On Writing More
ava.substack.com
ava.substack.com
Here’s what I learned:
It’s easier to be prolific. When you write every day it comes easy. Like brushing your teeth. You wake up and you’re full of thoughts on your general topic and you write them down. A quick edit, hit publish, and done. If it goes viral, fantastic. If peopel love it, amazing. If not, no big you try again next time.
And then life happens. You can’t just write every day, you have to create things worth writing about! Experiences, research, work.
You reduce your writing output.
And the ideas dry up. Writing becomes hard. You eke out 2, maybe 3, articles per week and it’s hard work. You struggle. You drag them out of your brain. It doesn’t feel right.
Nothing feels important enough to write about. With 2 at-bats per week, there’s a lot riding on every missive. It’s hard. It’s demoralizing. And it shows in your writing.
The readers can’t tell. Future you can’t tell. Neil Gaiman is right – 5 months from now you won’t see the difference between the writing that was work and the writing that flowed.
But you today, you know. You know you’re rusty. You know it wasn’t as easy as it could be. You see that it’s rough.
And I haven’t found a solution.
First: weeknotes. Every week I write a summary of what I've got done. I'm on a streak, so I can't let myself break that streak. I'm at 73 weeks now and it's ensured that I write something at least once a week - and like you said, that habit makes it easier. https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/
Second: TILs. These are basically blog entries where the only criteria is "did I just learn something" - which makes them very low friction. I often knock one out in 5-10 minutes. https://til.simonwillison.net/
I think the solution is simple: write constantly, publish rarely.
I understand that you want to be regular so you don't just "become lazy" and probably to avoid getting stuck, but I don't see neither what's the objective of forcing to do something you don't like - as long as we're talking about a hobby.
What might not be relevant/interesting to you could well be relevant/interesting to others. There's also the Field Notes philosophy - "I'm not writing it down to remember it later; I'm writing it down to remember it now" - blogging about something can solidify it in your mind because you have to work out how to express / explain it.
I wrote a post a little while ago where I thought I had a good handle on what I wanted to say. I researched certain elements to make sure what I was saying was backed up. I finished the first draft and thought, "Cool, with a couple of revisions I'll be done".
The funny thing was now that I had clarified my thoughts I began to encounter ideas that refined my perspective further and lead me to new and better ways of looking at the whole thing. This was in part because I was researching more and reading more as time went on but I'm pretty sure I would not have been primed for those breakthroughs if I hadn't already put what I thought in writing.
As it stands, I don't intend to use that first draft and its ideas will reused in something largely different but writing it was invaluable.
> It’s easier to be prolific. When you write every day it comes easy. Like brushing your teeth. You wake up and you’re full of thoughts on your general topic and you write them down. A quick edit, hit publish, and done. If it goes viral, fantastic. If peopel love it, amazing. If not, no big you try again next time.
When writing only once in a while, following happens:
> You reduce your writing output. And the ideas dry up. Writing becomes hard. You eke out 2, maybe 3, articles per week and it’s hard work. You struggle. You drag them out of your brain. It doesn’t feel right.
So, you write often, to keep yourself in "writing is easy" mode. And you are also probably improving in writing every time you do it little bit. Personally, I have observed the same effect on (different) creative activities. When you do it often, it is easy. When you do it only when you plan masterpiece, it is hard to impossible.
> You can’t just write every day, you have to create things worth writing about! Experiences, research, work.
It seems at some point he/she finds the writing must be something more than just writing
C players read B players writing about A players.
You want your writing to be A player stuff. When you fall to B player level or less you’re just an unpaid journalist shouting with the masses.
A level stuff takes time. Time you don’t have if you spend it all on just writing.
Well the 2 O-1 visas, 1 upcoming greencard (fingers crossed), and ~$250k in infoproduct sales have been nice :)
I rarely feel like I have nothing relevant or interesting to say. When I write daily for 3 weeks straight it gets a little wobbly.
The problem for me is that the brain gets full and I have too many ideas rattling around in there. With a lesser publishing schedule I can create time to write/work on bigger long-term projects (like a book), but what ends up happening are these long HN comments and such because the writing has to go somewhere.
Another issue is that with less publishing, suddenly nothing feels important enough. There's only 2 slots, better make them good! And that's paralyzing.
More slots is better, but then there's no time for longer higher impact projects.
If anything, I grew more careful about frequency. I want my readers to know that if they receive a post notification in mail, it is worth reading. And quality seems to be in a slightly inverted relation to frequency in my case.
But I do not feel 'rusty' until the gap extends to two weeks or so. Which it rarely does.
Really? Why make writing conditional? And what do you mean by 'worth'? Worth to whom?
I fell into the same bear trap and I ended up blocking myself. The challenge is to step away from attributing self-importance to what you write and make your writing superfluous. There are no rules except for those you encumber yourself with.
For sure, it's perfectly valid to set goals for yourself. Like attaining wide readership, connecting with others, sharing what you know and what you've experienced, establishing an identity for yourself as a writer, contributing to a field of knowledge,... Even so, those are choices you make for yourself, not obligations. You don't owe your readers your writing.
