Copy What You Like

July 2006 "None ever wished it longer than it is." - Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost --> When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers.

2006 年 7 月 “没有人希望它能比现在更长。” - 塞缪尔·约翰逊谈《失乐园》 --> 当我在高中时，我花了很多时间模仿糟糕的作家。

What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing.

我们在英语课上学的大部分都是小说，所以我认为那是最高的写作形式。

Mistake number one.

错误第一。

The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways.

最受推崇的故事似乎都是人们遭受复杂苦难的故事。

Anything funny or

有什么有趣的事情或者

gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer.

扣人心弦本身就值得怀疑，除非它太古老而难以理解，就像莎士比亚或乔叟那样。

Mistake number two.

错误二。

The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing.

理想的媒介似乎是短篇小说，后来我了解到短篇小说的生命周期相当短暂，与杂志出版的顶峰时期大致一致。

But since their size made them perfect for use in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing.

但由于它们的尺寸非常适合在高中课堂上使用，所以我们读了很多它们，这给我们留下了短篇小说蓬勃发展的印象。

Mistake number three.

错误三。

And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced.

因为它们太短了，所以实际上什么也不必发生。你可以只展示随机截断的生活片段，这被认为是先进的。

Mistake number four.

错误四。

The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.

结果是我写了很多故事，其中除了某人似乎很深的不快乐之外什么也没发生。

For most of college I was a philosophy major.

在大学的大部分时间里，我主修哲学。

I was very impressed by the papers published in philosophy journals.

哲学期刊上发表的论文给我留下了深刻的印象。

They were so

他们是如此

beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating—alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical.

排版精美，他们的语气非常迷人——时而随意，时而充满缓冲的技术性。

A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon him.

一个人走在街上，突然，情态作为情态突然出现在他身上。

I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more closely.

我一直不太理解这些论文，但我想当我有时间更仔细地重新阅读它们时，我会抽出时间来解决这些问题。

In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them.

与此同时，我也尽力模仿他们。

This was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't

我现在可以看出，这是一项注定失败的事业，因为他们没有

really saying anything.

真的什么都说。

No philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute.

例如，没有一位哲学家曾经反驳过另一位哲学家，因为没有人说过任何足够明确的话来反驳。

Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.

不用说，我的模仿也没有说什么。

In grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things.

在研究生院时，我仍然浪费时间模仿错误的东西。

There was then a fashionable type of program called an expert system, at the core of which was something called an inference engine.

当时有一种流行的程序类型，称为专家系统，其核心是一种称为推理机的东西。

I looked at what these things did and thought "I could write that in

我看着这些东西做了什么，然后想“我可以把它写在

a thousand lines of code." And yet eminent professors were writing books about them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy.

一千行代码。”然而，著名的教授们正在写有关它们的书籍，初创公司也以一年的工资出售它们。

What an opportunity, I thought; these impressive things seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp.

我想，这真是一个机会啊！这些令人印象深刻的事情对我来说似乎很容易；我一定很敏锐。

Wrong.

错误的。

It was simply a fad.

这只是一种时尚。

The books the professors wrote about expert systems are now ignored.

教授们写的关于专家系统的书现在被忽视了。

They were not even on a path to anything interesting.

他们甚至没有走上任何有趣的道路。

And the customers paying so much for them were largely the same

为这些产品支付这么多钱的顾客基本上是一样的

government agencies that paid thousands for screwdrivers and toilet seats.

政府机构花费数千美元购买螺丝刀和马桶座圈。

How do you avoid copying the wrong things?

如何避免复制错误的东西？

Copy only what you genuinely like.

只复制你真正喜欢的内容。

That would have saved me in all three cases.

在这三种情况下，这都会拯救我。

I didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert systems myself.

我不喜欢我们在英语课上读的短篇小说；我没有从哲学论文中学到任何东西；我自己没有使用专家系统。

I believed these things were good because they were admired.

我相信这些东西是好的，因为它们受到钦佩。

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with.

很难区分您喜欢的事物和令您印象深刻的事物。

One trick is to ignore presentation.

一个技巧是忽略演示。

Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it?

每当我看到博物馆里挂着一幅令人印象深刻的画作时，我都会问自己：如果我在旧货拍卖中发现这幅画，肮脏无框，而且不知道是谁画的，我会花多少钱买这幅画？

If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results.

如果你在博物馆里走一圈尝试这个实验，你会发现你得到了一些真正令人吃惊的结果。

Don't ignore this data point just because it's

不要仅仅因为这个数据点是

an outlier.

一个异常值。

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures.

弄清楚你喜欢什么的另一种方法是将你所享受的事物视为罪恶的快乐。

Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them.

人们喜欢很多东西，尤其是那些年轻而有雄心的人，他们喜欢很大程度上是因为喜欢它们的美德感。

99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses " as they do it.

99% 阅读《尤利西斯》的人在阅读时都会想“我正在读《尤利西斯》”。

A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one.

罪恶感的快乐至少是一种纯粹的快乐。

What do you read when you don't feel up to being

当你心情不好的时候你会读什么

virtuous?

有德行吗？

What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through?

你读了哪一本书，却因为读到一半而感到难过，而不是因为读了一半而感到感动？

That's what you really like.

这才是你真正喜欢的。

Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided.

即使您找到了真正值得复制的好东西，也需要避免另一个陷阱。

Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws.

小心地复制他们的优点，而不是他们的缺点。

It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy

人们很容易被模仿缺陷所吸引，因为它们更容易被发现，当然也更容易被复制

too.

也是。

For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors.

例如，十八世纪和十九世纪的大多数画家都使用棕色。

They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt.

他们模仿文艺复兴时期伟大的画家，当时他们的画作已经是沾满污垢的棕色了。

Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

这些画作如今已被清洗干净，呈现出绚丽的色彩。他们的模仿者当然仍然是棕色的。

It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things.

顺便说一句，正是绘画治愈了我临摹错误的问题。

Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being

研究生读到一半时，我决定尝试成为

a painter, and the art world was so manifestly corrupt that it snapped the leash of credulity.

一个画家，而艺术界显然已经腐败到了轻信的地步。

These people made philosophy professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians.

这些人让哲学教授看起来像数学家一样一丝不苟。

It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction.

这显然是做好工作或成为内部人士的选择，以至于我被迫看到其中的区别。

It's there to some degree in almost every field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it.

它在某种程度上几乎在每个领域都存在，但直到那时我才设法避免面对它。

That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting:

这是我从绘画中学到的最有价值的东西之一：

you have to figure out for yourself what's good .

你必须自己弄清楚什么是好的。

You can't trust authorities.

你不能相信当局。

They'll lie to you on this one.

他们会在这一点上对你撒谎。

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