In my podcast yesterday, I shared my final lesson-learned from Art & Fear, which was that flaws are useful in making art. I always end the podcast with a writing tip, so you to look over your early work and find pieces where you didn’t live up to your intention.

This blog is nearly 20 years old, so I have a lot of old, flawed posts. For the rest of the week, I’m going to look for posts that had a good idea, but didn’t do a good job of expressing it.

Here is the process that I’m going to apply:

1. Find a post that feels like it has no point, just a bunch of related ideas. (I have a lot of these)
2. Figure out the single message or takeaway I wanted to convey.
3. Remove everything that isn’t part of that message.
4. Reorder the text to make it clear what the point of the post is as soon as possible.
5. Title it to support that message.
6. Add whatever else it might need to convey that single message.
7. Make it more specific to my intended audience: software developers and managers.

It’s what I try to do now in new posts. I outlined this approach in Write While True Episode 5: Audience and Message.

In my podcast, I am doing a four part series on lessons I learned from Art & Fear by Bayles and Orland. Tomorrow, I’ll release part 3, but today I want to share a passage that I think of often, but didn’t make the series (emphasis mine).

It’s all a matter of balance, and making art helps achieve that balance. For the artist, a sketchpad or a notebook is a license to explore — it becomes entirely acceptable to stand there, for minutes on end, staring at a tree stump. Sometimes you need to scan the forest, sometimes you need to touch a single tree — if you can’t apprehend both, you’ll never entirely comprehend either. To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience. All this suggests a useful working approach to making art: notice the objects you notice.

When I am reading, when I am working, I am trying to be aware of when I smile and feel a rush of insight or understanding. I am trying to realize that I am noticing something. Notice my notice. I don’t know what to do with it yet, but what I am doing is making some kind of mark—taking down a note or a photo—just to remember the moment so I can deal with it later.

There was a post on HackerNews recently asking for everyone to post their personal blog. A few days later, some people had hacked up projects based on that data, including this OPML file, which you can import into a feed reader to follow all of the blogs.

I imported it and realized immediately that there were way too many to follow, so I started to cull them. I still have a long way to go, but I noticed a few things that made me want to delete feeds from my list immediately.

Here’s my list of things your feed should have:

1. A title. For some reason, there are a bunch of untitled feeds. The <link> tag has a title attribute, and I’m pretty sure that if you leave it blank, most readers will pick up the site’s <title> tag.
2. The full post. I don’t know if it’s intentional or just a default of some blog software. If you have a feed, I recommend putting the full post in it.
3. A recentish post. I know it’s hard to keep a blog up-to-date, but if you are going to add your site to a list, go put up a new post if your latest is very old. Even if it’s just a short intro and a few links to your best posts.
4. Not too many posts. I possibly post too much, but there were a few blogs with several posts each day. They were short posts, but I still found that they dominated my unread list too much, so I ended up deleting them.

There were other reasons I deleted blogs, but most of them had to do with the general topics of the blog, which were just not interesting to me personally.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the tools and materials of writing and concluded that using clauses to make interesting, well-ordered, complex sentences was a core skill.

I got this idea from David Lambuth’s book, The Golden Book on Writing. This is a book a lot like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Like Strunk, he was an Ivy League University English professor and turned his class notes into a pamphlet sized book.

Here’s another gem from the book:

Write down your idea as you would in speech, swiftly and un-selfconsciously without stopping to think about the form of it at all. Revise it afterwards.

I can’t easily write “as you would in speech”, so I’ve been trying to learn by speaking my writing. To be fair, extemporaneous speaking is also difficult, but it does feel like something that I can improve with practice. I talked more about the details in Write While True Episode 20: Extemporaneous Writing.

I sketch—mostly with pencil and charcoal on paper. To do that, I have had to become proficient with the physical nature of the drawing tools and the paper. Over time, I have become better at manipulating them because I do a lot of drawing.

When I was learning programming, I Didn’t Have a Disk Drive, so every day I started by typing in my program from the day before and then I added to it. In that time, I became proficient with the tools of programming—the typing, the code editing.

I was trying to think of what the equivalent was for writing. Typing is certainly part of modern writing. I think it’s good that I’m a fast and accurate typist. But, text editing is very easy compared to code editing.

After thinking about it for a bit, I think a basic part of writing is sentence construction. Sentences are the things you build paragraphs from. And you use paragraphs to build bigger works. Sentences are like marks on a sketch—a basic building block.

If manipulating a piece of charcoal on paper in different ways is the way to practice making marks. What is the thing I could do to practice making sentences?

I have a clue from David Lambuth’s Golden Book on Writing:

Complex sentences alone make possible that careful indication of the importance of one idea over another and that sense of the interrelation of ideas which is essential to accurate thinking.

Not until you have learned to select almost unconsciously the central, dominating thought of your sentence, and to group around this in varying degrees of emphasis the secondary or modifying thoughts, have you learned to think clearly.

The tool you are learning to manipulate is clauses. Simple sentences are simple. A complex sentence, however, is made up of clauses that are used give nuance to a complex thought, which you express by ordering them.