In pursuit of desirable difficulties

The psychologist Robert Bjork called them desirable difficulties. Learning sticks better when practice is made harder, rather than easier. Students who have to struggle to retrieve an answer remember it longer - and clearer - than students who are handed the same answer with minimal effort on their part. The effort is where the knowledge is actually built. Without effort, knowledge slips away.

Writing runs on the same principle. When you do battle with the language, when you fight a sentence into shape yourself, tooth and nail, you earn the finished prose. You know where the argument bends, you know where the logic goes thin, where one word can do the job of three.

Your struggle leaves fingerprints.

But if a machine hands you a clean paragraph in five seconds, while you sit back and daydream, there are no fingerprints. There can never be fingerprints. The paragraph can be genuinely good, and for all I know, it probably is genuinely good, and that's part of the trouble.

A half-baked idea, that sounds produced and polished and painted is far more dangerous, for any writer, than a rough draft that sounds rough. The rough draft challenges you to aspire to a degree of perfection, or as near to it as you can reliably get. But the polished draft tells you to fuck off, and leave it well enough alone - because isn't it good enough?

Bjork never actually claimed difficulty was a Good on its own, and for its own sake. And I agree - I still believe drudgery is worth killing off, and the tools that kill it are well worth paying for. But the difficulty that builds judgment, and the difficulty of drudgery sometimes look identical from outside; and the only way to tell them apart is to stay close enough to your work - and your words - to feel out which one you're dealing with.

Before you ship the polished and untouched paragraph, ask what part of it you actually decided.

If you're honest, and the answer is "not very much at all,” your work is not done.

You've produced something that looks done.

But it’s not the same thing.