Declarative knowledge: knowing about the thing, but not knowing how to do the thing.

Procedural knowledge: knowing how to do the thing.

Learning declarative knowledge: I read a book about it, so I know how to do it! I went to a writer’s workshop, I watched the youtube videos of 10 things that make your books suck, and I read On Writing by Stephen King, so I should be able to write this now!

Learning procedural knowledge: In this story, I’m going to work on learning X by doing it. Because I’m going to learn a lot more by failing at doing it, analyzing the successes and failures, and then doing it again.

By the way, you will arrive at both. You can learn things exist by doing something, and then as you try to figure out why your scientific progress went boink, learning about stuff that you didn’t even know was an option. It’s a lot faster to learn the declarative knowledge first, and then work toward the procedural, instead of reinventing the wheel…

But when you learn what everybody else knows, you also pick up the tribal mindset of “everybody knows” and the limitations that go with it. Which is why sometimes the greatest progress and the brilliant things come from people who don’t know “everybody knows you can’t do that / you have to do this.”

One of the greatest assets of setting out to read the stories in Appendix N is getting to see all the possibilities that were explored and played with back when people didn’t “know” that you “have” to write to specific genre and subgenres. A lot of the stories were wilder and richer, because they weren’t writing to artificial limitations, and they weren’t relying so heavily on modern tropes instead of worldbuilding. (There were still some tropes – and the ones we’ve forgotten seem rather strange without the “everybody knows” to make it easily ignorable.)

But reading is not the same as doing, and I’m still working on learning the procedural knowledge.

Back to the word mines!