- 作者：保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）
- 来源：博客链接
最好的文章
2024 年 3 月
尽管标题如此，这并不是为了成为最好的文章。我的目标是弄清楚最好的文章会是什么样子。
它会写得很好，但你可以就任何话题写得很好。使它与众不同的将是它的内容。
显然，有些话题会比其他话题更好。它可能不会是关于今年的口红颜色。但它也不会是关于崇高主题的空谈。一篇好的文章必须令人惊讶。它必须告诉人们一些他们还不知道的事情。
最好的文章将是关于你可以告诉人们一些令人惊讶的最重要的话题。
这听起来可能很明显，但它有一些意想不到的结果。其中之一是科学像一头大象踏入一艘划艇一样进入画面。例如，达尔文在 1844 年写的一篇文章中首次描述了自然选择的想法。谈论一个你可以告诉人们一些令人惊讶的重要话题。如果这是对一篇伟大文章的考验，这无疑是 1844 年写得最好的文章。而且，在任何给定的时间，最好的文章通常是描述最重要的科学或技术发现的文章。 [1]
另一个意想不到的结果是：当我开始写这篇文章时，我想象中最好的文章将是相当永恒的——1844 年你能写的最好的文章与你现在能写的最好的文章大致相同。但事实上，情况似乎恰恰相反。最好的绘画在这个意义上可能是永恒的，这是正确的。但现在写一篇介绍自然选择的文章并不会令人印象深刻。现在最好的文章将是描述一个我们还不知道的伟大发现的文章。
如果如何写出最好的文章的问题可以归结为如何做出伟大发现的问题，那么我一开始就问错了问题。也许这项练习表明我们不应该把时间浪费在写文章上，而应该专注于在某个特定领域做出发现。但我对文章以及可以用它们做什么感兴趣，所以我想看看是否还有其他问题我可以问。
有的，而且从表面上看，它似乎与我开始的问题几乎相同。我应该问的不是最好的文章是什么？而是你如何写好文章？虽然这似乎只是措辞上的不同，但它们的答案却大相径庭。正如我们所见，第一个问题的答案实际上与文章写作无关。第二个问题迫使它成为。
写文章，在最好的情况下，是一种发现思想的方式。你如何把它做好？你如何通过写作来发现？
一篇文章通常应该从我所说的“问题”开始，尽管我指的是一个非常笼统的意义：它不一定是语法上的问题，只是在某种意义上起到激发某种回应的作用。
你如何得到这个最初的问题？随意选择一些听起来很重要的话题并开始讨论可能行不通。专业交易员甚至不会进行交易，除非他们拥有他们所谓的“优势”——一个令人信服的故事，说明为什么在某些类型的交易中他们会赢多于输。同样，你不应该攻击一个话题，除非你有办法进入——对它有一些新的见解或处理它的方法。
你不需要有一个完整的论点；你只需要某种你可以探索的空白。事实上，仅仅对其他人认为理所当然的事情提出疑问就足以成为优势。
如果你遇到一个足够令人困惑的问题，即使它看起来不是很重要，也可能值得探索。许多重要的发现都是通过拉动一条起初看起来微不足道的线索而做出的。它们怎么可能都是雀鸟？ [2]
一旦你有了问题，然后呢？你开始大声思考它。不是真的大声，而是你致力于用特定的词串来回应，就像你说话一样。这种最初的回应通常是错误的或不完整的。写作将你的想法从模糊变为糟糕。但这是向前迈进的一步，因为一旦你看到了缺陷，你就可以修复它。
也许初学者会因为想到从错误或不完整的东西开始而感到惊慌，但你不应该这样，因为这就是文章写作有效的原因。强迫自己致力于某些特定的词串会给你一个起点，如果它是错误的，当你重读它时你就会看到。至少一半的文章写作是重读你写的东西并问这是正确的和完整的吗？重读时你必须非常严格，这不仅是因为你想保持诚实，还因为你的回应和真相之间的差距通常是新思想有待发现的迹象。
对你写的东西严格要求的奖励不仅仅是改进。当你采用一个大致正确的答案并试图使其完全正确时，有时你会发现你做不到，原因是你在依赖一个错误的假设。当你丢弃它时，答案结果完全不同。 [3]
理想情况下，对问题的回应有两件事：收敛于真相的过程中的第一步，以及其他问题的来源（在我非常笼统的意义上）。因此，该过程递归地继续，因为响应会刺激响应。 [4]
通常，对一个问题有几种可能的回答，这意味着你在遍历一棵树。但文章是线性的，而不是树形的，这意味着你必须在每个点选择一个分支来跟随。你如何选择？通常，你应该遵循提供最大通用性和新颖性组合的分支。我没有有意识地以这种方式对分支进行排名；我只是遵循任何看起来最令人兴奋的分支；但通用性和新颖性使一个分支令人兴奋。 [5]
如果你愿意进行大量重写，你不必猜对。你可以沿着一个分支走，看看结果如何，如果它不够好，就把它切掉并回溯。我一直在这样做。在这篇文章中，除了无数较短的子树之外，我已经砍掉了一个 17 段的子树。也许我会把它重新连接到末尾，或者把它归结为一个脚注，或者把它分离成它自己的文章；我们拭目以待。 [6]
一般来说，你要快速切割。在写作（以及软件和绘画）中最危险的诱惑之一是保留一些不正确的东西，仅仅因为它包含一些好的部分或花费了你大量的精力。
此时抛出的最令人惊讶的新问题是，最初的问题真的重要吗？如果思想空间高度连接，它就不应该，因为你应该能够在几次跳跃中从任何问题到达最有价值的问题。我们看到证据表明它是高度连接的，例如，那些痴迷于某个话题的人可以把任何对话都转向它。但这只有在你不知道要去哪里时才有效，而在一篇文章中你不知道。这就是重点。你不想成为一个强迫症的健谈者，否则你所有的文章都将是关于同一件事的。 [7]
