> something worth [improving].

I used this to write my first book and it took 48 hours. And then I spent months editing it before I published it.

(Also, there's a difference between editing and rewriting.)

My advice to Patrick would not be to change his style, which is clearly very effective, but to also throw some shorter update emails into the mix so people can keep tabs with less of a time investment if they so choose.

It’s a relief to read this. I’ve written about 135k words an only managed to edit about 15k so far.

The final version should be much more grammatically correct and clear. My goal today was to see what people thought about the general content.

Case in point: I only reached this concise comment after drafting two other, much longer versions of it.

> What if they just "edit" the current book with 100% new contents? Or 50%? Where does editing end and writing begin?

What percentage are they suggesting changing here? Do you think it's 0.1% — 60 words out of 60,000? 0.5%, that would be 300. 1% would be 600 words, that seems unlikely.

No. They are supposed to distill, crystallize, and intensify it.

> That's what mine do. Do you have any tips for that?

You may be editing by imagining a hostile reader. That tends to force you to be defensive, remove things that are potentially disagreeable, add lots of hedges, etc. All of that waters it down.

Some amount of that can be important — accuracy matters and it's good to address the questions and concerns likely to come to the reader's mind. But I think it's still important to presume a good faith, charitable reader, and write for them.

> Edit: Why's poignant guide to ruby would be hard to rewrite imho, I'm guessing it would be hard for him to rewrite too.

It's a common mistake to assume that writing that reads as effortless and spontaneous was written that way. I don't know about _why, but many writers whose writing is noted for flowing naturally get there by painstakingly honing and refining those words over innumerable drafts.

It takes a lot of work to make it look easy.

I think if you take a step back from your screen and look at the visual shape of what you just wrote, and the visual shape of the original story text, you can see how confusing the original looked just from that.

Did you write the first text in a hurry? With big things like announcing to HN, I would write one day, get friends to give brutal criticism, then submit the next day.

True. But beyond a couple rounds of self-editing, it becomes extremely hard to do it right.

> Do I really need to be more specific?

Yep. HN is a whole bunch of people around the world. Look at what PG does before publishing an essay: 3-6 people whom he knows personally review them.

May I ask about editing: how long would you spend editing something like that blog post? What's your editing process? How do you know when you are finished editing? Do you edit as a soon as you have finished writing, do you edit the same day? or a few days later?

one observation: PG does plenty of local edits (reworking over and over one sentence), but not so much changing the order of sentences, or moving paragraphs around -- these are the things that I have always been told (such as in college writing workshops) I should be doing. maybe such "macro" edits are not needed in such a short piece. and truth be told I never found much need for them either, even for pieces that are quite long.

Yeah, I’m finding it very difficult to decide what to keep, what to rip out entirely, what to rewrite.

I blew way past my 75k word target to about 98k words now, and still feel like there’s a bunch more I need to add.

FYI, I’ve found Hugh Howey’s four-part Writing Insights columns on his blog from last year very useful, helped me get thru my draft.

But I’m finding it hard to take his preferred approach to editing of rewriting scenes from scratch instead of altering or spot-editing them. I took a stab at rewriting one of my earlier chapters, now that I know what happens later on, but don’t feel the new version was substantially improved to warrant all the effort.

I think the hardest part for me is killing my darlings, and ripping out the big chunks that I feel are essential.

But I know I need to slog through and get to some point where I can stop picking at it and send out to some alpha readers, then consider actual editors.

I’m still not sure yet if I’ll self-publish or go the traditional route.

Good luck!