Re:Ask HN: How do you deal with mental illness?
by kylec on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @06:32PM
(#408212)
My main problem has been that after I say everything that I want to say I still have several pages to fill. I imagine this would be like asking a programmer to deliver a 2000 line program that the programmer can write in 200. It could be a psychological revulsion to waste (using more words/lines than are needed) or it could be that I don't have sufficient depth in my thinking to produce the volume of content needed to explore the topic. Either way, I think that I've probably seen the last of my mandatory minimum page lengths, so I'm not particularly worried about it. Still, it would have been a nice skill to have back in high school.
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Re:Ask HN: How do you deal with mental illness?
by SapphireSun on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @08:23PM
(#408343)
I used to run into that roadblock before. I find that what you can do is look at the ideas you started with and what you have written and then make sure that all your points are sufficiently proven. There is almost always some finer detail you can elaborate on (for instance by adding an example or two) and if it doesn't quite fit, you can delegate it to end notes or foot notes.
Sometimes, it really is waste and you have to hit the deadline, but other times it can make your piece a lot more interesting.