最初问题重要的另一个原因是，你通常会感到有义务坚持下去。当我决定要遵循哪个分支时，我没有考虑这一点。我只是遵循新颖性和通用性。坚持问题是在后来才被强制执行的，当我注意到我偏离得太远而不得不回溯时。但我认为这是最佳解决方案。你不希望对新颖性和通用性的追求在当时受到限制。顺其自然，看看你得到了什么。 [8]
由于最初的问题确实会限制你，在最好的情况下，它会为你将要写的文章的质量设定一个上限。如果你在最初问题之后的思路链上做得尽可能好，那么最初问题本身就是唯一存在变化空间的地方。
不过，让这让你过于保守将是一个错误，因为你无法预测一个问题会引向何处。如果你做对了，你就不会，因为做对意味着做出发现，根据定义，你无法预测这些发现。因此，应对这种情况的方法不是谨慎地选择你选择的最初问题，而是写大量的文章。文章是为了冒险。
几乎任何问题都可以让你写出一篇好文章。事实上，在第三段中想出一个足够没有希望的话题需要一些努力，因为任何文章作者在听到最好的文章不能是关于 x 的时候的第一个冲动是尝试写它。但是，如果大多数问题都能产生好文章，那么只有一些问题才能产生伟大的文章。
我们能否预测哪些问题会产生伟大的文章？考虑到我写文章的时间，令人震惊的是这个问题感觉有多新颖。
我喜欢最初问题中的一件事是离谱。我喜欢那些在某种程度上看起来很顽皮的问题——例如，通过看起来违反直觉或过于雄心勃勃或异端邪说。理想情况下，这三者兼而有之。这篇文章就是一个例子。写关于最好的文章意味着有这样的东西，伪知识分子会认为这是一种简化，尽管这必然源于一篇文章比另一篇文章更好的可能性。思考如何做如此雄心勃勃的事情已经足够接近做这件事了，以至于它会吸引你的注意力。
我喜欢以眼中闪烁的光芒开始一篇文章。这可能只是我的品味，但其中有一个方面可能不是：要就某个主题写出一篇真正好的文章，你必须对它感兴趣。一个好的作家可以写好任何事情，但要努力争取作为文章存在理由的新颖见解，你必须关心。
如果关心它是好初始问题的标准之一，那么最佳问题因人而异。这也意味着如果你关心很多不同的事情，你更有可能写出伟大的文章。你越好奇，你所好奇的事情和你所好奇的话题之间产生伟大文章的可能性就越大。
一个伟大的初始问题还应该具备哪些其他品质？如果它在许多不同领域都有影响，那可能是一件好事。而且我发现这是一个好兆头，如果它是人们认为已经被彻底探索过的问题。但事实是，我几乎没有考虑过如何选择初始问题，因为我很少这样做。我很少选择写什么；我只是开始思考一些事情，有时它会变成一篇文章。
我是否要停止写关于我碰巧在想什么的任何文章，而是开始系统地生成的主题列表？这听起来不太有趣。然而，我想写出好的文章，如果初始问题很重要，我应该关心它。
也许答案是更早一步：写下你脑海中浮现的任何东西，但要努力确保你脑海中浮现的东西是好的。事实上，现在我想起来了，这必须是答案，因为仅仅一个主题列表是没有用的，如果你对其中任何一个都没有优势。要开始写一篇文章，你需要一个主题以及对它的一些初步见解，你不能系统地生成这些见解。如果只是。 [9]
不过，你可能会让自己拥有更多。从你脑海中涌现出的想法的质量取决于进入的内容，你可以在两个维度上改进它，广度和深度。
你不可能学习所有东西，所以获得广度意味着学习彼此非常不同的主题。当我告诉人们我到 Hay 的购书之旅时，他们问我买了什么书，我通常会感到有点不好意思回答，因为这些主题似乎是一份不相关主题的清单。但也许这实际上是这个行业中最好的。
你也可以通过与人交谈、做事和建造东西以及去地方和看东西来获得想法。我不认为与新人交谈很重要，与那些让你产生新想法的人交谈才重要。在与罗伯特·莫里斯交谈一下午后，我比与 20 个聪明的新人交谈获得了更多的新想法。我知道，因为这就是 Y Combinator 的一系列办公时间所包含的内容。
虽然广度来自阅读、交谈和观察，但深度来自实践。真正学习某个领域的唯一方法是必须解决其中的问题。虽然这可以采取写作的形式，但我怀疑要成为一名优秀的散文家，你还必须做或已经做过其他类型的工作。这对于大多数其他领域可能并非如此，但散文写作是不同的。你可以将一半的时间花在做其他事情上，并保持净领先，只要它很难。
我不是把它当作一个食谱，而是对那些已经在做这件事的人的鼓励。如果你到目前为止一生都在做其他事情，你已经成功了一半。当然，要擅长写作，你必须喜欢它，如果你喜欢写作，你可能至少花了一些时间去做它。
我所说的关于初始问题的一切也适用于你在写文章时遇到的问题。它们是一样的；一篇文章的每个子树通常都是一篇较短的文章，就像考尔德手机的每个子树都是一个较小的手机一样。因此，任何能让你获得好的初始问题的技术也能让你获得好的整篇文章。
在某个时候，问题和回答的循环达到了一个感觉像是自然结束的状态。这有点可疑；难道每个答案不都应该提出更多的问题吗？我认为发生的情况是，你开始感到满足。一旦你覆盖了足够多的有趣领域，你就会开始失去对新问题的胃口。这也很好，因为读者可能也感到满足了。停止提问并不是懒惰，因为你可以改为问一篇新文章的初始问题。
这是思想连接性的最终阻力来源：你一路上所做的发现。如果你从问题 A 开始发现足够多，你将永远无法到达问题 B。尽管如果你继续写文章，你将通过燃烧这些发现来逐渐解决这个问题。所以奇怪的是，写大量的文章使得思想空间似乎更加高度连接。
当一个子树结束时，你可以做两件事中的一件。你可以停止，或者通过回到你之前跳过的问题来使用立体主义技巧将单独的子树首尾相连。通常，此时需要一些技巧才能使文章流畅地流动，但这次不需要。这次我实际上需要一个现象的例子。例如，我们早些时候发现，最好的文章通常不会像最好的绘画那样永恒。这似乎足够令人惊讶，值得进一步调查。
