Quote of the day: William Goldman

William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride, to David Baldacci, quoted in Why We Write:

Write everything as if it's the first thing you ever wrote. The day you think you know how to do it is the day you're done as a writer.

Comments

[GhostOfHeraclitus]

Suddenly I've come over all cold. Feeling like you are not improving? Despair. Feeling like you are improving? Despair.

Writing's really a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't sort of deal, isn't it?

[Bradel]

I don't know. There's probably a level of meaning I'm just not tapping into here, but if I wrote everything like it was the first thing I ever wrote, everything I wrote would be terrible. Whether you feel like you know what you're doing or not, writing is a learning experience. I suspect the quote is trying to say, "It's death for a writer to feel like there's nothing more to learn and master," but to me what it's actually saying is, "There's no point in trying to improve."

Experience is what lets me try things like foreshadowing, dialogue without attributions, parody, etc. If I hadn't already written many things, I wouldn't understand enough to see what more there was to try.

So, write everything like it's the first thing I ever wrote? No thank you. I'll stick with writing everything like my best work is still to be achieved.

[Causal Quill]

946003

No, it's not, and any advice that makes you feel that way isn't helpful.

I learned to write well from poor writing. I learned to write poorly from good writing. Acknowledging the value of each, the art of writing poorly is by far the more valuable one.

[horizon]

Thanks for posting this. It came at a good time.

946003
I read this quote as a coda to Do Writers Get Better?: one of my major takeaways from that post was that past the point of basic verbal competence, it's exceptionally easy to plateau, and that there's a strong pull toward mediocrity once you get big enough to be able to ignore editors' advice.

If it helps, recast the quote as: "Don't let your past improvement eclipse your ability to continue improving, or else it's all downhill from there." Or just take 946016's formulation in his last paragraph.

946030
Are you willing to unpack "I learned how to write poorly from good writing"? (The inverse is simple: reading bad writing can help you learn why it doesn't work and understand what to avoid.) You've got me curious with that one.

[Causal Quill]

946064

Bad writing teaches me more about how to write well than good writing does. Good writing makes me want to write even if I write poorly. It makes me willing to write poorly in the first place. It is hard to use the skill of writing well in my own work if I do not have a corpus of work to apply it to!

[GhostOfHeraclitus]

946064
I don't know. I feel about writing much like I feel about programming. I know how to do it, but I'm all-to-aware of the potential for screwing up (infinite), and the room to improve (also infinite). I'm generally pretty unhappy with my writing (ask my principal pre-reader and gracious host), but I do feel like I know how it's done. I've a map, now, it's just that most of it is covered with "Here Be Dragons, " "Terror[sic] Incognita," and things such as that.

946030
I second Horizon's query, I'm interested to hear your take on this.

[horizon]

946086
Ah! Alright. I was reading "taught me to write poorly" as "reading good stories lowered my skill level" and the motivation angle makes much more sense.

[Nharctic]

So very true.

[Bad Horse]

946003 Perhaps the problem isn't with writing, but with reacting to the realization that you aren't perfect with despair?

946016 I think we can assume Goldman didn't mean "Before writing anything, forget everything you ever learned about writing." He didn't have the training to speak with mathematical precision.

946090 I've noticed that people who try to continually improve their programming ability often end up writing terrible code because they insist on using the latest and greatest design patterns, modules, and classes. Then they write overly-general code no one can understand that gets thrown out and rebuilt when they leave. Do writers do something analogous?

[Blue_Paladin42]

946003
This sounds, to me, as a direct warning against Death of the Editor. The minute you think you're perfect, you're dead. Doesn't mean you aren't allowed to feel like you're improving. He just feels like the best attitude to keep your head outta the clouds is to approach it like it's new. I am not sure I agree with the first part, but I certainly agree with the second.

Says the non writer in this group.

[Bradel]

947029
You know what they say.
"Every party needs a cleric."

[GhostOfHeraclitus]

946908
Well, no, it's more that: you think you aren't improving -- what are you doing wrong? You think you are improving, oh dear, that's a bad sign, too. I'm light-years away from 'perfect' as you'll quickly see demonstrated when you look at my outline, but I like to think that I've learned a thing or two since the first thing I wrote -- if only how to be horrible in a more organized way.

Regarding coding -- I've certainly seen a lot of what you speak of, and while I'll cop to a complexity addiction that strikes from time to time, I'm a firm believer in not killing flies with a sledgehammer. After all, it doesn't matter how elegant your code is -- if it isn't done it's not worth much, now is it?

That said, I do suffer from a regrettable belief that any problem can be improved with the addition of regular expressions.

[Blue_Paladin42]

947080
I think I am more like the party bard.

Hmm. Some irony there.

[Bradel]

947137
I love me some beautiful, concise code. If it isn't efficient, orderly, well-documented, and so dense it's nearly impossible to understand without the documentation, I'm not a fan.

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given my love of punchiness in writing. If a piece of code doesn't set me down on my ass in wonder, it's not properly written.

[horizon]

947137
> That said, I do suffer from a regrettable belief that any problem can be improved with the addition of regular expressions.

"Regrettable" is sure a funny way of spelling "awesome." As a fix, may I suggest applying the filters s/[Rr]egret([a-z]+)/awe$1/g and s/([A-Z]?[a-z]+)table/{$2}some/g to your speech? This should increase your accuracy in discussing regexps, with only moderate impact on your ability to second-guess decisions about dinette sets.[1]

--
[1] Plus it would prove the old aphorism wrong! By splitting up the substitutions that way, if you end up with more than one problem, you're likely to have three.