I enjoyed this thread on writing by @stevesi. I began serious writing in 2007, & was shocked by how difficult it was, & how transformative.https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/987028913363849216 …
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I'd written a lot before then (a book, 50+ research papers, & theses). But in 2007 or 2008 I began to write pieces that were transformative. Mostly because I cared so much that I was willing to rewrite and rewrite, gradually sharpening the ideas.
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There is an incredible comment by Grothendieck - perhaps the most creative mathematician of the last century - on what it is to be alone, to develop an idea from first principles that transcends communitypic.twitter.com/0H2RkUcBKY
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For me, serious writing helped me understand & to some extent implement what Grothendieck was saying. An early example was http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/ … That looks simple and easy to read, but took a month of fulltime work to write, and much longer to distill the ideas.
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It looks much easier to write than, say, https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0701004.pdf … But the latter involved less thinking through fundamentals from first principles; it was more tied to conventional social mores, and so was in some sense much easier to write.
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I realize that, ironically, this isn't a terribly good description. At its core is a way of using writing to explore some very fundamental set of questions, approaching them as if from scratch, & pushing through to a novel clarity & simplicity. It's excruciating & transformative
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