[HN Gopher] Write Less
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Write Less
Author : ingve
Score : 7 points
Date : 2023-02-02 21:47 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattgemmell.scot)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattgemmell.scot)
| NovaPenguin wrote:
| While I post occasionally here, in terms of long term writing
| projects it is fascinating seeing how my own works have
| progressed over the decades.
|
| I must have initially written about 10 incomplete (80,000 word+)
| books - only to get into the last 20% of it and get that moment
| of "nobody would really want to read this!" I think some of them
| have survived the deletion process.
|
| Then it moved into smaller form, 1,000 word posts once a month on
| a blog I ran for about 3 years. Even that felt like a little too
| much.
|
| The one I have been working on for the last few years,
| unpublished, I describe as a thousandth of a shadow of the Tao Te
| Ching. Little sayings and expressions that can be communicated in
| under 20 seconds. They aren't original ideas just ones that I
| think will be useful to others. So far I have 86 of them.
|
| I guess it comes down to a saying in Buddhism, "a thousand words
| mean nothing compared to a single word that can bring peace." It
| also comes down to a case of, in distilling down to core concepts
| that aren't spelled out in detail, it allows the reader to flex
| their own mental muscles. It also reduces the attack surface area
| to some degree.
|
| I know of a few folks now that believe that if you cannot impart
| the core aspects of something, particularly in terms of politics
| and philosophy, in less than a half dozen paragraphs - you need
| to keep working on it. Essentially, if you cannot communicate it
| clearly, is your thinking clear?
|
| One of these sayings on my list is, 'Don't count the words - make
| the words count.'.
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