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Comment by friggeri | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I've been struggling with is that once I've mastered a topic enough to feel comfortable writing about it, everything I write sounds obvious to me, and from there there is an easy leap to "it's probably obvious to everyone", and I start questioning whether I should write at all. Anyone has dealt with this? Tips would be appreciated.

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Derek Sivers wrote about exactly this:

Obvious To You, Amazing To Others https://sivers.org/obvious

There's also an animated video version, if you prefer video.

https://youtu.be/xcmI5SSQLmE

I feel this too, and the way I deal with it is writing targeting the audience that you can still remember being a part of, for whatever is interesting to you.

So think back to what you knew and thought 6-9 months ago, and write for people in that boat. You probably learned a nifty trick or two since then, or had a recent revelation. Write just about that. Once you have an audience you can start to listen to their reactions and further questions to decide how to back-propagate from there even more (because not everyone arrives at that point from the same path).

The cool thing is that this works even for stuff you aren't a master at -- there's always someone who is just a step or two behind you in whatever it is you are doing, even if you are only on step 4 or 5 from being an absolute beginner. As long as you care about the topic and can pinpoint a meaningful thesis for your writing.

It's a rather limited form of writing, but if you have some topic that is also covered by Stack Overflow, you can answer questions.

That has the (big, in this context) benefit of directly and immediately showing that a) there is interest in the answer, since someone posted the question; and b) feedback about the quality of your answer, with the option to edit and improve it.

Sure it's bite-sized for the most part, but it is writing in some form. And yes I'm biased, it's easily my number one form of writing (but I don't go around wanting to be a writer, I don't think).

I know the feeling. What has somewhat helped me is to not write for publishing to the general population but for somebody who doesn't know about the topic. A gentle introduction that they consider not too demanding to follow but feels like they have a better understanding after reading. You can publish later, but I find it easier to focus on a single person and make it useful for them.

Any time I learn anything new it's never "wow, now I am smart", but always "ohh... I can't believe everyone but me has known this thing all this time".

What's the problem with writing something obvious? Honest question. I don't see why that should matter. (I mean, sure, you don't want to write 1000 words about how you should blink your eyes so they don't dry out.) Try to think of one person you know that wouldn't already know what you're writing. Even if it's obvious, it's not literally something everyone in the world already knows or shares your perspective on.

> What's the problem with writing something obvious?

You're not contributing something useful if you're just pointing out the obvious. Yeah, you can write the ten millionth article on how to change the default slogan in WordPress, but unless that's the maximum extent of your knowledge, you're wasting your potential and everybody else's time. That's how I feel about it at least, and why I don't write stuff that's too obvious or has already been widely covered. In that case, I might give a small overview and some tips to newcomers and link to others that I think did a good job.

"ten millionth" is a duplication problem, not an obvious problem.

There isn't a lot of a difference to me: the obvious has been stated by nearly everyone. You're right that there will always be some that can benefit from what one might consider obvious, but the amount of people depends on the level of what you're writing about. There are people that don't know how to change the default slogan on a WP site after all.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that nobody should write about that, I'm offering my perspective on why I probably wouldn't.

Yes, good point. The approach I'm trying is to find a narrative that's interesting to me, but includes a bunch of the obvious stuff along the way.

It's generally safe to assume nothing is ever obvious. Better to write simple things out than to write nothing at all.

Even worse, there will be exactly one person to whom your text also sounds obvious (rightfully [or not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)), and that person will leave a long angry comment.

The key is to accept that whatever is your topic and however you write it, someone will be disappointed because it is too simple, someone will be disappointed because it is too complex, someone will not understand the article because they miss some of the prerequisites, and someone will get angry because you spend too much time explaining the prerequisites.

People are different, you can't make everyone happy. The unhappy people are more likely to give feedback than the happy ones. (You probably wonder why other writers have tons of positive feedback. They likely paid for it. Or it is link spam: "your article is so awesome and inspiring; now here is a link to my completely unrelated web page".)

I guess you just have to imagine the target audience, and keep writing for them. First you get both positive and negative comments, which is okay, because the people who didn't like the first part should stop reading. If they keep reading your N-th article and posting the same angry comments, they are idiots; ban them and erase their comments. (There is a difference between pointing out a mistake, which is a good thing, and posting "this is noob stuff, loser" under ten articles in a row, which is bullying.)

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