

How I went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000 words a day - will_lam
http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

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beza1e1
Looks like a good argument for the Snowflake method [0]. This method is
basically to "develop" a novel, by starting with a single sentence and
gradually expanding it into the novel. In contrast, the other method (pansing)
is to start writing the first chapter immediately.

For either approach you find great writers using them. It seems to be a
question of personality.

[0] <http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php>

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cpeterso
Thanks for the Snowflake link. When reading a novel, I sometimes try the
reverse to crystallize my memory of the story. I imagine summarizing a page
with a sentence, then a chapter with a sentence, then the book.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Same. And actually, having used this method without knowing it had a name, I
can say it’s a great way to write. Crystals grow naturally, but distillation
is laborious.

Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight changed the way I write—it puts special
emphasis on being able to clearly state, in a sentence or two, precisely what
your story is about. And there’s hardly a better way to find out than to know
at the outset!

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rauljara
I am reminded of the Dijkstra quote:

From there it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in
terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly
measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I
am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point
of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should
not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current
conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of
the ledger.

Putting such a great emphasis on word count strikes me as a terrible idea. Who
wants to read 10,000 words? No one. What you want to read is a good story, or
an interesting argument, or beautiful language. If the writing isn't any good,
more words just mean more annoyance.

If you want to boost a specific metric, you almost always can. But that
doesn't necessarily mean that the whole picture improves along with it.

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jamie_ca
She makes a point of saying in point three that she's taking a critical look
at what she intends to write, and makes sure there's good content in the
scene, or she scraps/reworks the scene.

Admittedly that doesn't say anything about the quality of her prose, but one
perspective is that the sooner you're done your first draft, the more time you
have for editing.

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kroo
_"But that's the great thing about going this fast, the novel starts to eat
you and you find yourself writing any time you can just for the pure joy of
it. Even better, on the days where I broke 10k, I was also pulling fantastic
words-per-hour numbers, 1600 - 2000 words per hour as opposed to my usual
1500. It was clear these days were special, but I didn't know how."_

This thrill of creation, when you've got the design (momentarily?) cracked and
all that's left is the small matter of putting to disk what's there in your
mind already, describes some of the most exciting experiences I've had writing
code.

~~~
RegEx
I have a strange reaction to my epiphanies. When I've cracked the puzzle
mentally and it's time to put the code in the text editor, I start getting
extremely anxious. No clue why.

Edit: To clarify, I mean anxious associated with "anxiety", not "with great
anticipation"

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X-Istence
I know the feeling, and the reason why I start feeling anxious in the same way
you do is because I know that afterwards I am going to be in a lull again,
that I will be bored to tears and will have the hardest time concentrating and
getting done what needs to be done until there is another hard part that needs
to get done at which point I am flying again...

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sien
Quote:

"Several things were immediately clear. First, my productivity was at its
highest when I was in a place other than my home. That is to say, a place
without internet. The afternoons I wrote at the coffee shop with no wireless
were twice as productive as the mornings I wrote at home."

The internet is now the most powerful distraction in the universe.

~~~
sitkack
internet is the new tv

~~~
techsupporter
Internet isn't the new TV until people start bragging about how they've
canceled it completely and we're all idiots for remaining beholden to "Big
Internet."

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wccrawford
Pretty sure that started happening a while ago.

Here's one from 2010. [http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/2010/03/how-i-
improved-p...](http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/2010/03/how-i-improved-
productivity-by-canceling-my-home-internet-connection/)

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karterk
The part about knowledge applies for programming too. I have noticed myself
being far more productive when I have sketched out the general approach I am
going to take with a problem on a paper first before actually writing any
code. Once you start coding, you get lost in the low-level intricacies and
this sometimes makes you lose sight of the overall goal.

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paraschopra
True, but don't you find the sketching out process taking whole fun out of the
process? I mean, once you know what you are going to code (or write), doesn't
your motivation to (mechanically) implement it go down a bit?

I am curious because it happens to me usually, and I like to discover and
explore as I go along instead of doing careful initial planning.

