Writing process of the night (03-29-13)

Kristin Cashore's.

5 sentences of authors I admire (02/19/13)

This is the list of first-sentences I found of each author - the list is not about what they say but how they say things:

1) The conflict between modern neoclassical and traditional Keynesian theories of the business cycle centers upon the pricing mechanism. 

2) EARLY in October of 1991, 1 got a phone call from a retired minister in the Midwest, who told me about his daughter's fiance, a fifty-year old man named Virgil, who had been virtually blind since early childhood. 

3) I was chatting with a medical school friend of mine who is now a general surgeon in San Francisco. 

4) The study of economic geography - of the location of factors of production in space - occupies a relatively small part of standard economic analysis.

5. Despite some recent attempts to renew them, it would seem that during the past twenty years anthropology has more and more turned away from studies in the field of religion.

I noted that the social scientists in the list (1, 4, 5) started their articles with very big questions in their fields. 

More authors to come . . .  

The way economists communicate ideas

This is from Greg Mankiw's blog: 

Last October, Amazon introduced a new feature: a list of bestselling authors, aggregating across all books an author has written. Here is the list of the top 100 authors. 

For an economist, perusing the list is a humbling experience. As far as I can tell, not a single member of our profession made the list. I wonder whether Galbriath might have made it in his day, as he had written a large number of books accessible to general audiences. But these days, not a single one of us has wide enough readership to make it onto the list. The next time you are tempted to lament the sad state of the public discussion of economic policy, remember that we economists are probably not doing enough to educate the public.  

We just don't write things that people want to read.If you want to know what economists come closest, you can look at this list of bestselling authors in business and investment, a category that includes economics. Several of us make this less selective list.

We should remember that economists compete against great writers out there, including fiction-writers. Mankiw's post reminds me of why economics has been called the dismal science - not a very bright and welcoming nickname. My guess is that the majority of economists are doing research, and probably very few of them are trying to communicate economics ideas to the public. For a layperson it is very difficult if not impossible to understand an article from the top journals. Economics needs more intermediaries that can make the link between the highly technical (mathematical) papers and common knowledge to show how economics can be useful in the day a day life of people. 

Probably economics is not as beautiful as it is necessary. 

HT: Peter Boettke

Morrison on the art of fiction

. . . [O]ne has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power. 

I am interested in the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea. It is not “this is what I believe,” because that would not be a book, just a tract. A book is “this may be what I believe, but suppose I am wrong . . . what could it be?” Or, “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.”

From the Paris Review.  

Woody Allen on writing and more

I’ve written on legal pads, hotel stationery, anything I can get my hands on. I have no finickiness about anything like that. I write in hotel rooms, in my house, with other people around, on matchbooks. I have no problems with it—to the meager limits that I can do it. There have been stories where I’ve just sat down at the typewriter and typed straight through beginning to end. There are some New Yorker pieces I’ve written out in forty minutes time. And there are other things I’ve just struggled and agonized over for weeks and weeks. 

That is from an interview with Woody Allen in The Paris Review.
More:

I feel that unequivocally. I feel that what I have done so far in my life is sort of the ballast that is waiting to be uplifted by two or three really fine works that may hopefully come. We’ve been sitting and talking about Faulkner, say, and Updike and Bergman—I mean, I obviously can’t talk about myself in the same way at all.

It is worth reading the entire interview.  

The Economics of Good Writing

Julio Cole and I have a new draft of our paper "Economical Writing (or, “Think Hemingway”)." We find that:

. . . Literature laureates tend to use shorter words than laureates in other disciplines, and the difference is statistically significant. These results confirm Salant’s idea that words are a scarce resource and should be used efficiently. This includes using short words instead of longer ones whenever possible. In short, good writing is also “economical writing.” 

Our main results: 

Table 4. Nobel Prize Banquet Speeches, 1969-2011 (summary statistics).
(a)  Syllables per word
	Econ	Physics	Chem	Med	Lit
Mean	1.456	1.440	1.470	1.472	1.344
Median	1.46	1.44	1.47	1.47	1.35
Maximum	1.63	1.61	1.68	1.63	1.68
Minimum	1.24	1.21	1.29	1.31	1.19
Std. Dev.	0.106	0.104	0.085	0.088	0.103
(b)  Characters per word
	Econ	Physics	Chem	Med	Lit
Mean	4.737	4.754	4.845	4.816	4.470
Median	4.75	4.77	4.80	4.82	4.49
Maximum	5.17	5.36	5.54	5.25	5.39
Minimum	3.97	4.05	4.39	4.20	4.09
Std. Dev.	0.297	0.288	0.248	0.250	0.254
Observations	42	45	42	47	27

Note that the lowest average word lengths are for the Literature prize. In terms of syllables/word the Literature laureates’ word lengths were, on average, almost 8% shorter than the weighted average for non-Literature laureates, and about 6.6% shorter in terms of characters/word. 

. . . 

ANOVA tests for only the non-Literature prizes (Table 6 [in the paper]) do not reject the hypothesis of equal means: average word length is essentially the same for Economics, Physics, Chemistry and Medicine laureates. Therefore, it is only the Literature laureates that can be regarded as a separate group when it comes to word length, which is consistent with the Salant hypothesis: the very best writers do indeed tend to use shorter words.

