Do not erase the manuscript.

First published 2014, Hatena Diary

To resolve the “I’m writing and erasing manuscripts” situation

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I often hear people say, “I keep writing if you write it, erase it and then erasing it, and I never make any progress.

I think this is getting into a “not good mental state”.

Think about it. How much information can a human brain retain? After you write sentence A in your manuscript, erase it because it doesn’t feel right, and write sentence B, how much do you remember about sentence A? Do you remember what you thought was important to convey when you were writing sentence A?

While repeating “write and erase,” time is being consumed, but nothing is being accumulated. If nothing is accumulated, the problem does not get easier. The difficulty level will remain the same and will continue to stand in front of you.

It is a scary thing to lose perspective while fighting with a manuscript and not realize that you are getting into a “not good mental state”. Furthermore, you complain on Twitter or surf the net and arrive at a site like this. That is a complete escape from reality, and the work is not progressing at all.

How can we get out of this addicted state?

It’s simple. [Do not erase the manuscript. This is the main principle.

Even if you write sentence A and think it is of a poor, useless quality, do not erase it. It is like killing a newborn baby before it grows up by saying, “This one is useless and doesn’t deserve to exist. Even a bad sentence now has the potential to grow into a good sentence. By erasing it, you are picking out that potential.

You can’t start out with a perfect output. Hiroshi Yuki writes in “Writing Attitude”:

Tell yourself, “[You can write anything you want. It is very difficult to write while being reviewed. You can’t write while being constantly told, “That’s not right,” “That’s not the way to write,” “That’s not the right topic,” and so on.

• If you try to write something that is perfect from the start and then stop writing, you have lost the point. The only way to get better is to write something of terrible quality first, and then gradually improve it.

You may be lucky enough to get a “good sentence” after many tries without accumulating anything. It is fortune. It is not a rational attitude to be obsessed with the memory of having drawn an ultra-rare card and to pull the gacha over and over again.

Let’s compare this to programming. What would you think if someone was trying to program, and when it came time to declare a variable, he or she kept writing and erasing, saying things like, “What is the correct name for this variable? You would be tempted to say, “It doesn’t matter which way you write it, just write it all down. The reason why you cannot easily decide on a variable name is because you do not have a clear image in your mind of what you are going to write. Don’t worry about it, write it first. If you look at it after you have finished writing, you may realize that you did not choose the right variable name. If you notice, you can correct it at that time.

• [Implementation and refactoring cannot be done at the same time. Implementation and refactoring cannot be done at the same time.

One might argue, “Well, you say that, but you can’t write.” At least the “I can’t write” of those who “write and erase” is a lie. There is a difference between erasing what you have written and not being able to write.

Suppose there is a person here who wrote sentence A, erased it because it didn’t feel right, wrote sentence B, and then erased it because it still didn’t feel right. What else could this person have done? What is he missing?

Have you thought about why it “doesn’t feel right”? Are you taking a “hit-or-miss” approach without investigating why it “doesn’t feel right”? Are you burying valuable examples of “doesn’t feel right” in the dark?

Keep sentence A without erasing it and compare it with sentence B. What do they have in common? What is in common is probably what you implicitly believe needs to be written here. Is that correct? Would it be wrong to extract and write just that? Is this the place to put it? Can I not explain it elsewhere? What’s the difference between A and B. The difference between A and B would be what you implicitly felt “needed to be changed” in an attempt to improve A. What is the difference between A and B? Where is it? Why did it need to change? Is it really necessary to change something that has two messages in one sentence? Can’t you cut one out and move it to another place?

The act of “erasing” is to throw away the material for this kind of thinking.

The materials of the lecture I gave at Kyoto University’s Summer Design School can be found at http://nhiro.org/kuds2013/. The first day of the lecture, “The General Principle: Write and then Think” and “Structuring Fragmentary Information” may be helpful. This document itself was created by writing it down without thinking about poor connections, and then thinking about the arrangement of the information. This principle is something that the author came up with in the process of writing “Technology Supporting Coding,” but as a result, the book became a bestseller, so I think it has some validity.

PS I would like to add something since some of you have made the mistake of saying, “I will not erase anything until it reaches completion.” The situation where you write sentence A, erase it, and then write sentence B is “suffering from the lack of it,” and since the “lack of it” is the cause, you should not erase it. And if you keep writing without erasing, there will come a time when you think, “Neither A nor B, but C is best. At that point, A or B can be erased, moved to a separate file, or moved to a footnote, because if you keep writing all three in parallel, the information that “A or B was deemed inferior to C” will be lost.

Whether you delete A or B or move it to a footnote depends on how valuable you feel it is to A or B. In my case, I keep my manuscript in git and can go back to any point in time, so even if I delete something, I can always retrieve it. Even then, there are times when I don’t delete and just move it.

At the stage of correcting after writing all the way through, I delete quite a bit of the text with a bang. I replace particularly clunky phrases with concise ones. For example, the paragraph above, “Do you want to delete it or move it to a footnote?” was initially “Do you want to delete it or just move it to a footnote?“. I deleted an entire chapter of my book after I finished writing it and heard the reviews.

I would be afraid to write such an article if I were you. I would feel uncomfortable unless I add at the end, “I have this kind of wisdom for living, but in reality, there are still times when I can’t get the manuscript done.

The author is not a perfect superhuman either, so there are still times when the manuscript does not progress. The suggestions in this text are not a silver bullet that will solve everyone’s problems, and their effectiveness will vary from person to person. If you can’t get your manuscript published because you feel restless without it, then I think you should add it. I often delete this kind of content in my corrections because I believe that it is self-evident that the author is not a perfect superhero and that the proposal is not a silver bullet, and that writing it does not increase the amount of information, and that it is just a precautionary measure to alleviate the author’s fears.

2014-01-20 #201401-202014-01 Hatena Diary http://d.hatena.ne.jp/nishiohirokazu/20140120/1390217739

• narrow-minded

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