~~~
pmjordan
You must be extremely good at predicting any challenges in your designs. I'll
sketch out my data structures in advance, but implementing the algorithms for
processing them is rarely as straightforward as anticipated. Sketching it out
helps me solidify the high-level ideas - but then I like programming by the
"meet in the middle" model: a combination of bottom-up and top-down. I know
plenty other programmers who prefer one or the other.

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johansch
And it only took 3207 words to convey.

Ah, fantasy author, of course.

~~~
mvzink
Fun quote from the article: "This is not a choice between ruminating on art or
churning out the novels for gross commercialism (though I happen to like
commercial novels)"

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darxius
The most interesting part of that post, in my opinion, was how she claimed
each of her discoveries were -- trivial. That really hit home with me because
I've felt the same feeling before. I've learned to stop, step back, look at
the problem, and just solve it.

Thanks for a great post (even though it was written a while back).

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54mf
I feel it's worth mentioning that, while word count alone isn't an indicator
of quality, the #1 most common hurdle most writers (and developers, and anyone
pursuing a creative art) are facing is producing. Real artists ship. 10,000
words might not all be good, but you're a hell of a lot more likely to spit
out a few good ones in that pile versus a pile of 500 words. Make it work,
then make it work well, right?

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obtu
Writers swear by practice, and the discipline that enables it. Churning out
words is practice; there's a saying that you need to get the first hundred
thousand words of crap out of your system before the quality of your output
improves. See also NaNoWriMo — No plot? No problem! — where the winning
condition is simply to turn in forty thousand words at the end of the month.

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evincarofautumn
There are a few significant problems with NaNoWriMo. First, while a challenge
must be challenging, it should also be _realistic_. For many writers, 1666
words a day, _every_ day, is a bit too much to expect. Second, the requirement
that the project start from zero is also a deterrent—it encourages a “starter”
attitude when what’s needed is a “finisher”. Finally, the unrealistic deadline
in combination with the start-from-nothing requirement makes people throw away
their perfectly good work from last year. You wrote 80 pages? Toss it!

Sure, writers need practice, but such extreme conditions are not conducive to
practice at all.

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Jach
> For many writers, 1666 words a day, every day, is a bit too much to expect.

Well, with NaNoWriMo you have a whole month. So some days you may in fact have
0 words, and other days you'll have 4000. But in general, the more you do
this, the easier it is. Are weekly 2000 word essays from college students who
don't really care about English or Sociology or whatever class the essays are
for too much to expect? Maybe. I know that after a few months of blogging
1000+ word blogs on a relatively frequent basis, those school essays are
trivial.

> Second, the requirement that the project start from zero is also a
> deterrent—it encourages a “starter” attitude when what’s needed is a
> “finisher”.

The idea is that at the end of the month you evaluate what you have and decide
if it's worth finishing and revising. Your work is not supposed to be
"perfectly good". This is the same philosophy over at the Ludum Dare 48 hour
game programming competition ( <http://ludumdare.com/compo/about-ludum-dare/>
) where you start from scratch and see what you can do. Many people have taken
their finished entries and continued to work on them, eventually selling them
for real money. Most people don't, they abandon the project, and that's fine.
They learned something along the way that will help them be a better game
developer the next time around or in a context where they have more time.

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zeroonetwothree
It's interesting that the goal is to increase the amount of words written
rather than their quality. I suppose which of those matter more depends on the
type of work you are writing.

~~~
vacri
Don't get too hung up on words written as being considered a metric of quality
- for authors, it's a metric of productivity, quality or otherwise. Unlike
(most) code, a novel generally has a roughly intended length when it's started
(compare harry potter 1 vs 7; the light novel vs the must-service-my-fans). It
can take you a few years to reach that, or a few months.

Words per session for an author does not translate into lines of code for a
coder - they're different beasts.

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LinaLauneBaer
I have written a few technical books together with a co-author. From my
experience "Side 1: Knowledge" is king. Before I explain a technical topic in
writing I prepare every sample project beforehand. Complex sample projects are
prepared in different versions (starting with the sample immediately after it
has been created by an IDE, …) up to the final version. This has two benefits:
I, as a writer, can offer the sample (step by step) for download to the
readers so they can use them as a reference when something goes wrong - but
more importantly: It helps to structure the writing process because I know the
steps I have to describe. I know when something essential has happened
(because I have created an additional version of the sample).