文章可以在两种意义上永恒：关于一个具有永久重要性的问题，并且始终对读者产生相同的影响。对于艺术来说，这两种意义融合在一起。对古希腊人来说看起来很美的艺术对我们来说仍然看起来很美。但对于文章来说，这两种意义是不同的，因为文章是教导，你不能教人们他们已经知道的东西。自然选择当然是一个具有永久重要性的问题，但解释它的文章不可能对我们产生与它对达尔文同时代人相同的影响，正是因为他的想法非常成功，以至于每个人都已经知道了。 [10]
当我开始写这篇文章时，我想象中最好的文章将在更严格、常青的意义上永恒：它将包含一些深刻、永恒的智慧，这些智慧将同样吸引亚里士多德和费曼。这似乎不对。但是，如果最好的文章通常不会在这种更严格的意义上永恒，那么写出这样的文章需要什么？
这个问题的答案结果非常奇怪：为了成为常青的永恒，一篇文章必须是无效的，从某种意义上说，它的发现没有被我们的共享文化所吸收。否则，对于第二代读者来说，它将没有任何新意。如果你想让读者不仅现在而且将来都感到惊讶，你必须写一些不会坚持下去的文章——无论它们有多好，都不会成为未来人们在阅读它们之前所学内容的一部分的文章。 [11]
我可以想象有几种方法可以做到这一点。一种是写人们从未学到的东西。例如，雄心勃勃的人追求各种类型的奖项，只是后来，也许为时已晚，才意识到其中一些并不像他们想象的那么有价值，这是一种长期存在的模式。如果你写下这一点，你可以确信会有一条未来读者不断涌现的传送带，让他们对此感到惊讶。
如果你写关于缺乏经验的人过度做事的倾向，例如年轻的工程师产生过于复杂的解决方案，也是如此。有些错误是人们只有犯了才会学会避免的。任何这些都应该是一个永恒的话题。
有时，当我们迟迟不能掌握某些东西时，这不仅仅是因为我们愚钝或否认，还因为我们被故意欺骗了。有很多事情成年人会欺骗孩子，当你成年后，他们不会把你拉到一边，递给你一份清单。他们不记得他们对你说了哪些谎言，而且大多数都是隐含的。因此，与这些谎言相矛盾将成为惊喜的来源，只要成年人继续说下去。
有时是系统对你撒谎。例如，大多数国家的教育系统训练你通过破解测试来获胜。但这不是你在最重要的现实世界测试中获胜的方式，经过几十年的训练，新到达现实世界的人很难掌握这一点。帮助他们克服这种制度谎言将奏效，只要这些机构仍然破败不堪。 [12]
永恒的另一个秘诀是写读者已经知道的事情，但要比通过文化传播的细节多得多。例如，“每个人都知道”有孩子可以得到回报。但在你拥有它们之前，你不知道它具体采取了什么形式，即使那时你所知道的很多东西你可能从未用语言表达出来。
我写过所有这些类型的话题。但我这样做并不是为了刻意尝试写出更严格意义上的永恒的文章。事实上，这取决于一个人的想法不坚持这一事实表明，刻意尝试是不值得的。你应该写关于具有永恒重要性的话题，是的，但如果你做得如此出色以至于你的结论坚持下去并且后代发现你的文章显而易见而不是新颖，那就更好了。你已经进入了达尔文的领地。
写关于具有永恒重要性的话题是更普遍的事情的一个例子，尽管：适用性的广度。而且广度的种类比时间上的更多——例如，适用于许多不同的领域。因此，广度是最终目标。
我已经瞄准了它。广度和新颖性是我一直在追求的两件事。但我很高兴我理解永恒性在哪里适合。
我现在更了解很多事情适合在哪里。这篇文章是文章写作的一种旅行。我开始希望获得有关主题的建议；如果你假设写作良好，那么区分最佳文章的唯一剩下的事情就是它的主题。我确实得到了关于主题的建议：发现自然选择。是的，那会很好。但是，当你退后一步，问你在没有做出像那样的伟大发现的情况下你能做的最好的事情是什么时，答案结果是关于程序的。最终，一篇文章的质量是其中发现的想法的函数，而你获得它们的方法是通过广泛地寻找问题，然后对答案非常严格。
这张文章写作地图最引人注目的特点是灵感和努力的交替条纹。问题取决于灵感，但答案可以通过纯粹的坚持来获得。你不必第一次就得到正确的答案，但没有理由最终不能得到正确的答案，因为你可以继续重写，直到你做到为止。这不仅仅是一种理论上的可能性。这是对我工作方式的非常准确的描述。我正在我们说话的时候重写。
尽管我希望我可以说写伟大的文章主要取决于努力，但在极限情况下，灵感才是最重要的。在极限情况下，问题是更难获得的东西。那个水池没有底。
如何获得更多的问题？这是最重要的一个问题。
注
[1] 可能会有一些阻力来反对这个结论，理由是其中一些发现只能被少数读者理解。但是，如果你想以这种理由取消文章的资格，你会遇到各种各样的困难。你如何决定截止点应该在哪里？如果一种病毒杀死了所有人，只剩下一小部分被隔离在洛斯阿拉莫斯的人，那么一篇原本被取消资格的文章现在可以获得资格吗？等等
达尔文 1844 年的文章源自 1839 年写的早期版本。它的摘录发表于 1858 年。
[2] 当你发现自己对一个明显的小问题非常好奇时，这是一个令人兴奋的迹象。进化已经设计成让你注意重要的事情。因此，当你对一些随机的事情非常好奇时，这可能意味着你已经无意识地注意到它比看起来更不随机。
[3] 推论：如果你在智力上不诚实，你的写作将不仅有偏见，而且无聊，因为你会错过所有如果你追求真理就会发现的想法。
[4] 有时这个过程在你开始写作之前就开始了。有时你已经弄清楚了你想说的前几件事。学童经常被教导他们应该决定他们想说的一切，并在开始写文章之前将其写下来作为大纲。也许这是让他们开始的好方法——或者不是，我不知道——但这与文章写作的精神背道而驰。你的大纲越详细，你的想法就越不能从文章所针对的那种发现中受益。
