Writing longform content is O(n log n), at best

March 30, 2023

I wrote Modular: The Web's New Architecture. It was 100ish pages. It took six months.

I can write a 2-3 page blog post in half a day. If I could kept writing at that pace, Modular would have taken me 1-2 months, tops.

So: why does writing a book take so long?

It's not about the time to write the material. It's about the polish. And the organization.

Polish

The longer a piece is, the most we inherently expect polish. That's because the risk of abandonment is so much higher. If a short blog post is meh, that's fine -- you're done with it 2 minutes later.

If a book is "meh blogpost" quality readers are going to bounce after 2 minutes and the rest of your work will have been wasted.

Organization

The longer a piece of content is, the more organization you need.
Except for inherently-sequential content, such as tutorials, the more you need to think about placement. Does X topic belong in Y section or Z section?

The closest algorithm analogy is sorting.

• If you have a good organizational sense, you'll notice when a topic doesn't feel right, and have a sense for where it needs to be moved to, and then how to unglue it from its old section and then glue it into its new section.
• If you have a mediocre organizational sense, you'll notice that something doesn't feel right about where a topic lives currently, and try gluing it in a few different places before figuring out where it needs to go.
• If you had a bad writing sense, you won't notice at all. But the longer your piece gets, the more it will lose coherence. Eventually, you'll read your writing, pronounce it unsalvageable, and give up.

Lawrence Kesteltoot observes that novice programmers can write programs up to around 2k lines LOC before being overwhelmed by their own complexity, staff-level engineers to around 20k, and architect types to 200k.

It's similar in writing.