Just Write | Hacker News Reader

Just Write

robert.bearblog.dev

159 pointsHermanMartinus93 comments

There are many simple reasons to write. Nothing fancy.

Just to name a few (I have a daily blog):

- I kickstart my day with my own thoughts, not someone else's (i.e. social media).

- I can feel I created something instead of just (mindlessly) consuming

- I can work out what I really think about something: when you start to write what you think, you need to understand it or at least order your thoughts

- I have an ever growing vault of things I can point to (I do this a lot)

- I always keep an eye out for interesting things to blog about. It makes you notice more.

- I enjoy it!

The audience is 1 (me).

If there are other people who want to read it, great! But I mainly write to/for me. So why don't I just keep a diary? Accountability. I have to hit publish every day and make what I post coherent. My diary (which I also have) is more incoherent and definitely more boring.

I love this. I keep a diary but, because it's private, I can skip a day, or a few days, without regret. I like the accountability of it being 'public' (even if no one but me finds it).

I do a better job with "Just draw" and "Just play music" although I don't publish those online either. Now I'm thinking maybe I should.

If you don't have a tendency to yak shave, I highly recommend setting up your own site with drawings or doodles (or anything else you create) then update it whenever and however the fuck you want.

I started potato.horse by publishing a bunch of old late night doodles and notes taken during boring management meetings. There's no expectation of quality. And that's very important for me, as I have a tendency towards perfectionism. Since perfectionism is all or nothing, I'd never get anything done.

I also noticed that it was so much easier to publish stuff there vs. on IG, since social media puts us in a constant performative mode.

The feeling of creation is actually really satisfying and over time I've found it more enjoyable than straight consumption. Don't have the numbers off the top of my head but people generally consume far more than they create, and they would rather read other people's content than write their own stuff. There is some satisfaction from reading someone else's ideas but IMO it doesn't beat the feeling you get from coming up with and presenting your own opinions. This is true for articles/blogging as well as writing fiction.

I also second the idea of publishing your content publicly - it encourages you to keep the quality up as someone might read it!

> I kickstart my day with my own thoughts, not someone else's (i.e. social media).

That’s a really interesting thought, thanks.

I noticed (also from my daily notes) that I'm much more focused if I don't use HN or social media before 4-5 pm. I also apply this to email when I can.

I feel like opening your mail app or HN before starting work allows everyone else drop a bunch of unplanned background jobs in your head.

You can also heal yourself with writing: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170601-can-writing-abou...

> - I kickstart my day with my own thoughts, not someone else's (i.e. social media).

I like how similar and the same time different our approaches are.

I wrote an app to develop my writing habit (https://enso.sonnet.io). It's a "stream of consciousness" notepad separating writing from editing which makes it harder for you to edit yourself. I've been using it every day for the past 3 years, with ca. 800 words per day and I suck at sticking to habits. Check it out!

My notes are mostly private but I also write longer, researched articles, usually with an outline. As an experiment I wrote https://sonnet.io/posts/sit using Ensō, then spent 1 week rewriting and editing.

> - I have an ever growing vault of things I can point to (I do this a lot)

Have you tried using Obsidian Publish? I use it non stop as a personal knowledge graph and a brain dump. I have a different flow for posting public notes since my site runs on 11ty, but if I didn't care about branding, I'd just use it instead.

What's been holding this project back from being released on platforms other than Mac?

I also wanted to say that it's amazing that you have these calendar slots for people to speak to you. What has your experience been with this? How long have you been doing it? Where did you get the idea? What kind of people show up?

> What's been holding this project back from being released on platforms other than Mac?

Time and focus:

- most of my users use Macs (60%) and I had to pick one platform to start - the web version is perfectly capable (PWA w. offline support)

> I also wanted to say that it's amazing that you have these calendar slots for people to speak to you. What has your experience been with this? How long have you been doing it? Where did you get the idea? What kind of people show up?

I can't recommend it enough! I set it up almost 3 years ago to keep in touch with people after I left London during the pandemic.

Regarding the people, they're generally kind, curious and open. I'd say 2/3 of them are your typical HN readers, product minded engineers, founders, students, some of them really accomplished and some just at the beginning of their path etc... I met a homeless software engineer who turned out to be the author of a project I followed as a teen, then some writers, CXO-level MIT or Berkley alumni with tons of experience. The range is wide.

People are much nicer outside of social media or HN, so this feels a bit like time travel to the period when the discourse was less polarised.

I'm drafting and article about this subject, so will use some of your questions as a reference -- thanks! You can follow me via RSS or the newsletter in the footer of an article. Or just come and say hi https://sonnet.io/posts/hi

> most of my users use Macs (60%) and I had to pick one platform to start

So are you using native technologies?

