But remember that improving requires both practice and feedback. Practicing something that's developing the wrong habits will just reinforce those bad habits through neural pathway strengthening. This is a key principle in many skill activities (music, sports, gymnastics, strength training). It's one of the nuances to Gladwell's "10,000 hours" premise.
Go Full Screen / Eliminate distractions
I'd have to heartily agree. Full screen might not be entirely necessary (I often have reference or other materials present while composing), but removing distracting elements from my environment is hugely useful. It's also ironic to note Ben's use of animated gifs to highlight his blog post (I ended up removing both with the Chrome element blocker plugin). In general I either modify the CSS for sites I visit frequently, or use tools such as Readability (or Pocket or Instapaper) to provide simplified, streamlined, uniform, text-dominant presentations of online material (curating and tagging the content is an added bonus).
good writing is mostly good editing
Absolutely. I've long considered it a bit like sculpting in clay. First you gob a bunch of stuff up there, then you start carving away at what shouldn't be there, occasionally moving bits around.
I mostly agree with you. The only point I'm hesitant about is the idea that feedback is absolutely necessary. I think feedback can be both good and bad; bad in the sense that things like originality, uniqueness, and novelty might be averaged out into blandness.
I think I would say "reflection" instead of "feedback", which can encompass both internal and external reflection, without which no change (or improvement) can take place. Your subsequent actions should derive from and be influenced by your previous actions and alter their course based on your reflections. Balance is important. And balance swings both ways: don't get caught up inside your own head and completely disconnect from reality, but also don't let others dictate who you are and what your experience really is.
Art is tricky that way: it is essentially social, involving others, from the outside, but is also inherently selfish, expressing your (the artist's) feelings and sharing them. I think it's important to be mindful of this dichotomy, but not get too wrapped up in it.
The only point I'm hesitant about is the idea that feedback is absolutely necessary.
Improvement is a process of variation, selection, and inheritance. That's the fundamental process of natural selection, but it's applicable across a huge multitude of domains.
For process improvement, the "inheritence" would be your memory / neural pathway strengthening of the activity. A challenge with behavioral modifications are ways in which the feedback / reward mechanisms can be hacked to reinforce "bad" (or at least unwanted) behavior. I've commented some at G+ about what I call the dopamine meme -- effectively a large number of addictive behaviors which provide transient rewards but are ultimately long-term deleterious.
A concern with the "write something every day" model is people who write and publish absolutely all their crap. It leads to stuff such as blogspam -- I had a discussion not too long ago with an editor of an energy blog who quote their mission: "Our aim is to get people excited and discussing engineering topics." My response:
I'd prefer if you reconsidered your aim: to inform people of advances in engineering topics. Which means both an accurate portrayal of the state of the art and new developments, and a focus on relevant stories.
Point being: if you get in the habit of writing crap, you'll get really good at writing crap. And there are numerous organizations which deliberately exploit this ("virality", "gamification" and the like -- I've seen it from the inside).
Improvement is a process of variation, selection, and inheritance.
I don't think anyone in the evolution racket ever claimed that natural selection meant things were improving. They might be balancing themselves out and adapting to an ever-changing environment, but that doesn't mean it's "better" than what it was (whatever "better" means); just differently oriented to favour survival. And like you said, "if you get in the habit of writing crap, you'll get really good at writing crap".
My point was to be wary of (I should have been more specific) outside feedback; to be careful not to dilute your personal artistic expression in favour of popular opinion.
Robert Pirsig wrote a whole book on the nature of Quality...
In the evolutionary sense, "better" means "more fit for survival". Which is to say it's an empirical test. The adaptations which are the "best" are those which survive to create offspring.
In human affairs the question becomes more complex, and can be subjective. In part it depends on the environment and success criteria you've established. Are you trying to inform? To entertain? To be commercially successful? To pitch your startup? To expand your own understanding?
Not quite writing, but related: Jacob Nielsen's approach to Web UI testing is one that I've long been impressed by. Rather than dissect a design into its components and assess those individually, he has a very simple, and effective, test: assess the suitability to task of the interface. Define what it is you want the user to do and let them attempt to do it, using different designs. See which is the most successful. After you've identified which is better, you can look at the differences between the designs (or texts) and figure out why one succeeds where the other doesn't. It's simple, highly empirical, and, by focusing on goals rather than means wraps up a huge bundle of variables that would otherwise cloud assessment.
Feedback may not be absolutely necessary in all disciplines (endeavors? arts? crafts?), but for some things it can be vital. I recently found out that discs in my lower back are closer together than they should be, and my spine is slightly out of alignment in two planes, probably because of bad posture (the day job) and incorrect form during high intensity workouts (which I need to even break a sweat). I'm thinking that getting a physical trainer or other specialist to critique my form would probably be a good idea, especially if I want to continue my workouts.
There are cases in which it may be ... very specific. You're looking for feedback from a select group / highly refined community. Though this also presents issues -- see discussions of "the problem with mathematics" where there might be a half-dozen people who are capable of even following, let alone assessing, an argument or theorem.
Where you're working in a system without any selection, you're not dealing with an evolutionary system (or you've misidentified the selection process).
In some fields, and at some levels of mastery, yes, feedback may not be necessary. If someone is truly at the top of their craft, pushing the bounds, with no superiors or peers, feedback could be destructive. I posit that most people aren't at this level, and those who think they are probably aren't. Even so, contemplation would probably be a good idea, but that's probably already happening in those cases anyway.
You can only get better with experience.
But remember that improving requires both practice and feedback. Practicing something that's developing the wrong habits will just reinforce those bad habits through neural pathway strengthening. This is a key principle in many skill activities (music, sports, gymnastics, strength training). It's one of the nuances to Gladwell's "10,000 hours" premise.
Go Full Screen / Eliminate distractions
I'd have to heartily agree. Full screen might not be entirely necessary (I often have reference or other materials present while composing), but removing distracting elements from my environment is hugely useful. It's also ironic to note Ben's use of animated gifs to highlight his blog post (I ended up removing both with the Chrome element blocker plugin). In general I either modify the CSS for sites I visit frequently, or use tools such as Readability (or Pocket or Instapaper) to provide simplified, streamlined, uniform, text-dominant presentations of online material (curating and tagging the content is an added bonus).
good writing is mostly good editing
Absolutely. I've long considered it a bit like sculpting in clay. First you gob a bunch of stuff up there, then you start carving away at what shouldn't be there, occasionally moving bits around.