The most obvious reason is that pg writes an essay when he has an idea or an insight he wants to think and write about. New insights don't arrive on a fixed schedule.
If pg had been posting every month the HN thread would read: "Ask HN: is it just me or has the quality of Paul Graham's writing gone down?"
>The most obvious reason is that pg writes an essay when he has an idea or an insight he wants to think and write about. New insights don't arrive on a fixed schedule.
And yet, they did somehow, for several years.
Not to mention insights are not like some divine illumination. You can get them and shape by the actual process of writing down your thoughts on a matter.
>If pg had been posting every month the HN thread would read: "Ask HN: is it just me or has the quality of Paul Graham's writing gone down?"
Well, it's not like it has not, either. Last 4-5 years are nothing like the essays circa Hackers and Painters era.
Inspiration is in my view more like earthquakes then a continual shower - you need to wander around looking at the world and asking why is it like that? Eventually the pressure builds and builds and suddenly you know - and have to write about it. The first ideas out the door are the most powerful - I guess the comments about free and wild animals and entrepreneurs are just aftershocks.
The quake can release an awful lot of ideas that you can work through all at once or one at a time. But eventually the quake runs out of power and another must build up
Which basically all means "Be careful what you ask for" - another quake and we won't be able to stop him posting them.
He's never been that prolific. I guess he writes when he's got something to say. Some of his previous essays reflect long-held beliefs, supply of which is clearly limited.
If you consider the time from when he started to publish essays on a regular basis ("Java's Cover" in April 2001) until November 2012 it is 143 essays in 140 months.
Given the length and quality of his posts I'd consider this incredibly prolific for a single writer. Otherwise I completely agree with you.
(Some time ago I made a table with the length of the essays vs time. I never published it, but if someone is interested I can do so.)
Actually I misremembered, I never plotted the data against time, it's just a CSV with word count for all essays.
I put the CSV on Github[1], there is also one for codinghorror.com and the scripts that I used to create the tables. Some additional word count data (e.g. John D. Cook's The Endeavor) is on my website[2].
Uhm, that is fairly prolific. Could it be that his frequency increased at some point ? I remember when he started he didn't even bother with an RSS feed (which was all the rage back then), he'd publish fairly sparingly and new posts were major events.
Or maybe it's exactly that: in a blogosphere pumping content every hour every day (I can't believe at one point I even followed Scoble and Winer), I might have perceived somebody posting on a monthly schedule as "not very prolific".
I suspect it is something similar to the support issues for open source projects... you want to share your code, but the moment you do you find yourself having to support it at a cost to you (a good problem, you have people wanting to use the code)... but all you wanted to do was share.
His words have gone from mere thoughts and opinions that he's felt a need to share, to being received in some other way that it was intended and loaded with so much extra interpretation that then leads to that support cycle.
Writing is hard, but defending that writing when a large number of people will tear it to shreds, misinterpret it, over-analyse, take metaphors literally, and treat literal words as ambiguous... it can kill a lot of the desire to write and share.
He clearly cares about sharing his thoughts and views, but because of the above, I figure he must find far greater satisfaction and reward from sharing those things with his YC classes who probably really listen to what is being communicated and acting on it, rather than just debating and pedantically arguing over the choice of phrase.
I now expect to be downvoted for implying that we as an audience don't necessarily help him. And of course, I may be very wrong, it's just an opinion. I'm sure he'll pop up and say in a few hours time.
>"His words have gone from mere thoughts and opinions that he's felt a need to share, to being received in some other way that it was intended and loaded with so much extra interpretation that then leads to that support cycle."
Having a blog myself, I don't post for months, but then all of a sudden I have an idea and I push out a couple of thousand words within a few hours with a 100 likes.
Sometimes muse hits you and it just flows, sometimes it's on holidays for months. :)
I seem to remember reading he tends to write mostly during the fall months. Also, November was right before the previous class, which would explain why he got busy quick.
If pg had been posting every month the HN thread would read: "Ask HN: is it just me or has the quality of Paul Graham's writing gone down?"