A rough outline created in advance also helps.

I am also talking to myself - a lot. Before writing something down for my book
I explain it to myself.

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shepbook
I wonder, could similar principles be applied to writing code?

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jmonegro
I think it's best to focus on writing _less_ code per day.

(edit: I mean that in the sense of making your code more efficient)

~~~
dmlorenzetti
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

\--Blaise Pascal (<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal>)

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SatvikBeri
This is really important-the author is talking about starting with high level,
easily modifiable structures, vs starting with all the details at once.

This is exactly the same concept as doing customer validation before creating
the product.

It's the same idea as whiteboarding a complicated program before starting to
code.

It's the same as creating a prototype before you code out a full-fledged
product.

Using a top-down approach of creating "shells" before fleshing out details has
been my single biggest productivity gain over the last year, and it's
definitely worth applying to nearly every intellectual aspect of your life.

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alanfalcon
Late to the party, but I felt I had to share that this post directly inspired
my brain (definitely my _brain_, as opposed to _me_) to create and start
writing a story. The night after reading and thinking about this, I woke up
with characters, a world, a plot, conflict and resolution, a whole novel
(actually a whole set of them). It's been quite a week for me, especially
because my sudden surge in writing fiction led me to try giving my iPhone app
away for free and then suddenly finding some unexpected success there, for the
first time since that app launched!

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dhimes
_If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn't want to write them,
then there was no way in hell anyone would want to read them_

I wish more writers would recognize this. It may be the most important
revelation she makes in this blog.

Paralleling 9diov's comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755826>),
it would be great to come up with a way to think about app development that
captures its essence.

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9diov
Interesting. Only if we could come up with a meaningful metric for
programming.

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jorgem
Are there IDE's that track lines of code edited/added per hour, etc?

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bcjordan
The folks at cloud9 IDE or Codecademy are in a good position to collect and
expose patterns in programming efficiency.

On one's own, simply using a VCS with a high enough commit frequency would let
you infer something about lines added per hour. Perhaps an editor's undo stack
could also be committed to store finer-grained metrics.

With detailed metrics and impressive data analysis there's the opportunity to
uncover useful insights into how we debug and learn. That's probably more than
a weekend project, but worth it in potential future payout IMO.

~~~
obtu
Turns out I'm already collecting this data… Vim has recently added a
persistent undo feature (enable by setting 'undodir' and 'undofile';
'undolevel' can also be raised from the default 1000); there is a Gundo plugin
that displays the undo tree like a DVCS commit graph.

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vibrunazo
Am I the only one who reads about this huge inelegant approach to increasing
your "productivity" by simply brute-forcing more words per day. And can't
avoid to think "woa, such a huge waste, she should just use all that energy to
write a bot that does all that writing and save time in the long run"?

I already cry inside when I see the same design pattern repeat itself, twice,
in my code. I just have to re-factor it, to avoid waste. And she's writing
10,000 words a day, that won't make the next 10,000 any more efficient? I
literally cringe in fear.

I should probably take a break.

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vacri
Brute-forcing? What she was originally doing was brute forcing. She's changed
to a more planned, intelligent way of writing, the opposite of brute-forcing.
It's a classic 'work smarter, not harder' article.

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vibrunazo
Probably my fault that I wasn't clear. It's just an analogy to my world and
how I usually deal with problems as a programmer. If I had to write 10k words
a day, I would write a bot to do it. And any more planned, intelligent way of
doing that, _manually_ , would just feel like bandaging a brute-force solution
instead of looking for an elegant one.

Just a bad joke anyway, nothing to see here.

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anarchotroll
Do you guys know a productivity application that monitors app usage and
keystrokes?

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kolya3
Rescuetime, not sure about keystrokes though.

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alanfalcon
A hundred thanks for the Rescuetime mention. I had no idea that I could get
something like this for free (lite version, good enough for me, for now) and
so easily (I think it took less than a minute to download and set up).

