HST was always great in small rapid outputs of writing, which is captured well in his letters (similar to how his collection of articles are his most popular works, but these deserve a similar look).
He obviously had some sort of ADD and later on combined with a long series of drug/alcohol addictions, so it makes sense he was better in short blurbs. Even his most famous novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a feeling of multiple long spurts on a typewriter.
Which is always how he wrote. Always also at the very last minute of the magazine due date and/or because he was running out of money and needed the next advance.
I believe this is common in creative fields. Long periods of meh and spurts of greatness.
Anyway the book series is here, usually called the Gonzo Letters:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/64386-the-fear-and-loathing...
Only the 2nd one has a Wikipedia page for some reason (the 3rd one came out in 2014) but the first one (The Proud Highway: The Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955–1967) as a young writer who is often desperate and broke was most interesting IMO, even though his life or writing wasn’t yet as it would become famous for (but definitely still as wild) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_America
In my implementation, I collect little thoughts (shower thoughts, observations, good turns of phrases, etc.) into a single continuous Google Doc. I revisit it often and guided by my current emotions and interests, try to coalesce like-ideas and rewrite them into a large idea. Some ideas eventually snowball into something substantial.
Unless you're a columnist with a deadline (with innate talent driven by adrenalin), everybody knows how difficult it is to write an essay from scratch. However if you've been collecting ideas, and have been developing and coalescing and rewriting them over and over again (often for years), the essay almost writes itself.
[1] https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/05/04/weinberg-on-writing...
This is something that's bothered me since my university put out a survey asking about time spent on homework.
Suppose the following things happen:
1. A math class assigns a proof.
2. I look at the problem, fiddle around with it for 20 minutes, and get nowhere.
3. I play Final Fantasy for 6 days.
4. I go back to the problem. In 40 minutes, I have the proof worked out.
How long did I spend on the proof? What if the counterfactual was
1. Proof gets assigned.
2. Look at it, do nothing.
3. The day after, sit down and spend 3 hours proving it.
How long did I spend then? Are the two scenarios... different?
As with most things, this comes with diminishing returns as you push toward minimizing one over the other.
Sometimes, even negative returns, e.g. because of increased context switching costs, or confusion and general malaise caused by staring at something for too long.
But this is the problem with a survey of "how long does the homework take?". The question isn't well defined. The answer doesn't exist.
The drugs stimulate your executive function which helps you concentrate.
It is a wonder drug for me. I used to spend a majority of my time farting around on the internet at work, then working long hours and scrambling to get my work done before the deadline. Now I am able to be productive more consistently and don’t miss nearly as many deadlines.
The early days of uni for me were the first time I was actually responsible for ensuring that my med supply continued and that's a big part of why I'm hesitant to try tapering off of it - it was incredibly difficult for me to find the motivation or the energy to actually fill up my prescription if I had let it lapse and the days (up to eight in the worst case) I was without meds I completely dropped the ball on schoolwork and other responsibilities.
So I'm worried about tapering off since I'm concerned I might not be able to stop tapering or I would burn a lot of goodwill/financial security recovering from the tapering off if it went poorly. That all said, ADD is different for everyone with different levels of apathy and concentration, I wouldn't be surprised if mine was a particularly potent variety beyond what most folks deal with but, with meds, I'm able to cope and have a nice life.
The philosophical questions about personhood don't really ever stop nagging away at you in the background, but I'm happy with things as they are - sorry if this was a bit of a downer response ;P
I only take it at work so I am pretty much just sitting in front of a computer when I'm on it.
It also serves as a link to your insurance provider in each location, so reimbursements are automatic.
I thought making it through the other two 700+ pages of letters was quite an achievement. I was planning to read the 3rd one at some later point in my life.
I guess I'll still have to wait ... the title was really great too "The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop, 1977-2005".
Writing (and reading) short disconnected bits is fairly easy: nothing interrelates strongly, composition is simple and forgiving. Longer works are complex: they have structure, arcs, need to retain interest, jumps and connections need to be plausible, the whole be consistent (unless inconsistency is used for effect), etc., etc.
