Simple ideas can be conveyed clearly and concisely.
Complex ideas need space to grow, roam, demonstrate, and explain. But more critically (and something Zettlekasten should help with significantly) they require structure. John McFee's description of his use of index cards is among the best (and most concise) explanations of this that I've found.
A classic bit of bad writing advice I see, at least for someone trying to express complex thoughts, is the idea that writing only or simply requires adding some fixed number of words per day. Write a uniform 3,000 words per day, and you'll crank out a 250,000 word epic novel in three months. It ... doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't simply keep stringing words together. But eventually that's going to show.
Simple structures are simple. A box, or hut, or short program, or simple essay, can be stream of consciousness or happenstance. A more complex structure with interdependencies, relationships, and constraints requires more thought, a framework off of which to hang the parts, and an overall organisation.
Short fragments can give you the parts you're looking for, but you'll still need to fit them together. And apply tape, string, and mortar where needed as well.
why is that bad writing advice? I would expect that consistently developing the writing every day (aka, 3000 words per day) will lead to some results - of course, you'd still have to edit, rearrange, and cut at some point in the future (e.g., after the "full" novel is completed, you'd go back and repeatedly change and cut, until it's a good novel).
Because it's virtually never given in the context of "structure and edit". The formula is more:
- Write X words/day.
- After nX days, book of nX length!!!
There is advice that that addresses that. The John McFee piece I reference is one.
A writing guide book I'd used at uni had a chapter on rewriting. It consisted of something like this:
Rewriting
Interviewer: I understood you rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 16 times. What was the hard part?
Hemmingway: Getting the words right.
The author was Hemmingway. The book and number of rewrites may have differed. I'm near certain the response was as I've given it. That was the entire chapter. It is an effective communication.
There's a similar brand of reading advice that's similarly bad --- that you just have to plough through a book, keep reading, and make sure you understand each word.
Again: Thats. Not. How. It. Works.
There's context, references, allusion, cultural relevance.
Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book addresses this complexity, as a contrast.
It's not that you don't need to actually write to produce something, but just as a house is not a pile of bricks, and a skyscraper isn't a pile of concrete, glass, and steel, a book isn't simply a pile of words. The advice is very incomplete.
Simple ideas can be conveyed clearly and concisely.
Complex ideas need space to grow, roam, demonstrate, and explain. But more critically (and something Zettlekasten should help with significantly) they require structure. John McFee's description of his use of index cards is among the best (and most concise) explanations of this that I've found.
A classic bit of bad writing advice I see, at least for someone trying to express complex thoughts, is the idea that writing only or simply requires adding some fixed number of words per day. Write a uniform 3,000 words per day, and you'll crank out a 250,000 word epic novel in three months. It ... doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't simply keep stringing words together. But eventually that's going to show.
Simple structures are simple. A box, or hut, or short program, or simple essay, can be stream of consciousness or happenstance. A more complex structure with interdependencies, relationships, and constraints requires more thought, a framework off of which to hang the parts, and an overall organisation.
Short fragments can give you the parts you're looking for, but you'll still need to fit them together. And apply tape, string, and mortar where needed as well.