[5] 这种“贪婪”算法的问题在于你最终可能会达到局部最大值。如果最有价值的问题之前是一个无聊的问题，你就会忽略它。但我无法想象更好的策略。除非通过写作，否则没有前瞻。所以使用贪婪算法和大量时间。
[6] 我最终重新连接了 17 段中的前 5 段，并丢弃了其余的。
[7] 斯蒂芬·弗莱承认在牛津大学参加考试时利用了这种现象。在他的脑海中有一篇关于某个一般文学主题的标准文章，他会找到一种方法将考试问题转向它，然后只是重现它。
严格来说，高度连接的是想法图，而不是空间，但这种用法会混淆那些不懂图论的人，而那些懂图论的人会明白我的意思，如果我说“空间”。
[8] 太远不仅取决于与原始主题的距离。它更像是该距离除以我在子树中发现的任何东西的值。
[9] 还是可以？我应该尝试写下这一点。即使成功的机会很小，预期值也是巨大的。
[10] 20 世纪有一种流行的说法，即艺术的目的也是为了教导。一些艺术家试图通过解释他们的目标不是产生好的东西，而是挑战我们对艺术的先入之见来证明他们的作品是合理的。公平地说，艺术可以教一些东西。古希腊人的自然主义雕塑代表了一种新的想法，并且必须因此而对同时代人特别兴奋。但它们对我们来说仍然看起来不错。
[11] 伯特兰·罗素在 20 世纪初因其关于“试婚”的想法引起了巨大的争议。但它们现在读起来很无聊，因为它们占了上风。“试婚”就是我们所说的“约会”。
[12] 如果你 10 年前问我，我会预测学校将继续教授破解考试几个世纪。但现在看来，学生很快将由人工智能单独教授，考试将被持续、不可见的微评估所取代，这似乎是合理的。
感谢 Sam Altman、Trevor Blackwell、Jessica Livingston、Robert Morris、Courtenay Pipkin 和 Harj Taggar 阅读了这篇文章的草稿。
The Best Essay
March 2024
Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like.
It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about.
Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors. But it wouldn't be vaporous talk about elevated themes either. A good essay has to be surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know.
The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.
That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences. One is that science enters the picture like an elephant stepping into a rowboat. For example, Darwin first described the idea of natural selection in an essay written in 1844. Talk about an important topic you could tell people something surprising about. If that's the test of a great essay, this was surely the best one written in 1844. And indeed, the best possible essay at any given time would usually be one describing the most important scientific or technological discovery it was possible to make. [1]
Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing this that the best essay would be fairly timeless — that the best essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the best one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true. It might be true that the best painting would be timeless in this sense. But it wouldn't be impressive to write an essay introducing natural selection now. The best essay now would be one describing a great discovery we didn't yet know about.
