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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5437 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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What's a good way to get better at writing?

I kind of suck at it, and this is troubling me. I'm a working academic, and sitting on a growing cache of results that I can't get out because (outside of some unpredictable periods where the chemical stars in my brain align just right or something) I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia, and then feel so drained that I will viscerally fear opening vim again for a week or two. "Professional issues" is an easy sell as far as evidence that something must be done goes, but even outside that, there are so many things - posts, stories, explanations - that I wish I could write but can't. The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.

I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia

The problem is that you are not writing fast enough. Think about text too slow and the words will blend together and lose all meaning. Put your brain into Word Salad Generation mode and just dump as you would into a Motte comment; you can edit for style/tone/content once you actually have something to edit.

I've shilled this before, but you should really try The Most Dangerous Writing App to knock out a first draft. As described by Alexey Guzey:

DO ACTUALLY TRY THIS DON’T FLINCH AWAY. This app might seem like the dumbest thing in the world but it DOES REALLY HELP. And if it doesn’t work, you will just lose 5 minutes.

That's a fantastic idea. I often find my first drafts are extremely cogent and powerful, but upon re-editing, a lot of the power/meaning gets lost. I wonder how much self-censorship contributes to this.

This is just a guess, but I think it sounds like you are struggling with perfectionism. Words enter your brain, and if they aren't "perfect" (or nearly so) on the first pass, you feel stress and discard them, which results in a feedback loop that leads to writer's block.

Conventional advice I've heard to address this is to just "word vomit" garbage onto the page. Once enough material flows through you, you'll be able to piece it back together into something that's okay.

In my personal experience, alcohol has helped, but I would recommend against that being a long term solution. In addition to being unhealthy, drugs can change the way you think enough to break feedback loops and mental traps.

It would be a fairly self-flattering explanation if this were the case, but while I can't quite rule out that the pattern you describe is accurate (and simply leads to the end result being as it is because of some sort of semantic saturation), it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.

"Just because you are perfectionist doesn't mean that the thing isn't actually not good enough", or something?

Remind yourself that anything you do is just a first draft, so it's ok if it sucks.

it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.

This is to be expected. There is a reason I called it "word vomit." Once its all down, you can come back and re-arrange the pieces the next day and it may be a lot easier to get somewhere with it. I've had middling luck with this approach.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I've heard that changing your text editor to Comic Sans helps a lot.

In retrospect, one of the biggest problems I had in school was that I would always write sequentially; I would start at the beginning of whatever I was writing and pound through it until I was finished. In the meantime, I had all these great ideas about what I wanted to write, I just never seemed to get to them, and when I did I had trouble phrasing them correctly because the preceding text didn't set things up the way I wanted. As a result, writing was like banging my head against the wall where I had 500 things I wanted to say but couldn't figure out how to say them because I was handcuffed by what I had already written. Then later I realized that if I just wrote out the substance of what I wanted to say and tacked on the intro, transitions, etc. in "post-production", so to speak, things went much smoother.

So my advice is to simply write down whatever is on your mind. You know what you want to say, the problem it stating things coherently so that other people will understand them. Don't stress out over whether what initially comes out sounds like a schizophrenic with aphasia; that's just the first step. Then you can edit what you've written so that it's actually coherent. I've never noticed any issues with your writing here so it's obvious that you have it in you, so I wouldn't worry about lack of ability. A big part of the problem is that pressure and stress can become overwhelming and prevent us from doing what we need to do. For example, I do a lot of mineral titles for work, and most people with my job complete their files in a certain sequence. At some stages in the sequence, complicated issues can arise, and these issues can make it difficult to meet deadlines. If I run into an issue that I can't resolve in a reasonable amount of time, I usually just skip it and move on to the next part of the sequence. That way, if I'm about to miss a deadline I can tell the client that everything's done except this one issue that I need to resolve, as opposed to having to tell the client that the file's nowhere near completion because I spent the past several days spinning my wheels on a difficult-to resolve issue. It gives the client at least some peace of mind that this isn't some money pit project that they're being charged billable hours for; after all, if I spend all that time on one issue there's no guarantee that other issues won't pop up later that will take even more time. And even if the deadline isn't an issue, it's still easier for me to know that I have 2 days at the end of a project to resolve a difficult issue than to spend all my time working on one thing and having 2 days to complete the rest of the file.

It sounds like you can write, you just find it very difficult and unpleasant. Which is not unusual, since I have heard this comment from many people.

The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.

That sounds more like that your circuitry is functional, but you have problems with environment or mood that interfere. That's good because you can control your environment and your mood (to an extent). Think back to those times when you succeeded in writing and think about whether your situation was different, or maybe you did something immediately beforehand that put you in the right state. Having a pre-writing ritual can help deal with procrastination and also put you in the writing mood, even if it's as simple as taking a walk or talking to a particular person.