And you don't get this knowledge simply by copying out great works.
I see a similar failure-to-grasp in some proposals for hypertext or advanced publishing systems. Reading is inherently serial, in that we follow lines of text on a page. Interactivity --- usually defined by the ability to skip between previously-written segments --- just offers more serial paths.
The value of hypertext and related tools may be far more on the writing process, where vastly more sources can be referenced and cited with greater ease. Some might be incorporated into the final work, but an excess of interconnections and quotations is itself distracting.
I see this as a particular blindness of Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, despite many fascinating and original elements to it.
Well, I think the point is that you may get knowledge, but nt necessarily of the type that lets you make another great work. Doing is an act of learning, whether very small amounts of learning as you do something you've done countless times before, or possibly large amounts of learning as you try something absolutely new, or learning about yourself and what you like, what you don't, what you feel is worthwhile even if you dislike it, etc.
Ultimately, there's something to be learned from everything. Even the book you read that purports to teach you someething that you find worthless for the task should be illustrative of either what things are not useful for you in learning that, or how to structure something in such a way that it's hard for you to take away good meaning from it, and ultimately, some hints about what to look for next time that doesn't have the same problems.
So, copying isn't necessarily creating, but it should be an act of learning, and learning should hopefully help in creating, even if it's something totally divorced from what you were originally copying.
And any learning process which focuses largely on output or product rather than process, shares this deficiency.
To your other point, serendipitous discovery is very much a thing. I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
Recent example: moralising pathologies fallacy, in wildfire:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24684652
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e...
> I find that it is helped by haviing a conceptual structure or mental model which allows slotting new concepts from unrelated areas into a larger whole.
I very much agree. In fact, I think discovering new mental models is one of the best ways to come to new understandings about things. My entire stance on topics has changed in the past when I found on revisiting it I now had a mental model that I thought applied better/more closely than the ones available previously, and looking at the topic from that new perspective yielded a different opinion.
My entire stance on topics has changed in the past...
I keep seeing this, revisiting topics, questions, books, etc., and immediately seeing some now-obvious relationship or aspect. It's an argument for returning, at least occasionally, to familiar ground. Though it generally helps to have journeyed elsewhere.
Also for both extensive and intensive reading. Domains which focus exclusively, or even only extensively, on intensive analysis and exploration, seem more prone to going off the rails or ending up at dead ends.
Maybe he means like jazz musicians? (I'm one.) Every musician I know has transcribed solos. You pick some solo you like but have no idea what they're doing, transcribe it, and learn to play it along with them. Bits and pieces perhaps will rub off in your own playing. You don't want to sound like them, but it's good to be able to if you want – and for that you need to absorb their style, so your body can just go into that mode, without having to think about it. I'm a piano player but have also transcribed sax, trumpet, bass lines, gospel songs, reggae, funk, .. even taps dripping, babies crying etc etc.
The reasoning is that when you produce output you are by definition producing something at your own level, so little improvement occurs. When you consume input (and transcription is a great way to do it), you are consuming input of a native speaker - or in the case of Jazz, a master player - which is at a much higher quality level than what you could produce yourself. So input drives the learning process.
The exception is for motor e.g. pronunciation or playing technique, which do benefit from practice.
Been prepared that it will sound absolutely terrible for the first few months or even years.
Probably also more common among jazz musicians than rock musicians, who don't emphasize sheet music and music theory as much (as much, it's certainly more prevalent than outsiders would naively think).
And of course, all these categories blur together. There wasn't any reason to take his post and interpret it in absolutist terms.
One of the authors she mentioned was Yasunari Kawabata, who is widely admired for his writing style in Japanese. I believe she also said that she got the idea to do this from the tradition of shakyō (写経), the copying of Buddhist sutras by hand [0].