If the question of how to write the best possible essay reduces to the question of how to make great discoveries, then I started with the wrong question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we shouldn't waste our time writing essays but instead focus on making discoveries in some specific domain. But I'm interested in essays and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there's some other question I could have asked.
There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.
Writing essays, at its best, is a way of discovering ideas. How do you do that well? How do you discover by writing?
An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like one in the sense that it spurs some response.
How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to choose some important-sounding topic at random and go at it. Professional traders won't even trade unless they have what they call an edge — a convincing story about why in some class of trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you shouldn't attack a topic unless you have a way in — some new insight about it or way of approaching it.
You don't need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind of gap you can explore. In fact, merely having questions about something other people take for granted can be edge enough.
If you come across a question that's sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn't seem very momentous. Many an important discovery has been made by pulling on a thread that seemed insignificant at first. How can they all be finches? [2]
Once you've got a question, then what? You start thinking out loud about it. Not literally out loud, but you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that's a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.
Perhaps beginning writers are alarmed at the thought of starting with something mistaken or incomplete, but you shouldn't be, because this is why essay writing works. Forcing yourself to commit to some specific string of words gives you a starting point, and if it's wrong, you'll see that when you reread it. At least half of essay writing is rereading what you've written and asking is this correct and complete? You have to be very strict when rereading, not just because you want to keep yourself honest, but because a gap between your response and the truth is often a sign of new ideas to be discovered.
