emilygould:

The Saddest Shelf In The Library

Fuck that! "Philip and Alex's Guide To Web Publishing" changed my life. You can read it here, though it's been heavily revised since the original (per Philip Greenpun's very practical philosophy of what a book should be), so anyone with a library this cool should check out a copy (and then somehow transport yourself to 1998, if at all possible, for context).

In all seriousness, Greenspun set a bar and a vision for long-form web writing that has been sadly marginalized. There's something very touching, 13 years on, about the "Philip and Alex's" chapters in which he argues for the web as an accessible form of education. This is a book that can remind those of us writing online what the hell we're working toward.  

It's because editing prose involves so much time judging your work, I decided.

In programming, you typically judge your work in a fraction of a second. Your code compiles or it doesn't. Your Web app feature works or it fails. Sure, you'll spend long frustrating stretches debugging the code. But even then your head stays in a creative place. You literally have to hunt for flaws in your work, and so the act of debugging becomes a process basically identical to that of programming - imagine a solution to the problem, write/edit some code to test your theory, run the code, observe results. It's just more creation.

In writing prose, you judge your work by reading it. This takes minutes or hours for a longer work rather than milliseconds. Minutes or hours of finding flaws, many entirely subjective, in your own writing. The deleterious effect on your mood is predictable, if sometimes subtle.

This repeated switch in mental modes is inefficient and unpleasant, which is why many writers prefer pounding out a first draft without doing any self editing, and even without using notes. Of course they eventually have to surrender to the editing process, and to the ping-pong of mental state changes. This draining back and forth is largely absent from the process of programming, save for those rare hero coders who carefully re-read and refactor their working software so it can be more easily understood and modified by other people. But that's an optional and very occasional process -- not, as with writing, one integral to the process of creation itself.

The only consolation is that the writer will never, like the programmer, spend days or weeks trying to fix a single mysterious bug. Unlike, say, C, the English language is mushy enough that some things can, in the end, be fudged.