> If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut

> If you're willing to do a lot of rewriting, you don't have to guess right. You can follow a branch and see how it turns out, and if it isn't good enough, cut it and backtrack. I do this all the time. I feel like even if you guess right, you can't help but do a lot of rewriting and exploration because otherwise you'll always feel that "something's missing", and that you're further from the truth than you could be, that there's a better explanation around the corner if you study this subtree a bit more. In the process of an essay I'm currently writing, I've probably written a short book of meandering thoughts / notes. I can't imagine it any other way because doing so would be imagining me actively not exploring an interesting subtree / implication of something I wrote, that I feel could impact the crux of the essay. And of course none of this is wasted effort, as PG talks also mentions. Identifying the next essays from those ideas I've left out of this one is simply an act of observation and organization based on the exploration I've already done. And likely when I start the next essay, this process will repeat itself.