let me start by writing down true things that no one else knows

[aryanhwy]

Today I wrote a chapter where I had the skeleton but not the words. "still need more words here", my PDF says in read, and a few paragraphs later "more words here", and 1/3 of a page later, "words", and in the next line "words

Comments

[madbaker]

George "Kill 'em All" RR Martin once used the metaphor of two kinds of writing styles: gardeners and architects. Architects build foundations before they start constructing. Gardeners plant scenes and ideas, and are sometimes surprised by what comes from that. One is not better than the other; it's whichever works for you (and in what combination).

It's a simplification of course, but I've found it an interesting discussion point with authors as to where they fall on the spectrum.

[aryanhwy]

Among NaNoWriMo people, the two types are called "planners" (obvious) and "pantsers" (because they fly by the seats of their pants). I've always been one of the later, even when writing academically (I still don't exactly know how I managed to complete a dissertation). I find a text or a topic that looks interesting, and I start writing with the assumption that along the way I'll figure out what it is I want to say.

But a 15 page paper and a 90,000 word book can't quite be done the same way...

[hudebnik]

When I was writing a computer programming textbook, I had all the major ideas clear early on, but spent a lot of time reordering them according to "what's the least you need to know in order to do X?" I ended up, rather surprisingly, with a textbook in which arithmetic doesn't show up until chapter 7. Which made sense for my audience: I had a bunch of mathophobic students who were taking a single computer science course so they wouldn't have to take math, and naturally they equated "math" with arithmetic. So we started with graphics and discussed variables and functions and function composition (what I would call "math"), then event-driven GUI programming, passing functions as arguments to other functions, before ever using an arithmetic operator (by which time we were usually past the "drop" deadline for the semester :-) ).

[aryanhwy]

I'm currently working on converting a couple of years' worth of lecture notes into a coherent textbook. I'm using the two classes I'm teaching this year as a means of figuring out what to put in where. For example, one class is working through material mostly from chapters 8 and 9, but last week I went and added a section on "hey, you've probably never seen set theoretic notation before, here it is" to the introduction for them.