Reflecting on what’s changed in my writing over the past 10 years
Apart from technical flow, I think a big thing is I’m a lot more comfortable leaving things unsaid
I used to feel the need to articulate every single thing, and maybe that’s a necessary transitional phase
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But when I look back now, the over-articulation seems to cloud the points I was hoping to make. I was sketching with too many lines.
To use fewer lines, though, you need to know precisely what lines to use. I don’t know of any clever way to get to that other than raw practice
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I take solace in the fact that , a much better writer than me, took thousands of attempts to get good at saying a handful of things really well. I don’t think I’m going to have a better batting average. Just gotta keep stepping up to the plate
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Replying to @visakanv
Wrote 3,382 articles but made like four points.
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A funny thing that does happen when you leave things unsaid is that people who don’t get what you’re doing will say “hey you left out X”, thinking they’re helping. They can’t see that you agonized over every possible configuration, debated internally, and *chose* to leave X out
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These few sentences from (another *phenomenal* writer) permanently flipped a switch in my brain re: how to think about writing medium.com/@bobbie/carl-z
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I have the opposite problem; I think I tend to view the audience's time as 'super valuable' and the readers as 'really impatient' and forget that people don't think the same way I do and so I tend to truncate or breeze through arguments that could really take more explaining.
😂🤔 I guess we each fall short of perfection in different ways
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