The prize for being strict with what you've written is not just refinement. When you take a roughly correct answer and try to make it exactly right, sometimes you find that you can't, and that the reason is that you were depending on a false assumption. And when you discard it, the answer turns out to be completely different. [3]
Ideally the response to a question is two things: the first step in a process that converges on the truth, and a source of additional questions (in my very general sense of the word). So the process continues recursively, as response spurs response. [4]
Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which means you're traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped, which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point. How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don't consciously rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting; but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting. [5]
If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time. In this essay I've already cut a 17-paragraph subtree, in addition to countless shorter ones. Maybe I'll reattach it at the end, or boil it down to a footnote, or spin it off as its own essay; we'll see. [6]
In general you want to be quick to cut. One of the most dangerous temptations in writing (and in software and painting) is to keep something that isn't right, just because it contains a few good bits or cost you a lot of effort.
The most surprising new question being thrown off at this point is does it really matter what the initial question is? If the space of ideas is highly connected, it shouldn't, because you should be able to get from any question to the most valuable ones in a few hops. And we see evidence that it's highly connected in the way, for example, that people who are obsessed with some topic can turn any conversation toward it. But that only works if you know where you want to go, and you don't in an essay. That's the whole point. You don't want to be the obsessive conversationalist, or all your essays will be about the same thing. [7]
The other reason the initial question matters is that you usually feel somewhat obliged to stick to it. I don't think about this when I decide which branch to follow. I just follow novelty and generality. Sticking to the question is enforced later, when I notice I've wandered too far and have to backtrack. But I think this is the optimal solution. You don't want the hunt for novelty and generality to be constrained in the moment. Go with it and see what you get. [8]
Since the initial question does constrain you, in the best case it sets an upper bound on the quality of essay you'll write. If you do as well as you possibly can on the chain of thoughts that follow from the initial question, the initial question itself is the only place where there's room for variation.
It would be a mistake to let this make you too conservative though, because you can't predict where a question will lead. Not if you're doing things right, because doing things right means making discoveries, and by definition you can't predict those. So the way to respond to this situation is not to be cautious about which initial question you choose, but to write a lot of essays. Essays are for taking risks.
Almost any question can get you a good essay. Indeed, it took some effort to think of a sufficiently unpromising topic in the third paragraph, because any essayist's first impulse on hearing that the best essay couldn't be about x would be to try to write it. But if most questions yield good essays, only some yield great ones.
Can we predict which questions will yield great essays? Considering how long I've been writing essays, it's alarming how novel that question feels.
One thing I like in an initial question is outrageousness. I love questions that seem naughty in some way — for example, by seeming counterintuitive or overambitious or heterodox. Ideally all three. This essay is an example. Writing about the best essay implies there is such a thing, which pseudo-intellectuals will dismiss as reductive, though it follows necessarily from the possibility of one essay being better than another. And thinking about how to do something so ambitious is close enough to doing it that it holds your attention.
I like to start an essay with a gleam in my eye. This could be just a taste of mine, but there's one aspect of it that probably isn't: to write a really good essay on some topic, you have to be interested in it. A good writer can write well about anything, but to stretch for the novel insights that are the raison d'etre of the essay, you have to care.
If caring about it is one of the criteria for a good initial question, then the optimal question varies from person to person. It also means you're more likely to write great essays if you care about a lot of different things. The more curious you are, the greater the probable overlap between the set of things you're curious about and the set of topics that yield great essays.
What other qualities would a great initial question have? It's probably good if it has implications in a lot of different areas. And I find it's a good sign if it's one that people think has already been thoroughly explored. But the truth is that I've barely thought about how to choose initial questions, because I rarely do it. I rarely choose what to write about; I just start thinking about something, and sometimes it turns into an essay.
Am I going to stop writing essays about whatever I happen to be thinking about and instead start working my way through some systematically generated list of topics? That doesn't sound like much fun. And yet I want to write good essays, and if the initial question matters, I should care about it.
Perhaps the answer is to go one step earlier: to write about whatever pops into your head, but try to ensure that what pops into your head is good. Indeed, now that I think about it, this has to be the answer, because a mere list of topics wouldn't be any use if you didn't have edge with any of them. To start writing an essay, you need a topic plus some initial insight about it, and you can't generate those systematically. If only. [9]
You can probably cause yourself to have more of them, though. The quality of the ideas that come out of your head depends on what goes in, and you can improve that in two dimensions, breadth and depth.
