
of pre-existing patterns, and I don't think that's what the parent post is
claiming.

I'm not familiar with the parent poster's music, but I am pretty sure that
"create basic components" refers specifically to that "copy-and-paste" from a
concept into a more tangible form (like a drum loop). So it seems like they
have considered this idea explicitly.

I'm not a pro, though I have to play a 3-hour solo gig tonight on piano, and
most of it will be improvising ornaments over blues and jazz tunes that I
already know.

One of the problems in this gig is that it becomes very easy to fall into
rather generic patterns.

That repetition is a real short-coming of a lot of so-called original music
that I, and many musicians I have heard and work with run into: a lot of
original music is a bad copy of something that already exists.

However, in the process of re-implementing existing stuff (as opposed to
consciously reworking a tune, re-performing a piece, or literally resampling
audio) I tend to make mistakes, and I find that to be a good source of
actually 'new' music.

I can't say for sure if my understanding is correct, but that's how I
understand the parent poster's motivation.

Of course, I'm not a "composer" and I often have to create a whole lot of
music without a lot of prep, so I am perhapshappier to have a large-ish
library of known things in my brain that I can directly quote when I play.

~~~
somedumbguy22
I agree with your statements about the parent's train of thought. I also
compose music from time to time, and starting off a piece boils down to three
methods (taking drums for example): 1\. Copy/pasting a drum loop 2\. Writing
your own drum loop, although it's most likely a common pattern from the genre
of music you intend to create 3\. A hybrid of the two, meaning you paste in a
drum loop and chop it up to make something unique out of it.

The parent was stating that they don't do the first option, and prefer the
second choice. For example, if he/she wanted to make a drum and bass track,
they might write their own version of the amen break [1], rather than use a
sample from someone else

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break)

------
mistercow
There is a lot of argument in this thread that seems to boil down to whether
or not this technique (or an analogous technique for another field) is
something a competent person would do.

I think that's missing an important point (which is also a point that TFA
doesn't cover). Competent people do what makes them productive. If you start
worrying about what specific things "the best" do, you're going to end up with
a process that works very well for somebody else, and that very possibly won't
work for you. You'll optimize for status, but you won't get near your
potential.

The idea in TFA seems to be clearly worth trying if you have the problem it
purports to solve. Maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't,
but it gives you more data on how your brain works, and helps to come up with
something that works better for you.

But don't let anyone convince you that because you use this method or that,
you're less competent than someone who uses other methods. Results are what
matter.

(Edit to add: That doesn't mean you shouldn't pay attention to what competent
people are doing. They are competent for a reason. But you shouldn't be
discouraged if their techniques don't work for you, or if different techniques
do.)

------
startupdiscuss
I really like the opening insight, but I thought the author undersold how it
might be used.

A writer should absolutely have some kind of structure. Writing a novel, here
are 4 Scrivener files that encode structure. Writing an essay, here are some
structures.

But this author seems to think that the way to cash out the "don't start from
scratch" is to collect quotes. I think this is not the best use of your time
(you can google quotes on topics easily). Secondly, its not the largest
challenge when writing, and thirdly, it sells short his own insight which I
think can be taken further.

If any other HN reader has any ideas on how to "not start from scratch" in
various kind of writing, I would be interested.

~~~
jonahrd
I'm not sure "you can google quotes on topics easily" is true if you're
looking for a specific quotation that captures a feeling you're trying to get
across in writing. When you happen to stumble upon a quotation that really
sticks with you, that's the type of feeling you're trying to capture. You
can't just google that, it happens naturally.

~~~
0898
This is it. For example, I have a fact in my swipe file about how when you put
a young turtle in a small aquarium, it will only grow to a size that fits the
tank. The next time I need to write about personal growth, I'll probably be
able to use that as a hook.

~~~
kbutler
Thanks, I'm probably going to use this in a piece next month.

------
ideonexus
Similar to what the author has done, I wrote an open-source PHP application to
manage "memes" I use in my writing. It's basically a bucket of ideas I've
clipped from books, websites, etc (over 4,000 in the database now). I link the
memes to their references, triple them into one-to-one relationships, and have
"schemas" which are buckets of ideas I might use in articles and books I'm
writing one day. I find it incredibly helpful in my personal use, but many
people (understandably) find the interface a bit convoluted:

[http://mxplx.com/](http://mxplx.com/)

I have it on github, but if you like it, I would recommend rewriting it from
scratch because I wrote this in the "Over-Engineering" phase of my career many
years ago, over-using design patterns and abstracting away things to the point
of making them incomprehensible. Also, I'm only maintaining it for my personal
use now, but feel free to clone and make your own if you dare:

[https://github.com/ideonexus/memexplex](https://github.com/ideonexus/memexplex)

Another great resource I would love to see made into something I could query
for this is the public domain book "Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases" by
Grenville Kleiser.