I must say it's really unique and cool what you're doing with the calendar slots.

> So are you using native technologies?

It's mostly a wrapper for a (slightly) better desktop UX on Mac. I'm using some native APIs, but mostly as a polyfill (e.g. better shortcut support, even cleaner UI, native save dialogs). I might put the app on the App Store, but I'm a bit tired of working with Apple bureaucracy.

I implemented the text editor in other technologies as an experiment (e.g. UIKit, SwiftUI) but web view + a wrapper seems to be the most stable and flexible approach.

> I must say it's really unique and cool what you're doing with the calendar slots.

Thanks! It's quite easy to start actually.

When I moved to an English speaking country a few years ago, I wanted to get better at writing.

On a snowy day, I wrote an email to a guy who writes for The New Yorker and whose articles frequently appear on HN.

In that email, I asked for advice on how to become better at writing.

I thought he’d never reply but he actually did.

His reply had a bunch of good advice, and writing a lot was one of them.

The other recommendations I got were these books:

* A sense of style - Pinker * Garner's Modern English Usage

Hope that helps someone else as much as it’s helped me.

A really good book is Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (https://www.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Joseph-M-Williams/dp/02...), notable because it uses a lot of examples to move step by step through the process of improving and clarifying what you've written. Far too often people think the first draft has to be perfect, when in reality writing well is more like rewriting well.

Just write, just code, just do accounting, just play the violin, just do math - it's relevant to any field, skill or passion.

Unironically the best way to learn higher math is to just do more of it. The more proofs you see and understand the easier it is to deal with more complex problems and the larger arsenal you have at your disposal.

Same for code.

But the key, I think, is that you have to try new things, which also includes deliberately attempting to improve what you already have via new approaches.

Avoiding uncomfortable situations e.g. during synthesis, is not going to help you learn anything as there's nothing to learn, at best you learn to type or write faster. It has to be deliberate, and you need to be relentless in the pursuit.

Sure to get better at something you have to practice, the more regular you are it the easier it gets?.

But writing has some other benefits which not all non-creative activities have. Some of the benefits make you a better person perhaps, things like the ability to formulate your thoughts and putting them is words really makes you a good communicator, by writing down things you offload your brain from the pressure of remembering something continuously, with time you learn to use writing as way to offload intrusive and sometimes debilitating thoughts/ideas/data from your working memory so you can keep doing what you are doing.

For some writing has helped with making time and space for other things in life as ones brain is not constantly trying to remember things all the time. We use public knowledge sources to forget certain things as they are quickly accessible and available, the same can be done with a a self documented personal knowledge bank.

Oh, another one - I'm wondering if this is like the story about shoeshiner giving the advice about stock market and investments. When everyone and their mother is telling you that you need to write then is it really good time to start to write?

For some reason idea of reading a book which content was partially generated is really really of putting to me. I already noticed multiple people claiming in the comments that they are using generative AI tools for writing and oh man I'm glad that I already read my share of SF/fiction so I can completely avoid new books from whole genre and especially new, non renowned authors.

> Oh, another one - I'm wondering if this is like the story about shoeshiner giving the advice about stock market and investments. When everyone and their mother is telling you that you need to write then is it really good time to start to write?

However, it can be challenging to avoid taking things to the extreme. For example, consider the internet. Eventually, even your shoeshiner might start talking about how cool the internet is as it becomes more mainstream (let's imagine we're in the 2000s). But should you avoid it simply because it's becoming more popular?

In the case of the internet, that might've been a good idea...

I hear what you’re saying but writing can become even less lucrative and still be a very good tool for yourself, your thoughts, your reasoning, your feelings etc. It doesn’t even have to be read by anyone else to help one get their thoughts sorted out. It could also be a therapeutic activity.

I’m writing a short sci-fi piece about a world that’s rotation was linked to the psionic energy of the creative thoughts of its inhabitants, and one day they discover mechanical tools to think for them. As the natural harmonic waves of psionic energy deminish the world starts to spin slower and slower.... and now I’m finished writing it. Very short indeed.

I think the key difference is that writing is less of a zero sum game than trading stocks for financial gain. One goal of getting better at writing is improving your ability to clarify your thoughts to the point where words come easily. Everybody writing more in principle /should/ reduce coordination barriers which pushes out the boundary of Largest Useful Group Size for any system of coordinating.

> Everybody writing more in principle /should/ reduce coordination barriers which pushes out the boundary of Largest Useful Group Size for any system of coordinating.

LargestUsefulGroupSize is already way underfilled due to the bottlenecking on GroupInterestSyncRate

> I'm wondering if this is like the story about shoeshiner giving the advice about stock market and investments.

This reminded me of when I recently overheard a server in a restaurant passionately talking about crypto investing like it was going to make him rich.