You can't learn everything, so getting breadth implies learning about topics that are very different from one another. When I tell people about my book-buying trips to Hay and they ask what I buy books about, I usually feel a bit sheepish answering, because the topics seem like a laundry list of unrelated subjects. But perhaps that's actually optimal in this business.
You can also get ideas by talking to people, by doing and building things, and by going places and seeing things. I don't think it's important to talk to new people so much as the sort of people who make you have new ideas. I get more new ideas after talking for an afternoon with Robert Morris than from talking to 20 new smart people. I know because that's what a block of office hours at Y Combinator consists of.
While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it. Though this could take the form of writing, I suspect that to be a good essayist you also have to do, or have done, some other kind of work. That may not be true for most other fields, but essay writing is different. You could spend half your time working on something else and be net ahead, so long as it was hard.
I'm not proposing that as a recipe so much as an encouragement to those already doing it. If you've spent all your life so far working on other things, you're already halfway there. Though of course to be good at writing you have to like it, and if you like writing you'd probably have spent at least some time doing it.
Everything I've said about initial questions applies also to the questions you encounter in writing the essay. They're the same thing; every subtree of an essay is usually a shorter essay, just as every subtree of a Calder mobile is a smaller mobile. So any technique that gets you good initial questions also gets you good whole essays.
At some point the cycle of question and response reaches what feels like a natural end. Which is a little suspicious; shouldn't every answer suggest more questions? I think what happens is that you start to feel sated. Once you've covered enough interesting ground, you start to lose your appetite for new questions. Which is just as well, because the reader is probably feeling sated too. And it's not lazy to stop asking questions, because you could instead be asking the initial question of a new essay.
That's the ultimate source of drag on the connectedness of ideas: the discoveries you make along the way. If you discover enough starting from question A, you'll never make it to question B. Though if you keep writing essays you'll gradually fix this problem by burning off such discoveries. So bizarrely enough, writing lots of essays makes it as if the space of ideas were more highly connected.
When a subtree comes to an end, you can do one of two things. You can either stop, or pull the Cubist trick of laying separate subtrees end to end by returning to a question you skipped earlier. Usually it requires some sleight of hand to make the essay flow continuously at this point, but not this time. This time I actually need an example of the phenomenon. For example, we discovered earlier that the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in the way the best painting would. This seems surprising enough to be worth investigating further.
There are two senses in which an essay can be timeless: to be about a matter of permanent importance, and always to have the same effect on readers. With art these two senses blend together. Art that looked beautiful to the ancient Greeks still looks beautiful to us. But with essays the two senses diverge, because essays teach, and you can't teach people something they already know. Natural selection is certainly a matter of permanent importance, but an essay explaining it couldn't have the same effect on us that it would have had on Darwin's contemporaries, precisely because his ideas were so successful that everyone already knows about them. [10]
I imagined when I started writing this that the best possible essay would be timeless in the stricter, evergreen sense: that it would contain some deep, timeless wisdom that would appeal equally to Aristotle and Feynman. That doesn't seem to be true. But if the best possible essay wouldn't usually be timeless in this stricter sense, what would it take to write essays that were?
The answer to that turns out to be very strange: to be the evergreen kind of timeless, an essay has to be ineffective, in the sense that its discoveries aren't assimilated into our shared culture. Otherwise there will be nothing new in it for the second generation of readers. If you want to surprise readers not just now but in the future as well, you have to write essays that won't stick — essays that, no matter how good they are, won't become part of what people in the future learn before they read them. [11]
I can imagine several ways to do that. One would be to write about things people never learn. For example, it's a long-established pattern for ambitious people to chase after various types of prizes, and only later, perhaps too late, to realize that some of them weren't worth as much as they thought. If you write about that, you can be confident of a conveyor belt of future readers to be surprised by it.
Ditto if you write about the tendency of the inexperienced to overdo things — of young engineers to produce overcomplicated solutions, for example. There are some kinds of mistakes people never learn to avoid except by making them. Any of those should be a timeless topic.
Sometimes when we're slow to grasp things it's not just because we're obtuse or in denial but because we've been deliberately lied to. There are a lot of things adults lie to kids about, and when you reach adulthood, they don't take you aside and hand you a list of them. They don't remember which lies they told you, and most were implicit anyway. So contradicting such lies will be a source of surprises for as long as adults keep telling them.
Sometimes it's systems that lie to you. For example, the educational systems in most countries train you to win by hacking the test. But that's not how you win at the most important real-world tests, and after decades of training, this is hard for new arrivals in the real world to grasp. Helping them overcome such institutional lies will work as long as the institutions remain broken. [12]
Another recipe for timelessness is to write about things readers already know, but in much more detail than can be transmitted culturally. "Everyone knows," for example, that it can be rewarding to have kids. But till you have them you don't know precisely what forms that takes, and even then much of what you know you may never have put into words.
