What Are Some Tips for Advanced Writers — Venkatesh Rao

By Venkatesh Rao · Ribbonfarm Quora Archive · June 15, 2011 · View original ↗

Saved from @nosilverv’s recommendation: “This is possibly my fave thing Venkatesh Rao has written.” The full article is captured in wiki/attachments/what-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writers-venkatesh-rao/.

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Summary

Rao’s central framework: writers vs. thinkers. Most people are one or the other — thinkers use writing as a means to organize thought; writers treat the writing itself as the end. To advance, you must choose which you are and develop accordingly. Rao is a thinker who can write well, but he will never have DFW-level grammatical precision.

How Good Are You? Self-assessment comes from your ability to rewrite. If you can’t sustain 4.5 hours of rewriting a 5,000-word passage, catching every marginal improvement, you can’t see the potential in your own work. Readers’ comments (“your writing is popular”) don’t measure your skill — they measure popularity of ideas.

Counting to 10,000 Hours — and counting the right hours. “Rewrite” is the magic word. Ordinary writing practice counts; rewriting counts more. The HUGE difference between everyday writing and serious writing is what proportion is rewriting: 10–20% for non-writers, 50–90% for serious writers. Rao estimates 75% of his blog writing is rewriting. For serious writers, it’s 50–90% depending on how critical the piece is.

Two types of rewrites:

1. Rewrites that make you a better thinker — clarifying ideas, compressing, sharpening logic
2. Rewrites that make you a better writer — semantic precision, grammatical precision, word choice, sentence structure

Semantic precision is the harder skill: matching a word exactly to the idea, not just approximately. Rao has high semantic precision but average grammatical precision. Great writers (Shakespeare, DFW, Joyce) have both.

Writers vs. thinkers distinction — J.K. Rowling is a writing-first fiction writer; Wallace was a writing-first non-fiction writer. Rao is a thinking-first non-fiction writer. Shakespeare is the ultimate writing-first example. The fiction/non-fiction divide matters less than the writing-first/thinking-first divide.

Connections

• Venkatesh Rao — the author; Ribbonfarm founder; this is the piece @nosilverv calls his best writing on writing itself
• Writing — the core subject; Rao’s framework of writers vs. thinkers maps onto how Kyle thinks about essay craft