I have never retyped literary texts myself, but I used to teach English literature classes to Japanese students in which I would read the texts aloud in class before we discussed them. I found that, over the years, that experience heightened my awareness of writing style and maybe improved my own writing as well. I can see how retyping might have a similar benefit.
Do you mean learn other people's songs from sheet music, or do you mean write down, from the sheet music, the same song again on blank sheet paper?
Edit: Or do you mean write down the song via hearing?
You can buy books of solo transcriptions, but I've found that they're absolutely useless. (and always inaccurate) Maybe it's like reading a book vs. typing it out?! hehe. At first glance I couldn't see how typing a book out would help anything, I mean, it's already written down for you! The main element of learning by working out bit by bit what it is, isn't there. But there are elements in common - it's a little like playing a solo you've written down, and you would absorb the word patterns if you typed a whole novel I guess.
You would not read or download the lessons. You typed all the python in word by word. I think it really helped the learning process to type it out. It was slow and deliberate, even to mistyping and making mistakes (and fix them).
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483
Qui scribit, bis legit
(Maybe your sight-reading is quicker than your playing? Mine is nearly the opposite.)
[1] Quintilian even finds value in exercising criticism of popular examples (because of course, even way back in the first century, The Old Days Were Better. Elsewhere Quintilian complains that people in his day only repeat a Cliff's Notes knowledge of greek authors instead of reading the originals in full.)
> "It will even at times be of value to read speeches which are corrupt and faulty in style, but still meet with general admiration thanks to the perversity of modern tastes, and to point out how many expressions in them are inappropriate, obscure, high-flown, grovelling, mean, extravagant or effeminate, although they are not merely praised by the majority of critics, but, worse still, praised just because they are bad."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
and makes a good point about a pedagogical advantage to criticism of works other than one's own:
> "I will venture to say that this particular form of exercise, if diligently pursued, will teach learners more than all the text-books of all the rhetoricians: these are no doubt of very considerable use, but being somewhat general in their scope, it is quite impossible for them to deal with all the special cases that are of almost daily occurrence. The art of war will provide a parallel: it is no doubt based on certain general principles, but it will none the less be far more useful to know the methods employed, whether wisely or the reverse, by individual generals under varying circumstances and conditions of time and place. For there are no subjects in which, as a rule, practice is not more valuable than precept. Is a teacher to declaim to provide a model for his audience, and will not more profit be derived from the reading of Cicero or Demosthenes? Is a pupil to be publicly corrected if he makes a mistake in declaiming, and will it not be more useful, and more agreeable too, to correct some actual speech? For everyone has a preference for hearing the faults of others censured rather than his own."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Im demang tili peroba pash im demang finyish vide fit.
This is also why I always type in all the examples from programming books instead of cutting and pasting.
The downside is that it's easy to 'overfit' and lose your own voice.
Just like anyone can trace or copy a picture drawn by a master, copying text won't grant understanding. What actually matters for a creator is the ability to produce content from higher level ideas, eg from whatever mental representation you used to hold the writing or drawing in memory.
Programming is the exact same way. If ever I'm in doubt of someone's design and I have an inkling of respect for them, I'll try to design the code from scratch in my head, or sometimes even redesign a toy version myself. This usually surfaces some weird property of the problem that explains their code. You can also go through their thought processes and see exactly how they made decisions along the way. I'd argue you can even infer philosophical viewpoints in some cases, too - all without actually communicating with the author.
I love that about humans. One of the things I really admire about us.
Writing does not proceed letter by letter, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.
Earlier writing is deleted, moved, revised. Passages are moved earlier or later. Key passages are rewritten.
Etc.
Typing character-by-character an entire novel will likely teach you little about the act of literary creation.
The second quote in the parent comment is "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it." - the focus is learning more about the finished product. And I read "I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that well." as about experiencing the quality of the finished product.
HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music. And from typing out parts of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald - these were writers that were very big in my life and the lives of the people around me - so yea I wanted to learn from the best I guess."
http://brianjohnspencer.blogspot.com/2014/06/hunter-s-thomps...