I've written about all these kinds of topics. But I didn't do it in a deliberate attempt to write essays that were timeless in the stricter sense. And indeed, the fact that this depends on one's ideas not sticking suggests that it's not worth making a deliberate attempt to. You should write about topics of timeless importance, yes, but if you do such a good job that your conclusions stick and future generations find your essay obvious instead of novel, so much the better. You've crossed into Darwin territory.
Writing about topics of timeless importance is an instance of something even more general, though: breadth of applicability. And there are more kinds of breadth than chronological — applying to lots of different fields, for example. So breadth is the ultimate aim.
I already aim for it. Breadth and novelty are the two things I'm always chasing. But I'm glad I understand where timelessness fits.
I understand better where a lot of things fit now. This essay has been a kind of tour of essay writing. I started out hoping to get advice about topics; if you assume good writing, the only thing left to differentiate the best essay is its topic. And I did get advice about topics: discover natural selection. Yeah, that would be nice. But when you step back and ask what's the best you can do short of making some great discovery like that, the answer turns out to be about procedure. Ultimately the quality of an essay is a function of the ideas discovered in it, and the way you get them is by casting a wide net for questions and then being very exacting with the answers.
The most striking feature of this map of essay writing are the alternating stripes of inspiration and effort required. The questions depend on inspiration, but the answers can be got by sheer persistence. You don't have to get an answer right the first time, but there's no excuse for not getting it right eventually, because you can keep rewriting till you do. And this is not just a theoretical possibility. It's a pretty accurate description of the way I work. I'm rewriting as we speak.
But although I wish I could say that writing great essays depends mostly on effort, in the limit case it's inspiration that makes the difference. In the limit case, the questions are the harder thing to get. That pool has no bottom.
How to get more questions? That is the most important question of all.
Notes
[1] There might be some resistance to this conclusion on the grounds that some of these discoveries could only be understood by a small number of readers. But you get into all sorts of difficulties if you want to disqualify essays on this account. How do you decide where the cutoff should be? If a virus kills off everyone except a handful of people sequestered at Los Alamos, could an essay that had been disqualified now be eligible? Etc.
Darwin's 1844 essay was derived from an earlier version written in 1839. Extracts from it were published in 1858.
[2] When you find yourself very curious about an apparently minor question, that's an exciting sign. Evolution has designed you to pay attention to things that matter. So when you're very curious about something random, that could mean you've unconsciously noticed it's less random than it seems.
[3] Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth.
[4] Sometimes this process begins before you start writing. Sometimes you've already figured out the first few things you want to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide everything they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they start writing the essay itself. Maybe that's a good way to get them started — or not, I don't know — but it's antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for.
[5] The problem with this type of "greedy" algorithm is that you can end up on a local maximum. If the most valuable question is preceded by a boring one, you'll overlook it. But I can't imagine a better strategy. There's no lookahead except by writing. So use a greedy algorithm and a lot of time.
[6] I ended up reattaching the first 5 of the 17 paragraphs, and discarding the rest.
[7] Stephen Fry confessed to making use of this phenomenon when taking exams at Oxford. He had in his head a standard essay about some general literary topic, and he would find a way to turn the exam question toward it and then just reproduce it again.
Strictly speaking it's the graph of ideas that would be highly connected, not the space, but that usage would confuse people who don't know graph theory, whereas people who do know it will get what I mean if I say "space".
[8] Too far doesn't depend just on the distance from the original topic. It's more like that distance divided by the value of whatever I've discovered in the subtree.
[9] Or can you? I should try writing about this. Even if the chance of succeeding is small, the expected value is huge.
[10] There was a vogue in the 20th century for saying that the purpose of art was also to teach. Some artists tried to justify their work by explaining that their goal was not to produce something good, but to challenge our preconceptions about art. And to be fair, art can teach somewhat. The ancient Greeks' naturalistic sculptures represented a new idea, and must have been extra exciting to contemporaries on that account. But they still look good to us.
[11] Bertrand Russell caused huge controversy in the early 20th century with his ideas about "trial marriage." But they make boring reading now, because they prevailed. "Trial marriage" is what we call "dating."
[12] If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd have predicted that schools would continue to teach hacking the test for centuries. But now it seems plausible that students will soon be taught individually by AIs, and that exams will be replaced by ongoing, invisible micro-assessments.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Courtenay Pipkin, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.