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
Why Sketch? An Essay from Field Notes on Science and Nature by Jenny Keller What you have observed closelyA single imageParallel refinementColor reproductionThe negative spaces+4 More Conversational drawingThe Beauty of the Overlooked
What you have observed closely Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not. drawingdetailsseeing
A single image Scientific illustrations can achieve certain things that photographs cannot. A good illustration can portray difficult-to-photograph or rarely witnessed events. It can incorporate everything that’s important into one single image or show a special view of a subject. It would be next to impossible to observe, in nature, a dozen different aquatic species in their natural habitat, posing perfectly together and all in focus at one time—but such a scene can easily come to life in an illustration. notetaking
Parallel refinement My studies of live animals usually begin with a series of quick drawings, all on a single page. When the subject changes position—which it pretty much always does—I abandon the first sketch and start a new one. Continuing on in this way, the page fills with mostly unfinished squiggles until the animal eventually resumes one of its earlier poses. If that happens, I add as much detail or refinement to one of the easier sketches as I can. While this is all going on, I also jot down written notes that help explain what I observed and what seemed significant.
Color reproduction In-person, live observation of color is a practice for which I feel there is no adequate substitute. Photographs are often imprecise in reproducing color. perception
The negative spaces Focus on the negative spaces surrounding the object to give yourself a fresh perspective on the form. space
Hues subdued Colors in nature are, in general, more subdued than what comes directly from the pencil or the tube of paint. Greens, especially, tend to be a lot browner than we expect. The palette of natureColors in nature color
Unfinished Leave the drawing unfinished. Record as much information as you need, but don’t draw any forms, details, or colors that are merely repetitive. The back and front of a representative flower on a plant, for example, or half of a bilaterally symmetrical animal may be all that’s necessary. research