On writing

Degas is a well-known French painter. Less-known is the fact that he played around with poetry. One day he explained to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé his struggle with writing. He said he had many ideas and yet he couldn’t write. Mallarmé answered:

Poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made with words.

This is the best definition of writing I’ve ever come across: it’s all about the words.

The way you connect them, the way you get rid of them. It’s about each sentence you choose, how you craft the rhythm of your sentences.

Varying between short sentenced and longer ones gives a personal touch to your writing. It helps my writing a great deal.

I just did that.

Writing in a second language #

I have always dedicated time to writing but my personal life got in the way of my fluency.

Moving to Germany had a big impact because speaking a different language at work fundamentally changed the way I think.

I often catch myself thinking in English. I even dream in English. While I’m grateful about the experience, it had a negative impact on my writing.

I feel limited when I write in English. I know I’m not a native speaker and I feel it every single time I write.

Writing doesn’t feel clear and fluid, there’s too much clutter.

I’m clumsy but I had never felt that way about my writing. My experience as a student spoilt me. I was “the good writer” in any class. I put no effort and yet my writing was good.

The experience gap between my Italian writing and the English one blocked me. I did not know how to fix it and a few years passed.

That’s how life works: if you do nothing, nothing happens. But I couldn’t just give up on writing. I like it too much. I like the act itself, it calms me down. It gives me that silence that’s so hard to find in this frenetic world.

So I did what I always do when I want to know more about something: I read a few books.

I must confess I was sceptical. I’ve always thought of writing as something you’re good at; that was my personal experience growing up.

By now, I’m know nothing really works like that. You can get better at anything if you work on it.

Reading is my first step when I want to understand something better so here is a list of the books I read with a short review:

The element of style #

The classic everyone recommends. Rightly so: it’s a must-read.

If you care about improving your English writing, this is the book for you. I have not got around to buy a dead-tree version yet, so I’m using my Kindle application to consult it every now and then. But it deserves to live on your desk.

On writing well #

It’s a good book. I loved the first chapters, but I can’t say I liked the rest of the book as much. After the introduction, each chapter covers writing techniques on different topics (like travelling, interviews) and some of them were too boring. I did skip some chapters, overall a good read.

Writing tools #

The first two books can teach you most of what matters about writing in English, so this one may feel a little repetitive.

I enjoyed it anyway for two reasons:

Each chapters comes with a workshop section. The information is helpful and actionable. Great feature.
Some repetition doesn’t hurt when you’re learning.

These books taught me that writing works like everything else: if you put hours of practice in something, you will get better.

We don’t think like that when it comes to writing though. We think of artists as people with innate talent. You’re either born like Dostoevskij or you’ll always write crap.

Of course, this isn’t true.

Moreover, the goal isn’t becoming the most important novelist of all times. The goal is to enjoy writing.

If you don’t intend to write for money, you can ignore the audience. I suggest you do that anyway though. More on this later.

Rewriting is the best part of writing #

These books taught me something else too. They changed my perspective on the writing process. They taught me to love the rewriting process.

Before this experience, this was my process:

Research the topic.
Take notes.
Write the draft.
Proof-read the draft and call it a day.

It was pretty presumptuous of me.

These books, in particular on writing well, teach you to love the rewriting process, they help you understand its value.

I started rewriting my drafts. It was a fascinating learning process. My sentences got better, the writing felt more fluid.

Rewriting my drafts made me love writing even more. It forced me to think of ways to get to the first draft as fast and as effortlessly as possible.

That changed everything and two new writing techniques quickly emerged:

Note by note.
Outline expansion.

I couldn’t come up with a better naming for now, as a programmer I know how hard naming can be. I explain what I mean in the coming paragraphs.

As I kept rewriting my drafts before moving on to proof-reading, I realised I had never written a draft and rewritten it in one sitting. I had always put at least a few hours between the sessions.

My explanation is that writing and rewriting require different mindsets.

When I write a draft, my goal is to write everything I have in mind as fast as possible so I can move on to the real work: the rewriting sessions.

When I rewrite something, my goal is to remove clutter. I want to get rid of whatever is superfluous: unnecessary adverbs, adjectives, sentences, entire paragraphs.

When I started to rewrite my drafts, the question “how much rewriting is enough?” worried me.

