Writing, Briefly An Article by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it; start writing when you think of the first sentence; write about stuff you like; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it. v0.crapThe situation talks back writing
Writing and Speaking An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better. writingspeechcommunicationpractice
Write Simply An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. Several Short Sentences About Writing writing
The Age of the Essay An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com EssayerExpressing ideas helps to form themFlow interesting (The Meander) Follow the brushThe Anxiety of Sequence writing
Early work An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do. The right way to deal with new ideasFocus on the rate of change creativityskillideas
What doesn't seem like work? An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do. So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you? workinterestlife
The Top Idea in Your Mind An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind. ideas
Cities and Ambition An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com Boston says you should be smarterFlorence and MilanA city speaks to you mostly by accidentCity messages citiesambition
Taste for Makers An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff? You feel this when you start to design thingsGood design is simpleGood design is timelessGood design is often slightly funnyGood design is hard, but looks easy+3 More Beauty in flight beautytastedesign
Good and bad procrastination An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com The absent-minded professorYou can't look a big problem too directly in the eye
The still life effect A Fragment by Paul Graham paulgraham.com If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late. ideasart
How to do what you love An Essay by Paul Graham paulgraham.com To do something well you have to like itWow, that's pretty coolPrestige is just fossilized inspirationAlways produce worklife
Hackers and Painters An Essay by Paul Graham www.paulgraham.com A great painting has to be better than it has to be
Designer + Developer Workflow An Article by Dan Mall danmall.me The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy. The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this: “Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.” Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us? collaborationmakingholismadvertisingcreativity