No particular pattern I see in environment. The one mood that seems to most frequently help is panic, as induced by a looming deadline that I can't houdini myself out of, but even that is sufficiently inconsistent that the usual tricks with commitment devices and bets and what-not have too much footbullet nature.

I find using GPT-3 as an "unblocker" works quite well. Insert the last few paragraphs you've written, and let it complete the text. The result isn't always very good, but you frequently get decent ideas on how to structure the next section.

That's an interesting idea. I'll try it next time my disgust level with my text editor drops below the threshold again.

"by keeping at it" is boring but true. longform, not short comments. longform develops your ear for your style. stronger ear, easier writing.

there is one quick fix. "that" often can be omitted, in this paragraph uses 1, 3, 6, 9.

if you want to pm me something longer i'd look it over.

t. wannabe author

Interesting observation about the "that"s. I do think there's a correlation between redundancy of this type creeping into my writing and it feeling forced.

Thanks for the offer! Would you mind if I ping you for nitpicks next time I make a longform post here?

omitting "that" can improve flow but it's not a critical mistake, i call it a quick fix because it applies to most writing. definitely not just yours.

feel free to ping, i'm sure i'll see it either way

My advice - just write a lot.

Well, to be more specific, just put yourself in a low stakes environment where you can just churn out writing at a breakneck speed.

If you're anything like me, when I am writing anything high-stakes or important, it tends to result in paralysis, particularly when I'm starting a project. Constantly second guessing your word choices and sentence structure, constantly evaluating your argument and paragraph ordering. Because you feel you have to get this right, get it perfect.

My solution is to put yourself in a situation where you don't have to care about those things, and can just spew out words without much thought and second guessing, to build a habit just putting something, anything onto the page. Go on to sports forums, or video game forums and talk shit (in lengthy but detailed posts). In writing environments where it doesn't really matter if your sentences are unclear, or you make grammar mistakes. Try stream of consciousness writing where you just think and write at the same time and don't worry about how it ends up. It's something I'm trying to do to improve my writing, or more specifically my productivity of writing. I think it does help to form a habit that you can transfer to important writing. It doesn't matter if your writing is perfect or not after, or you develop "bad" habits. That's what drafts are for. I have found it is substantially easier (as I've improved), to just spew out a ton of paragraphs and then edit them down in to something coherent if it's something that needs to be edited, than it is trying to write as perfectly as possible the whole way through.

put yourself in a situation where you don't have to care about those things, and can just spew out words without much thought and second guessing

So, participate more on this site?

Maybe, but personally I think there's a bit more pressure to write at a higher standard in theMotte than there is your average forum or subreddit.

You write beautifully on the motte, so I don't think writing ability is fundamentally your trouble. For me it was about my uncertainties about being in academia, but I imagine there are any number of types of baggage that would fit the bill. I also found it annoying how stilted the academic writing style is, and how lonely academia can be: I'm proud of myself for this result, but now I have to suck all the life out of it and wait months for anybody else to find out about it? That said, looking back on grad school, I'm proud of all the results I published, and I do envy my academic friends at least a little.

It can help to inject some humanity in the process, and I'd be happy to hop on a video call sometime and hear about your research while we transcribe it to a shared doc. I don't know if that would produce a finished paper but it could help get the bones in place.

Thanks for your kind words. I think writing on the Motte is not quite the same as writing an article; I've thought about why it is that I can fight internet arguments at near the WPM cap but struggle so much with anything closed-form, and came to the conclusion that it makes a big difference to me if I can model the process as talking statefully to a single concrete person. (You might notice that I have very few top-level posts on here, too.) However, the obvious trick of trying to imagine the hypothetical reader of the paper as a particular individual doesn't work; there is no actual individual person being targeted and whatever process enables me to talk to real people does not work with respect to a make-believe simulacrum.

Thank you also for the offer about a video call, but I have some opsec concerns about linking my Motte identity to the real world in that fashion. (Do I want to find out how compellingly I have to argue for immanentizing the wrong eschaton before the Mottizen who knows my real-life identity decides that stopping me takes moral precedence over other concerns?)

Well and on top of that I always prefer in person to video, so you'd probably be better off finding somebody local anyway. I feel like there's some potential in modeling your audience as a single person; half the thing that makes papers such a drag to write and read is how impersonal they are, and the really great academic writers seem less susceptible to that. Seems like if you managed to write an email to a friend describing all the stuff that'd go into the paper, the remaining task of putting it into stuffy academic style could be done almost mechanically. Heck, I bet you could just about get gpt3 to do that part for you.

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