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I was in the room when he started typing this - I walked into YC that day to be met by PG bubbling with delight about how Etherpad had implemented playback and he was about to try it out. He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
I watched over his shoulder for a little while, but it feels intrusive to be standing there breathing down someone's neck while they think and write, and hey, I could just play it back later, so I left.
Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi. I want to add that he was going to try to get the Etherpad guys to implement vi shortcuts but that feels suspiciously like the sort of embellishment that creeps into a story years later.
> Memory is fallible after all this time but I think he
Waiting with bated breath for the continuation. Not often you see dang write about things which aren't moderation.
edit: After seeing the continuation I'm just nodding along. Very few things could make me abandon Vim.
> Memory is fallible after so much time but I think he told me later that he wouldn't keep using it because he was so used to vi.
Now I'm wondering if there's a length limit to vim macros...
Ha! I once saw PG writing an essay at his home and he told me what it was about, then when it came out it was so radically different that it felt like not much must have remained. But I didn’t watch long because it does feel intrusive watching someone write. It’s like you’re reading their mind.
> ... He was like a little kid about to get a birthday present. IIRC, he wanted it so he could see how he actually writes.
Was that the intent of the feature, or something else?
It seems like this might be coupled to some kind of teaching program that helps you become a more efficient writer. Maybe something that could recap your session and offer a focused lesson on, say writing a paragraph from a prompt.
in replit we just implemented playback mode, it's called history mode, and we do happen to have vi shortcuts (couldn't live without them)
(I'd expect pg to know this already, but hey, here it is)
I've always found it odd that people want to share this sort of thing. Such as live coding videos or live editing.
People change behavior when they are being watched. Even when I know I'm being recorded and no one is watching, I feel a bit of the spotlight effect going on. I don't know that I could actually record my honest self without being performative. I wouldn't be free to do anything that might be embarrassing. Even in pair programming or coding interviews. It's an incredibly intimate thing, to watch someone take their brain noise and broadcast it, raw.
I don’t find it odd at all. I think it’s illuminating.
Sure there’s an observation effect, but this is 1000x more informational than if Paul were to write an essay: “how I write essays”.
> people want to share this sort of thing
> People change behavior when they are being watched
Maybe they want to share this sort of thing, so they can practice not changing behavior while they're watched.
That's true for many people, but people also like to show off, or to educate others. I think that recording yourself is just applying new technology to the problem.
For example, Vernor Vinge wrote many of his stories on early computers. He didn't have any way to record that, but his style of annotating the text as he wrote it and thought of ideas or problems turns out to be quite interesting. He eventually shared his annotated text for A Fire Upon the Deep; you can read it at <https://3e.org/vvannot/>.
Although he didn't ever intend to publish them himself, JRR Tolkien kept extensive (but very badly organized) records of how his stories evolved over time. Christopher Tolkien later published stories from those notes, but also successive versions of the same story from different stages of it's development. "Beren and Luthien" is especially fun because you can see Tolkien's mistakes, such as characters like "the appalling Tevildo", Prince of Cats who captures Beren in the earliest surviving draft.
You don't create these if you're worried about being embarrassed. For most people, this is one of the most embarrassing things a person could do.
I don't use them often, but when I'm doing something new, these kinds of references are absolutely invaluable.
The impression you get from someone describing their process is totally different than seeing it. Especially iterative aspects, false starts, etc. All of those are thing writers AND readers gloss over.
Especially for someone you've never met before, right after getting through a 30 second "getting to know you" introduction where you don't say anything of substance.
In my experience, some people perform better when operating feels performative. I don't think it's something anyone comes by naturally, though.
It's Sartre's "The Look"
This was done in EtherPad and there were a couple HN threads at the time:
The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495336 - Feb 2009 (126 comments)
Watch Paul Graham write his latest essay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557191 - April 2009 (22 comments)
It's a great shame that these links now only show the etherpad landing page!
unfortunately not this gem
Direct link to the content[1] if you don't want to load twitter. Context is that this is a live view of Paul Graham writing his "Startups in 13 Sentences"[2] article in real(ish?) time.
I am a little surprised by the crazy amount of editing going on during writing. It is obvious that this way of writing is not possible (or at least practical) if the medium is pen and paper. Is that a good thing or not? I personally try to resist the urge to rewrite during the writing proper and postpone editing until after I am done putting down the main ideas. At least on a paragraph by paragraph basis.
But each to his own. PG is obviously a prolific and successful writer, so for him this works.
2 minutes in, Paul types out [xfs] and then later [xtc] — what do you think these symbols are for?
My best guess from watching the video is that they are temporary place holders, breadcrumbs he leaves himself to return to, allowing him not to break his flow/train of thought. If that's the case, then the technique reminds me of Neil Strauss's "Power of the TK":
When you get suck on a word, or cant’ think of the right fact, what shouldn’t you do?
Don’t stop. Just type, TK.
I built a tool for separating writing from editing: https://enso.sonnet.io
It's the complete opposite of the site shared in the post, but people seem to like it.
Time to figure out the 13 core insights: decades. Time to flesh them out in an essay: 15 minutes. Thanks for sharing.
