Discovery fiction

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Michael Nielsen
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To help me understand a scientific result, I often find it helpful to write what I call discovery fiction. By this I mean: a plausible story of how I could have discovered that result – an arc of small questions and ideas, false starts and backtracking, incremental steps eventually leading to the res...

To help me understand a scientific result, I often find it helpful to write what I call discovery fiction. By this I mean: a plausible story of how I could have discovered that result – an arc of small questions and ideas, false starts and backtracking, incremental steps eventually leading to the result. None of these things should come out of thin air: they should all be simple, almost-obvious steps.

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Grant Sanderson 2mos

Naming a familiar but not-quite-defined idea can change how you think about it. “Discovery fiction” did this for me in writing, and @michael_nielsen just wrote a great essay summarizing it. Note, it shows why longer work is not necessarily more verbose.