Sol LeWitt wrote a response to Eva Hesse who made the same complaint about the hardships of creation. Here's Benedict Cumberbatch reading that letter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSMIgsPj5M
Both artists became front-runners of post-modernism and post-minimalism.
Now, none of the above implies that selecting, curating, editing, reviewing, reflecting,... should go out of the window. It means that when you sit at your desk - feet in the air, shooting pencils at your ceiling, thinking about what you're going to write - becoming acutely aware of how you judge yourself in the back of your head and being able to step back from that becomes a valuable skill.
Per Neil Gaiman, your Inner Inquisition won't even remember the finer details of the hour long questioning sessions it submitted your thought process to in 5 months time.
Does this refer to the baseball 'at bat' or some other writing terminology, please? Thank you.
Some questions I might have...
- Are people reaching you out to work with you?
- Any deals thanks to your blog?
- Are People influenced in what you write about?
- Anything else?
All directly and indirectly thanks to my writing.
Sure, but how about you intertwine the process of creating things and writing about them?
I don't remember the exact reference but I remember reading an article by someone who uses something like a Zettelkasten to write down his thoughts and insights in small digestable pieces and then creates an outline for an article / a book once a pattern of thought emerges and he feels ready.
I really liked this approach as you don't need to filter yourself in your daily writing practice – no one will read your notes, so it's okay if they're not perfect or relevant to millions of people or whatever.
EDIT: Found the reference! It wasn't Zettelkasten but Evergreen note-taking (though the author does reference Zettelkasten):
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PBVkZ2SvsAgFXkjHsycBeyS6Cw...
Original, Spectral: https://i.imgur.com/SBS8iQG.png
Source Serif Pro: https://i.imgur.com/AM8KSUC.png
substack.com##body:style(font-family: Arial !important)
Something like Helvetica with good spacing and high contrast is the best for reading online.
I’m pointing the letter spacing. Doesn’t matter if it’s serif or sans-serif. If the fitting is bad, it’s going to be difficult to read. The vision system recognizes word shapes and it’s sensitive to how much space is between letters (kerning is a bit different, usually pairs of glyphs).
Orthogonally, can you cite the scientific source that claims sans serif is better on displays? Curious when it was published. I wonder if it still applies to retina displays and hidpi screens.
Were any of those studies conducted after high DPI displays became commonplace? Other than backlighting, I can't think of much that would distinguish a serif font on a high DPI display from one in print.
Late 2019 I started writing on a topic I'm passionate about- cheap entry into amateur radio. I wrote more than ever, about 12000 words. Not much by novelist standards, but more than I'd written on any single subject before it. And I have a lot more material to write, once I can find the brain power to sit down and fix it up. One of the subjects of my writing was a product that's been since discontinued (the BITX40 if anyone is wondering) and so it's stagnant- but it's all there and I have more writing to do.
I wish this were the motto of all writers. There is already too much “sentence inflation” online...succinctness needs a comeback.
For what it's worth, it's long and rambling. The abject incoherence of their writing fails to hold your attention.
> I needed write about it ...
> you’ll run out of things write about ...
> I take that as a sign that to not hold anything back.
> in the guise of letting you knowing me better
The article is riddled with various typos.
Let me refer to this HN commentary:
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
For what it's worth, I agree with you. But I think this criticism could have been phrased more constructively.
For instance, 'Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People' is a perfectly fine article in isolation, but to bring it up in direct response to an article is tantamount to calling the author insane.
New TV series which are slowly converting every original work of art into something that can be passively consumed on the couch. And the remakes and resurrections and remixes of proven favourites. More podcasts than there are hours in the week. Reams of self-published books, endless blog posts, often highly detailed and very well researched. Then all the tweets, social media posts, videos, not to mention very high quality youtube content...
It's a deluge. I find myself paralysed sometimes, unable to choose what to look at next. Being a content creator (artist?) must surely become dminished in the face of this overwhelming amount of content.
It isn't going away, this democratisation of content publishing. But I wonder if we will ever have any 'classics' ever again.
Also: less books and fewer authors in the past, so some books bubble to the top and are considered a classic for several reasons. Many people read them. Nowadays, everything is more fragmented, which can be a good thing.
It is so common nowadays that I find myself automatically skipping the first paragraph altogether.
I've recently been reading essays by G.K Chesteron and William Hazlitt. They are incredibly verbose by modern standards. They spend many long sentences teasing out shades of meaning and subtle implications. They take extremely long run-ups to their topic, often starting with several paragraphs on something that seems unrelated before cleverly integrating it into the main thesis. Instead of clearly stating a thesis and arguing for it, they often layer related concepts and arguments, and they expect the reader to figure out the associations, analogies, and references. But both writers are widely acknowledged to been masters of prose style
Some people appreciate "a fancy prose style" in the same way they appreciate complex music. It's more about using language and argument to craft something intricate and elegant than a plain information dump.
(I personally can't stand the writing style, but I get the appeal.)