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18362](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18362)

~~~
shanusmagnus
Love this idea and love that you built a tool for it. I have been toying with
a similar idea literally for twenty years. This is very inspiring.

------
mrob
I don't think starting from scratch is the difficult part of writing. You can
make a reasonable start simply by writing what you'd say if you were to talk
to somebody about your topic. The difficult part is editing that impromptu
speech into something worth reading. The most useful new writing tools would
be tools for editing.

~~~
startupdiscuss
Interesting.

Do you have any ideas around what tools for editing might look like/do for
you?

~~~
mrob
Grammar checkers are already useful, but they still have a long way to go
before they can match a skilled human editor. Machine learning probably has a
lot of potential here.

One useful editing technique is reading your work aloud. But it's slow and
annoying to do, so I'd like to see a word processor with visualization of the
predicted sound of the words. There are already many good audio visualization
techniques, but for full effectiveness this needs another tricky problem
solved: speech synthesis with natural prosody. Again, this is an ongoing area
of research where machine learning could be very useful.

I'd also like some kind of refactoring support for moving around blocks of
text without breaking dependencies between them, eg. accidentally moving a
paragraph where something is discussed to earlier in the piece than the
paragraph where it's defined. Automatic detection of these kinds of
dependencies would be ideal.

------
pdabbadabba
Yep. I do something like this, and it is very helpful. (And I'm a lawyer, so
it could be said that I write for a living.) The bost basic thing is to make a
template whenever you're working on a new 'type' of document. Include as much
as possible in the template including, when appropriate, some actual language
that you're likely to want some variant of in most documents. (In many cases
this could include some version of the background pitch for the
product/service/technology/industry/idea that you're generally in the business
of promoting, if applicable.) Don't worry too much about overinclusivity.
Deleting is way easier than rewriting (or digging up something you've already
written elsewhere). Though there is an obvious balance to be struck here.
Conversely, though, go ahead and make a template even if there is very little
that will be stable between documents of a given type. A Thin template is
better than nothing to get you started.

Then, your first task when starting a new document can be to delete the
irrelevant stuff from the template, if there is any. Next, I like to just
start writing bullet points in whatever order/style they come to me in. Once
you've done this, organize them in a coherent way that will be reflected in
the finished product, cull the points you don't really want, fill in
conceptual gaps, and think about whether/how you want to break the document
explicitly into sections. Then, finally, start writing, expanding bullet
points into prose.

Throughout this process, another important rule applies: if at any point
something comes into your head that you actually want to write, even if its a
random idea that you know will be be buried deep in the draft, write it
immediately. You can work it into the rest of the draft later, once the rest
of the draft actually exists.

------
barkingcat
As a writer, I dislike this approach since it sucks the fun out of a blank
sheet of paper or a blank document.

I revel in the joy of starting from scratch!

This approach works for some people, but creativity and writing are so
personal that it's good to have different ways of working.

------
shanusmagnus
Hemingway discussed one of the ideas in TFA in this awesome Paris Review
interview [1]. His trick was to stop a day's work at a point where he knew
what came next:

"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come."

I've found the advice to be very helpful for fiction writing.

[1] [https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/ernest-
heming...](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/ernest-hemingway-
the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway)

------
RubberShoes
Aaron Sorkin does this:
[https://youtu.be/S78RzZr3IwI](https://youtu.be/S78RzZr3IwI)

Somewhat ironically he explains how he does it.. [https://youtu.be/UJgslhoG--
M?t=3m21s](https://youtu.be/UJgslhoG--M?t=3m21s)

------
wimagguc
I'd be surprised if this wasn't what most creatives do. I think it was B.J.
Novak (from The Office) I've heard in an interview where he explained that he
keeps a notebook to keep track of every idea he encounters during the day.
From the outside of it it's pretty much the same concept.

As for the blank-paper-scare, my go to tool is the [Most Dangerous Writing
App]([http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com](http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com))
- for the times you can't get started, it's a good push down the hill. (I'm
not affiliated with them in any way.)

------
antirez
The best graphical designers I saw working always start from scratch and use
very simple building blocks to compose more complex things in their own style.
Often they create from scratch even letters when creating a logo.

------
Apocryphon
Looks like the OP has rediscovered the commonplace book.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book)

------
jmduke
I was a little skeptical because the veracity of this is _iffy_ , at least
amongst the designers I know:

> Look at graphic designers, for example. If you’ve ever watched a graphic
> designer work, most of the backgrounds, icons and badges they use come from
> stock websites

> An efficient designer will normally buy a funnel diagram template rather
> than make one from scratch. For $5, why reinvent the wheel?

That being said, the general advice is solid. I'd add two more pieces:

1\. Three-sentence drafts are your friend. When you think of something that
might make an interesting blog topic down the line, write three sentences
about it and let it germinate for a bit. (I've found Trello to be great for
this, since you can easily add notes and links.)

2\. Blog your email. (This advice is stolen blatantly from patio11.)
Especially if you're writing to do content marketing, surfacing customer
support + answers to interesting questions is a great way to get a jump start.

