Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I looked at an early draft of an essay to see which text made it into the final version. I never published it at the time, because it seemed presumptuous to think anyone else would be interested. But since you ask,

http://paulgraham.com/laundry.html

View on HN

Good read, thanks! The draft seemed to me more living and personal, while the finished version is pure idea. I wonder if it's possible to keep the intimate tone when you're editing for clarity.

Interesting question. I think it would be hard. Maybe you could leave in occasional chatty bits to preserve that tone, at the cost of only a little extra length.

I think that intimacy is the awkwardness that's natural to real time conversation. Like where he knocks passion fruit. I laughed because of how out of tone it seemed.

Do you find that you get better and faster at editing the essays, comparing the first essay to the most recent one? (I imagine so) Or it is something like a constant, but you just find ways to work around it?

I find that writing is good practice to to get my thoughts down coherently. And with a blogging habit, I find I can do it with much more ease, but it still takes a long while to re-edit something.

You get better at deletion. When you first start writing, it's hard to delete stuff because it cost you a lot of effort to write it. As you get more confident, you get more ruthless in that respect: "This is crap. Out with it."

Editing is writing, however, and the hardest part of writing is thinking. I don't feel I've gotten much better at that.

Wow! Talk about surprises. I've never thought about writing in that way. I think if I had I might have really enjoyed it. Hey, I think I might go write something that I've been thinking a lot about lately... now I just need to find out what I've been thinking about. haha Thanks for the insights.

I usually learn from these essays, but I've always found them somewhat grating. Some perceive the style as confrontational, but I think that's unreasonable intellectual defensiveness that pg so often picks apart.

These deletions have helped me realize why these essays bother me, on a stylistic level. The cadence is very regular and robotic. It's easy to anticipate the switches from descriptions of conventional wisdom to a different way of framing the problem, and easy to anticipate that there will be a conventional wisdom to roast.

Is the draft less grating?

I haven't reread the edited version, but the draft is less grating to me than most of these essays (I read every essay). I can see why you deleted much of it, but the draft has some interesting detail that got cut.

The essays do have a lot of telling vs. showing, and maybe that gives them the feel of over-produced music. For instance, the paragraph about VC reactions to your suggestions in Why There Aren't More Googles would be way better as an anecdote with specific detail, imho.

I asked first!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152335

Anyway, thanks :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com