Idea: animated documents. It starts with the core points. and if you have more reading time you move the slider and more detail appears, highlighted.
Wait, so he doesn’t print a draft, go outside with a pen and have a smoke or vape and read through it that way for flow and coherence?
Hmm, okay.
If people wonder what I’m referring to, think about it in music terms: you don’t listen to a song in just one environment usually. There are speakers, headphones, your car, etc. so it’s a good idea to mix a track and test it on a couple.
It is my perspective that coming up in a print culture the best way to slow down and be critical of self produced work is to change the medium slightly. Thus the print out. It’s the same content but you are digesting it a different way. In this regard I would consider my approach superior to Paul’s and suggest you give it a try for your next important email, letter, or essay.
tip to anyone following the link: you can drag the progress bar at the top, and make the playback much faster.
one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.
I'm surprised to find that I actually laughed out loud, midway through watching the edits. I didn't expect to find humor in the rewriting process.
And a lesson I got from the edit that made me laugh: don't tell people what you're not saying, just tell them what you're saying.
(Or, more succinctly: Don't equivocate.)
I prefer the bullet point list that he started with to the long form essay that buries the message.
It would be really interesting to have this slowed down and annotated, like DVD commentary. I saw a few things that were like little flashes of insight into PG's mind, and it would be really cool to hear them elaborated. Simple example: changing a word to "claiming" instead of just "saying". I think he rightly assumed that people would feel he was less invested in what he was saying with the original term.
Multiply insights like that by every edit he makes, and assume most edits are significantly less obvious, and you end up with some seriously interesting content.
Reminds me a bit of Hunter S Thompson famously typing out a The Great Gatsby in full, just so he could feel what it was like to write a masterpiece.
Twitter doesn't even let me click the link unless I signup or login. Great website.
Thanks for the self-esteem boost in this early morning, PG. I totally needed it.
I always beat myself up that I am not a quick, efficient and articulate enough as a writer and I always to take some time to organize and reorganize my thoughts and sentences but when I see I am not alone in this and there are even native speakers who struggle with this aspect of communications despite being domain experts, I feel good about myself.
Seeing the demo (and the vi(m) comments) made me wonder if someone had implemented this sort of editing playback functionality in Emacs.
It's not clear that anyone has exactly, but it's certainly something that's been talked about [1], [2], including on HN itself 13 years ago when pg's etherpad writing session was discussed [3]. (Though I can't find any evidence of the threatened minor mode.)
[1]: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47495/how-to-play-... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/tnhvs7/replay_macro_... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495751
That does not seem to be any different from how most people write I suppose?
The thing that has improved my writing the most, both code and text, is training my "Inner Rubber Duck".
While writing, I constantly let my IRD read what I have, as if it's a stranger reading for the first time. Then I adjust until it's out of complaints.
I don't know if this is a common technique, but it's really worked for me.
What's interesting is I thought people write entire paragraphs and then rewrite entire paragraphs.
Here the case is, from the first sentence, it gets rewritten 20,000 times.
I should rewrite the last paragraph it's a bit wonky but I'm on mobile and I got kids to put to bed. Such is life.
First - I LOVE this. Very few people outside of prolific writers understand just how much "writing" is actually "editing" and "re-writing" over and over again. It's awesome to see the process of a prolific tech writer like Paul Graham.
Second - I have used asciinema to record various writing and/or coding sessions in Vim, but does anyone know if there's a native vim plugin for recording "replays"/playback sessions like this? Closest I found is https://github.com/chrisbra/Replay but it hasn't been updated in some time.
Writing is also souding ideas out, so typically the first thing a reader of mine reads was the last thing I wrote, since part of the service of writing is having done that work for them.
The addition I would make to this process is that I sometimes let comments sit, go do something else, and if I don't feel awesome about reading them when I've forgotten them, I delete them. Usually on controversial topics that I know I've been provoked into responding to, but also on other things. The key is to write something I don't cringe at reading after. Write in the voice of the person you would like to become, and then read it to reflect on whether you aimed high enough.
Link to the resulting essay (for those that quickly got distracted by the great content, like I did): http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
I found interesting, and wondered what the highlighting was all about, making various assumptions that never turned out to be right. It turns out it was the "doomed" feature, showing text that wouldn't survive, I thought it might be the opposite.
When I was done watching.... a wave of nausea hit me in the face.
Did this happen to anyone else?
The only bummer about this is it is such an atypical essay for Paul Graham. He rarely writes lists, and is pretty outspoken about why outlines can be harmful.
I would love to see a playback of him writing a more exploratory essay, where perhaps the information wasn’t as concrete in his mind before hand.
Actual site:
https://byronm.com/13sentences.html
Avoids the senseless friction of the twitter link.
The making of the sausage is long, messy, and a lot of hard work.
> offer surprisingly good customer service
many of today's tech giants seem to thrive with the opposite approach: offer no customer service at all.
Impressed by the "blocky" typing style, it is as if he has keyboard shortcuts for common words or syllables.
What is this tool you've used to record the writing? Reminds me of Procreate record feature
GPT-3 will probably soon fix this. Write once -> auto rewrite -> proof read -> done.