~~~
0898
Author here. Thanks – yes designers in my experience often do this, but
clearly not always.

The point I'm making is that other creative processes let you start with
something to build on. Maybe writing should be that way too.

~~~
rasjani
Didnt read your article yet but.

As a amateur song writer, i try to write snippets of lyrics down as they come.
Whenever I'm trying to finish something but can't think of anything suitable,
I have my rhyme book with tons of stuff to refer to. In some cases it doesn't
even have to be quotes from what I've already written down that I might end up
using. It could be word/rhyme/rhythm patterns that i pick up from material
that I have available.

So yeah I concur with the title of the article. :)

------
6stringmerc
Ugh, this is like the plot of _Finding Forrester_ without the overarching
craft nuance of personal voice as the inherent foundation of writing. Mimicry
has a place in art, sure, whether music or text. But, and this is a big but,
this article is about describing a "crutch" as a positive and I don't like it.

There are plenty of other more, dare I say _mature_ ways of approaching
writing that don't resort to, ahem, swiping other people's shit. Bullet
points. Outlines. This example is not a good one in my opinion, and should be
considered useful at best for Amateurs intent on developing their own skills
over time.

~~~
0898
Maybe I wasn't clear. I don't think you should "swipe other people's shit". I
said you should keep a library of interesting anecdotes and stories, so you
can refer to them in your writing. In my experience, this makes your writing
more interesting, and helps you to write faster.

------
Zanta
His analogy to other professions building from premade blocks rings true for
me (mech eng), but there are two distinct cases:

a) The design of the block has been perfected through years other people's
work and experience. If I need a spur gear in a design there's almost
certainly an off-the-shelf component that's 99% perfect.

b) I'm in a rush and I need something good enough. Slap something down and
move on.

In the context of writing it seems like the latter will pop up more often. Did
his examples seem trite to anyone else?

------
jodrellblank
_Programming is another creative process where it’s considered wasteful and
ignorant to start from scratch.

If there’s already code that works, a programmer would be insane for
attempting to recreate it._

Is it just me, or is "throw it away and rewrite from scratch, get it right
this time" so incredibly common that it's a programming trope in itself? Along
with "programmers want to write from scratch because it's fun, nobody wants to
do maintenance" ?

------
mark_l_watson
Pretty good idea. I write a lot (books, blog, emails) and my starting kit for
writing consists of lots of notes, web URLs, etc. I used to keep everything in
Evernote (still there) but I exported everything to iOS/macOS Notes. The key
thing is to have the notes searchable.

Indexed notes are kind of like my own private library.

------
ivan_ah
Another trick for getting the first draft out is to record an audio file, then
then transcribe it. It's amazing how much better thoughts flow when you stick
to a conversational tone.

Also a point-form plan can help to keep your thoughts organized. So plan +
voice, and only then move to the computer keyboard.

------
jmnicolas
An advice I read somewhere is to just write anything no matter how bad and
enter the "flow".

It said you should write or edit but not both at the same time. Writing is
supposed to be more on the right side of the brain, editing on the left side
so they don't mix well together.

~~~
zupreme
The War of Art by Pressfield advocates this approach.

~~~
0898
Yes. Also, Stephen King's On Writing. ("Write with the door open. Edit with
the door closed".)

------
inanutshellus
Regularly jotting down your thoughts is very good, solid advice.

When I cared more about my annual corporate review, for example, I would jot
down things I was proud of so I could hype myself up and stand up for myself
should I get a sub-par review or raise.

------
takinola
My approach is to just write. If you accept that the initial draft is going to
suck and will need to be rewritten then it is much easier to start as it takes
the pressure of having to find the perfect opening.

Like many things in life, you learn by doing.

------
wale
Quite an insightful article. I've followed this path most times. Though my
Swipe File is scattered around -- from Evernote to Notes to Sublime Text to an
Untitled document on my desktop and all. It just works.

------
brikelly
Would love to know what he swiped to start writing this post about swiping :)

In fairness, it's a neat-sounding technique and I plan to give it a try.

~~~
0898
I swiped it from my book! [https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-You-Genius-Anybody-
Anything-eb...](https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-You-Genius-Anybody-Anything-
ebook/dp/B00PWE8IXA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-
text&ie=UTF8&qid=1417511738&sr=1-1&keywords=Hooked+On+You%3A+The+Genius+Way+to+Make+Anybody+Read+Anything)

------
js8
How does it work with the copyright?

~~~
0898
You rewrite the story, and credit the source if appropriate.

