| | > But if I let the kinds of risks you outline slow me or stop me, I would never accomplish anything worthwhile in any area of my life: I would never have become a NASA engineer; I would never have married a woman with a pretty face and a sweet disposition; I would never have reduced my body fat from 26% to 10%.
Luke, I agree that one should not be intimidated by a mountain in front of one. But that doesn't mean one just starts straight up as opposed to working out on smaller hills, building base camps, etc. And it's the particularly difficult nature of writing which breaks through and reaches totally new audiences that makes it more of a "multi-step" process than several of the things you name.
Even in the case of becoming an engineer, there are a lot of preliminary steps starting with H.S. algebra for example. My point is that in the history of Oist grand and sweeping projects, I have never seen one where people don't make the mistakes of i) rushing it, ii) being unprepared, iii) knowing the audience, iv) skipping steps.
[Aside: You're an engineer, not an experienced writer. Toastmasters is a great start but it's not writing in particular. Getting there requires working on a *lot* of training exercises from op eds to efforts at writing exercises which don't read like flowcharts to letters to the editor to poetry to exercises in biography, in description like Rand used to do, to many of the things she covers in her NFW book (have you read it?) and so on....You have many of the writing problems I had when I was a math and computer science person. I wrote (and still sometimes write) in too complicated or too technical or too abstract or convoluted a fashion....}
> I notice you still have no formal RoR articles published on this site while I have many.
My goal is not to write for Objectivists but for an audience thousands of times larger. Am I there yet? No. In a major way writing for Oists is -destructive- of that larger goal: you get used to jargon, a peculiarly abstract writing style, assumptions peculiar to that audience. So when you try to "breakout" you express yourself in a style that makes it seem like you are from Mars. (I'm using "you" in the plural and general sense, not applied to Luke in particular.)
I can't think of a single Objectivist writer other than Rand who does not make that mistake to a lesser or greater degree. (Maybe the two Brandens, who have had some public audience success, but I haven't read enough of the work of both to be sure.)
This is a TREMENDOUSLY serious and neglected issue.
It's brushed aside by Oists who keep on stubbornly banging their heads against the same old walls, unintelligently in the same old ways with only minor wrinkles. As opposed to a sea-change.
(If the wheel keeps squeaking, it probably needs more than a fresh coat of paint.)
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 5/27, 11:58am)
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