Today’s post will be a reflection on the writing that I’ve done this month, which will hopefully help me to continue full throttle through the rest of November.

Record ideas when you get them. I mentioned this in my previous post but this month it really came in handy. By keeping even a very brief list of things I’d like to write about, I was able to spend less time sitting at my keyboard thinking “what should I write” and more time actually writing it. Even just a bit of brainstorming while waiting for buses recorded into a text file on my MacBook managed to yield a couple of ideas to expand on which turned into full posts.

Write it, rewrite it, and then write it all again. I found that I would write one draft and then scan over it, trying to find ways to rewrite it to be more fluid. It really has to happen in that order because without the first draft, I don’t have the full picture of what I’m trying to express. Once I have that, I can work on ways to express the same thing but better. Even if I scrapped the entirety of what I was working on, the thoughts I had while writing it would still stay with me for attempt #2 (or 3, or 4).

Telling a story is important. Even in cases where it seems like there isn’t a story to tell, you can probably find a related one to tell. When I wrote my recent article on RSpec matchers, I added something to my usual approach to technical writing: I tied the subject to something that I’d experienced and told the story of how I was introduced to it. For my reviews, the synopsis section has been excellent practice for conveying a lot of story in very few words. I think all of these exercises have greatly improved my writing. They give it a certain colour that my previous writing just didn’t have.

Ideas beget ideas. It’s interesting how I would always complain that I didn’t know what to write about but when I committed myself to writing something every day, I started to come up with more things to write about. If you’ve ever wanted to blog but think “I don’t know what to write about,” it might help if you just start writing. When explored, ideas often lead to other ideas; you just need to get the ball rolling.

I don’t think any of this is particularly new. November is very likely filled with blog posts giving all sorts of advice about writing. But perhaps the best lessons are still those that we learn for ourselves. Some things are best learned by doing, especially crafts that require practice to make perfect (or close enough, anyway). What has your writing taught you about yourself and about the art of writing?

RAM holds the current information that a program is working with, but it doesn’t hold on to it forever. Once the program has exited, the RAM it was using is (ideally) reclaimed by the operating system for use by other programs. If a program needs to keep information for the next time it executes, it will get written to the hard drive or to another form of persistence.

I imagine short-term memory as being very similar to RAM. The thoughts are in your head, but they aren’t going to stay there forever. Even long-term memory is not entirely reliable; the act of recalling something changes it slightly. So if our memory isn’t the best place to keep ideas for later, where should we keep them? In writing.

The act of reading words doesn’t change them. The letters which were printed may become illegible but they will never change. The information that those written words encode persists, and is the same every time you read it. The written word is how we have aggregated the collective information of our entire species with the accuracy and efficiency that we needed to make our social and technological advances.

One of my goals for 2010 is to write more things down and stop trying to keep so much in my head.

I’ll close this brief thought by quoting a blog post I read recently about writing:

The amount of information our brains can fit into our short term memory at once isn’t a lot. If you never have thoughts that require notes, then all your thoughts are small or unoriginal enough to fit into your tiny short term memory.

Writing allows you to record your short term memory into a format that you can examine and reflect upon, so you can suss out what makes sense, and how it makes sense, and then expand on the original seed. When you expand your thought all the way into a piece of coherent writing, it becomes complete. It would have been impossible for you to have that size of a thought without writing–your brain just isn’t powerful enough.