We conclude:

Salant (1969) argued that the use of short words is an indication of good writing. We found support for this hypothesis by comparing the banquet speeches of Nobel laureates. To be sure, word length is only one dimension of what makes for “good writing.” But it seems that it is a necessary dimension. Words are a scarce resource and must be used efficiently. This includes using short words rather than longer ones, whenever possible. “Economical” writing might indeed be the key for “good” writing. We leave for debate the different implications of our paper.

On Dickens' two selfs

Even Dickens didn’t understand his energy. He grasped that there was a wildness in him, and so did nearly everyone who knew him. When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine — Dickens explained that there were two people inside him, “one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite.”

To what Dostoevsky’s replied: “Only two people?” 

That is from this NYT article.
Addendum: This is a short chapter on the economics of identity. 

Why does Orhan Pamuk write?

This is Orhan Pamuk acceptance-speech. He delivered it in 2006 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a gem: 

Why do you write? This is the question I've been asked most often in my writing career. Most of the time they mean this: What is the point, why do you give your time to this strange and impossible activity? Why do you write... You have to give an excuse, an apology for writing... This is how I have felt every time I've heard this question. But every time I give a different answer... Sometimes I say: I do not know why I write, but it definitely makes me feel good. I hope you feel the same when you read me! Sometimes I say that I am angry, and that is why I write. Most of the time the urge is to be alone in a room, so that is why I write. In my childhood I wanted to be a painter. I painted every day. I still have that childish feeling of joy and happiness whenever I write. I write to pursue that old childish happiness and that is why for me literature and writing are inextricably linked with happiness, or the lack of it... unhappiness. In my childhood, I felt happy, painted a lot, and all the grown ups were constantly smiling at me. Everybody was gentle, polite and tender. I wrote all about this in my autobiographical book, Istanbul. After the publication of Istanbul, some people asked me this question: Aren't you a bit young to write your autobiography? I kept my silence. Literature is about happiness, I wanted to say, about preserving your childishness all your life, keeping the child in you alive... Now, some years later, I've received this great prize. This time the same people begin asking another question: Aren't you a bit young to get the Nobel Prize? Actually the question I've heard most often since the news of this prize reached me is: How does it feel to get the Nobel Prize? I say, oh! It feels good. All the grown ups are constantly smiling at me. Suddenly everybody is again gentle, polite and tender. In fact, I almost feel like a prince. I feel like a child. Then for a moment, I realize why sometimes I have felt so angry. This prize, which brought back to me the tender smiles of my childhood and the kindness of the strangers, should have been given to me not at this age (54) which some think is too young, but much much earlier, even earlier than my childhood, perhaps two weeks after I was born, so that I could have enjoyed the princely feeling of being a child all my life. In fact now... come to think of it... That is why I write and why I will continue to write.

Source. 

Economical Writing (or, “think Hemingway”)

This is my new paper co-authored with Julio Cole.

The motivation for this paper is an argument proposed by Salant (1969), who claimed that on many occasions he found the writing of his colleagues “nearly incomprehensible.” Too often, he said, it is difficult to understand the main message that an economist is trying to communicate. He then argued that a “simple way of avoiding clumsiness is to prefer the short word to the long one and to avoid the unfamiliar word if a familiar one can be found that is equally correct, specific, and concrete” (p. 556). We call this “the Salant hypothesis,” and use ANOVA to test this hypothesis by comparing the average length of words used by Nobel laureates in their acceptance speeches. We find that Literature laureates do indeed tend to use shorter words than laureates in other disciplines, and the difference is statistically significant. These results confirm Salant’s idea that words are a scarce resource and should be used efficiently. This includes using short words instead of long ones whenever possible. In short, good writing is also “economical writing.” 

See the draft here. 

Unusual and quasi-scientific advice on writing

The unusual, and the quasi-scientific. Enjoy!
HT: Surse Pierpoint and @TimHarford 

The heart of writing is . . .

. . . Grossman said, is getting to know a book’s characters intimately, in a way that is impossible with other human beings. Even when it comes to those with whom we are most intimate, we shy away from complete knowledge, Grossman said. With our children, we avoid the darker corners of their characters; we may know our lovers better than others, but still not completely.

“To me, the heart of writing is the privilege of knowing other people from within,” Grossman said. “Usually, we are quite protected from the other. … We develop an instinct of not being totally exposed to the hell within the other.”

Writing a novel involves creating a suite of characters whom you know so intimately that they become like a family you’re hiding during wartime and to whom you take food and news daily. The whole of a book, he said, somehow becomes greater than the writer.

“I believe books are much more clever, courageous, and generous than their writers,” Grossman said.

Source. 

On writing fiction

[Writing] fiction is an act of courage and humility, a protest against our mortality, and we, the authors, don’t matter. What matters is our characters, those constructions of imagination that can transcend our biases and agendas, our egos and entitlements and flesh. Trust your powers of empathy and invention, I say. Trust the example of the authors you love to read—Flaubert: “Emma, c’est moi”—and trust that your craft, when braided with compassion, will produce stories that matter both to you and to readers you’ve never met.

Source