Whatever amount of time I may think it will take to write a certain blog post…
…I probably should just triple it and I’ll be closer to the mark.
To take one example, here’s the post I wrote earlier today. It was based on a little article that caught my eye in the Guardian, about an expedition to explore the flooded lands that used to connect the British Isles to the mainland of Europe.
Pretty straightforward. Not too long. Do an intro, then a few quotes, a concluding paragraph, and voila! Done.
But as so often happens, that’s not how it went. As Frost said—“knowing how way leads on to way…”—one thought leads to another thought and some more research, which takes more time. And that leads to another thought that I hadn’t anticipated when I had the concept for the post, which leads to more research and more time. And then to a post that’s substantially different from the one I’d originally envisioned, and I hope more interesting.
I’m not complaining. That’s the way my mind works anyway, whether I blog or don’t blog. A regular Garden of Forking Paths (oh no neo, don’t turn this into a post on Borges!). But it does mean that, whatever amount of time I budget for writing, I’m usually underestimating.
I find sometimes I encounter diminishing returns the more time I spend on a project. Sometimes the more time the more convoluted things get. Been instances where I feel I didn’t fully put the time in on something and then when I look back on it I see it was good despite the time.
Griffin:
Are you trying to tell me something about my own writing 🙂 ?
Neo,
I would never do such a thing!
Argghh! Neo, the same thing happens to me when I start out to write a simple 2-line comment, and an hour and a half later I quit trawling the cyberstacks onaccounta the internal RAM is so stuffed the internal CPU can’t process the data therein. (And still it remains to write the comment!)
Sympathies, indeed. OTOH, what are we bibliophiles and interest-driven OCD curiosity-cats to do?
Thomas Jefferson once apologized for a letter’s length and said he had not had time to make it shorter,
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
–Douglas Hofstadter
Yay! My semester ended last Friday.
That’s the “good” thing about schedules/deadlines. Those take as long as long you expect because someone else is holding the gun to your head.
The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline.
–Chris Baty, “No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days”
Baty started “National Novel Writing Month” AKA NaNoWriMo back in 1999. It’s been a yearly thing since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Novel_Writing_Month
Wiki says some 400 NaNoWriMo novels were eventually published by traditional publishing houses.
NaNoWriMo rules require one to produce 50,000 words in the month of November for whatever one calls a novel. That’s 1667 words a day. Well, Ray Bradbury said he wrote a 1000 words a day as his discipline.
NaNoWriMo provides a website for uploading one’s daily words. The website is also a blogging community for participants. One “wins” a jpg certificate for successful completion.
I gave it a bash back in 2008 but found it hard to keep up that pace and remain comprehensible. So I called my work experimental and never looked back.
I appreciate it when it happens. I tend to do the same thing (but not blog about it) and I end up with information I consider valuable – thanks for you efforts!! – but usually no where to use it.
I ended up going more indepth than you offered because there are two ‘outflows’ that I would REALLY like to know more about (the Central American and the tip of the South America) because THOSE would surely have been mammoth events drastically changing the entire Atlantic and its Rim.
huxley,
I just saw a film called “Genius.” It seems to be a biopic about Thomas Wolfe, but it’s really more of a biopic of his editor Max Perkins. Perkins was also the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to the film, Wolfe was a prodigious writer (5,000 words a day was mentioned) whereas Fitzgerald’s writings were quite slow. Sounded like there was something of a love/hate relationship between the two authors.
Neo- If Hofstadter’s Law doesn’t do it for you, try this. For any task, estimate the time you think it will take. Then double it. And then .. raise it to the next higher unit of measure.
Ex: Task estimated at 2 hours. Apply formula. True time consumed: 4 days.
It applies to most tasks, but I have to admit to never having it applied to blog posts, but for home and equipment repair it has proven depressingly accurate.
Love the allusion to Borges!
Julie near Chicago on May 14, 2019 at 5:31 pm at 5:31 pm said:
Argghh! Neo, the same thing happens to me when I start out to write a simple 2-line comment, and an hour and a half later I quit trawling the cyberstacks
* * *
So, I set out a couple of hours ago to investigate Doggerland, and just got back…
Mike K on May 14, 2019 at 5:37 pm at 5:37 pm said:
Thomas Jefferson once apologized for a letter’s length and said he had not had time to make it shorter,
* * *
AesopSpouse’s Rule of Speech Writing:
If you give me 2 weeks notice, I can do a 20 minute speech on the topic; if you give me one week, it will last forty minutes; if you call me the night before, be ready to sit for two hours.
Mike on May 14, 2019 at 8:59 pm at 8:59 pm said:
Neo- If Hofstadter’s Law doesn’t do it for you, try this. …
It applies to most tasks, but I have to admit to never having it applied to blog posts, but for home and equipment repair it has proven depressingly accurate.
* * *
Every 15 minute plumbing job will take 2 hours and 3 trips to the hardware store.
For software projects, the first 90% of the job will take 90% of the estimated time; the remaining 10% of the job will take another 90% of the time.
Aesop — Your last — Ain’t it de troof! LOLOLOL
Yes on the software — virtually all software is “shipped” with some known “bugs”. Usually with the plan to fix them later, being listed … on the bug list.
Neo, your work is HUGELY appreciated, because it’s interesting and NOT so extensive. (Artfldgr comments are too often too long). Yet also not too short, like merely an Instapundit link (Glenn’s site is great for headlines; better than most news).
I’ve been trying to blog / keep track of comments on this and other blogs — but just that, plus any editing or link checking, and it takes hours. 15 min comment, 2 hrs to copy that comment into a blog post.
I’m happy to be here reading you; much easier than writing me, and almost as interesting (to me).
Personally, I don’t mind long comments, including artfldgr’s; if they become uninteresting to me, I just move on to the next one. Sometimes it takes some real estate to develop a thought properly, and sometimes as we’re writing, other, related, thoughts strike us and seem important to make; and sometimes these do elucidate important points even when they may seem not directly O/T.
So, my own 2¢.
I like the breadth and depth of Neo’s interests, and how they get developed further in comments. It’s like having a watercooler conversation at a convocation of colleges, where everyone has been hanging out in different lectures and also has their own research and experiences to draw on.
“That’s the way my mind works anyway, whether I blog or don’t blog. A regular Garden of Forking Paths (oh no neo, don’t turn this into a post on Borges!).”
Well…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToRkA_WbpkA