Comments on: Write no matter what

By: Andrew'

Andrew' — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 17:00:43 +0000

By the way, bad ideas and good ideas may come from the same birthing process.

By: Andrew'

Andrew' — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 16:52:49 +0000

Your comment is irrelevant. But anyway, Adams is just self-taught. He just doesn’t know the lingo because he’s one of only a handful of people doing what he does. The list is Cialdini, Charlie Munger, Adams….ummm….the guy with the facial scars….sort of?

By: Rich Berger

Rich Berger — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 10:10:11 +0000

Agree. I get a lot of ideas while walking the dogs. Adams dares to be wacky, which generates a lot of ideas, some of which are nuts.

By: Octavian

Octavian — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 09:02:30 +0000

I very much agree. It’s the same with programming. Writing a program to perform an elaborate task seems very daunting and I’d spend a lot of time just sitting and thinking about how to do it (and, of course, procrastinating). The more you break it up into simpler subtasks, the more straightforward it becomes and the more time you spend working instead of head-scratching.

By: Jeff R.

Jeff R. — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 22:46:24 +0000

That seems like sound advice. A couple of years ago I attended a guest lecture by the screenwriter David N. Weiss at UMBC. His philosophy was that successfully completing any large project in which the end product was months or years away depended upon chopping it up into a series of small, manageable tasks, and so his writing process involved forcing himself to write at least one page of a screenplay per day, even if that page was garbage and he ultimately never used a word of it. I thought that made a great deal of sense.

By: Andrew'

Andrew' — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 19:55:48 +0000

As Scott Adams says (hehe, just to trigger the haters) all his good ideas happen when he is doing some mindless rote task like showering or driving a known commute.

Another one of God’s practical jokes that those are the least convenient situations to write it down.

By: collin

collin — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 18:32:23 +0000

That is I rationalize my nonsense comments on blogs. It is “Write No Matter What!” (And I am not a particularly good writer and do need practice.)

One reason why do I continue to believe in college education is good for society is because it forces the students to read and write a lot on their own. And good writing is an important skill for any job.