It’s a fair question, it comes up often in conversations about writing.

I can’t say if there’s an answer that works for everyone. I don’t believe answers to this kind of question work this way but I can share my current process.

I have a three-step process:

I do one or two sessions in my editor depending on how long the piece of writing is.
I then switch to reading the piece as it was published on my website. It helps me to polish my tone. I took mental note of how the piece flows.
I go back to the editor and quickly apply my notes.

Most times I quickly go back between step 2 and 3 a few times until reading feels right to me.

Sometimes the second step sends me all the way back to “writing mode”. I realise that something about the piece isn’t working. The reason isn’t important.

What I think matters the most in my process is that I try hard to use a different perspective in each step.

I’m a writer in the first step so I use my editor.

I’m a reader in the second one so I do not use my editor. I just read and take notes.

It fascinates me that I didn’t come up with this process, especially the bit about reading as a writer (meaning through the editor) in the “rewriting mode” and as a reader (as everyone else would read it) in the “reader mode”.

It happened to me over time.

In fact, I rewrote this last part of the paragraph in December 2022, a few weeks after I realised my process had refined itself. More than 5 years after I wrote this article.

Note by note #

I have been trying to write every day for a long time, yet I’ve struggled to come up with topics I wanted to write about.

A few weeks ago, I started looking into React (a JavaScript library for building user interfaces). I was completely new to the topic and the ecosystem around React can be overwhelming.

I started taking notes to help myself learning React. After a couple of coding sessions, I was looking at my notes and I realised I could transform them into a draft with little effort. That was the first time I used the note by note technique.

So now I take notes about everything I do. I don’t care if what I’m writing down is worth sharing or not.

This way I give myself the chance to take a bunch of notes and transform them into a draft at a later stage.

Nowadays, I can get from notes to a first over a thousand words draft in thirty minutes.

When I’m about to run out of items in my draft queue, I check my notes. I always find something I can expand into an article. I found a way to write every day.

It only took me seven years.

Outline expansion #

I use outlining every time I have no clue what I’m doing.

Since that’s true for most of what I do (and yes, that’s true for you too. Don’t lie to yourself), I organise lists this way every day.

When it comes to writing, it helps me to structure ideas that have been on my mind for a while. This article is a perfect example.

As soon as I started researching how to improve my English writing, I knew I would want to write about it at some point so I outlined my thoughts this way:

on writing

- use all the day one writing with the "on writing" tag
- Books I read quick review
  - The element of style
  - On writing well
  - Writing tools
- The absolute necessity of getting an editor
- Make a habit out of it
- Build a drafts queue
- Get to the draft as fast as you can:
  - note by note
  - outline with paragraph expansion (use the article itself to explain it)
- Share everything you write (example of the vim article)

This is the actual outlined list I used for the article you’re reading. The outline is a guideline for my thoughts. It works like this:

I paste the outlined list into my editor.
I expand one point after the other.
If a point doesn’t fit where it is, I move past it.
If I’m left with points I couldn’t expand, I get rid of them.

As you can see from the example above, “make a habit out it” and “the absolute necessity of getting an editor” did not make it to the final article.

They are important topics but I couldn’t find a way to make them flow with the rest of the content.

Furthermore, “get to the draft as fast as you can” ended up being three different paragraphs. While writing the article, I realised I cared too much about “rewriting”, so only mentioning it didn’t work.

As with the “note by note” technique, I try to expand all the points in one session, but it doesn’t always work.

Sometimes I get tired using this technique, because I don’t have enough content in the outline list already. In that sense, the “note by note” technique is easier to use.

For example, I wrote the first draft of this article in one sitting. It took me less than two hours and I couldn’t be happier with the result. But it was almost 1900 words and the writing session left me very tired.

We have the tendency to overestimate our forecasting capabilities. It’s called the overconfidence effect. I feel the effect of this bias every time I publish something.

2017 is a perfect example: the only article I thought wasn’t worth sharing got more attention than the rest of my articles put together. I couldn’t believe it.

I decided that the best strategy against this bias is to ignore it completely. I won’t ask myself if an article is worth sharing or not. I’ll share whatever I write because I love writing.

Besides, from time to time someone tells me they found my writing helpful. It’s a beautiful thought: I do something just because I like it and that helps someone else.

Why wouldn’t I take that chance every time I write something?