Not to detract from the message or discourage anyone from writing, but if you're looking to reproduce the specific career arc mentioned in the article it may be helpful to keep in mind that Lena Dunham started her career with well-connected parents and at least a modest amount of family wealth.

Thank you for mentioning this. I looked up her Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Dunham

Some points:

> Lena Dunham

> The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade.

> Oberlin College Creative Writing (BA), 2008

> She has a younger sibling, Cyrus, a 2014 graduate of Brown University

It's definitely true she had something of a leg up, but she still has to write. Except for having the space (time) to create and help starting her career through her family connections, to move forward and actually create a career, maintain a reputation, etc. she has to continue creating in one way or another.

absolutely - I'm really not trying to detract from Lena Dunham's work ethic (she's a prolific creator) nor from the thrust of the article which is encouraging other people to be prolific creators.

-- it's just that if someone else is writing a ton and wondering why they can't succeed, it's helpful to understand what other ingredients are involved.

I also think there's some amount confidence in one's prerogative to create and publish, when for example both of one's parents are also in creative fields. Confidence that creating is worth the effort and confidence that if one's creations improve in quality that there will be help to find an audience.

This is all very true.

True and at the same time, the advice still stands. Just write. Stephen King didn’t come from wealth and he kept at it until this day he can look back on a successful career in writing.

Really recommend his memoir: On Writing.

A couple of other resources about writing:

John Swartzwelder on writing scripts: https://www.thewrap.com/simpsons-writer-john-swartzwelder-su...

Revision Strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers: https://psychology.yale.edu/sites/default/files/sommers_onre...

Sommer's paper is classic in comp theory. This is a great suggestion.

I recently started a blog after years of thinking about starting one. I've only written a couple of posts so far, but it's been very satisfying. No one else may ever read them, but writing down the words from my head has helped complete my internal thoughts. I usually walk around with 3-4 internal "blog posts" in my head that are just milling around inside my head. Putting these down into an actual blog has filled some void that I didn't even know I had.

> No one else may ever read them

Where can we find it?

On HN click someone’s username to view their profile. Often such information is found there.

I read them, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I experienced the same re criticism.

I’m unsure about the diversity questions in the application form though. Do you think your new answers would have changed your outcome ?

I love to write, and I've found the biggest inhibitor to me actually doing it is the desire to have it be highly polished and "perfect", especially if I'm posting it online. I end up writing nothing at all. There was a recent post on here with a similar sentiment as "Just Write", but I'm having trouble finding it.

Are you referring to this? https://www.internetvin.tv/i-dont-like-making-the-best-thing...

No, sorry, I've still not been able to find it.

I agree, writing is something I like to do, but often don't as I question the relevance of my thoughts to others. I am realising it doesn't mater what others think, no one reads it anyway, and it is really something oersonal, like a diary. This post spurred me to write a post about posting, very meta I think.

> I just finished listening to a podcast about Lena Dunham

Which podcast?

Do write, but also check if you’re a nepo baby or not, that fact of life is of greater importance when it comes to getting recognition for your writing. In Lena Dunham’s case (i.e. the writer referenced by the author) both of her parents have Wikipedia pages of their own, both in the artistic sphere. If you’re not a nepo baby and if you’ll not get the recognition that you deserve there’s always a dedicated sub-Reddit or two for just your type of non-recognized and not-connected writers, I’d say there’s more writing talent in there than in all of Dunham’s “writings”.

An unexpected benefit of having a writing practice (not even consistent) is being able to go back 10 years and see what you were thinking at the time.

I have found great joy in looking at conversations with my friends over email, seeing my goals and opinions, etc. It's interesting to see how ideas you hold now have been brewing for years. Also lessons learned (and mistakes repeated) show up and are a good reminder of stuff you may have missed along the way.

I completely agree with this. During the past few months I started writing a lot more, first in Apple Notes, then in Obsidian. I used to write some blog posts, but then I started writing down everything I learn, cool code snippets I come up with, the results of a random benchmark I've run, or a summary of the article I just read. It's been great, even if you don't go back to those notes.

I would also encourage people to publish their writing[0][1], even if they feel incomplete. I've started doing it, and it feels liberating. You don't have to put a ton of pressure on the quality or potential usefulness, just write and share.

[0]: https://ricardoanderegg.com/posts/stream-of-thoughts-notes/ [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

I like "just write". I visited the Posthaven website [1] recently, after a while, and I noticed they have a new landing page with exactly this h1: Just write.

[1] https://posthaven.com/

The way that I think about this is that anyone who's good at skill X has put in the hours. Putting in the hours is not a sufficient condition for "getting good" or "being successful", but it is a necessary one. Each and every successful person has been obsessively devoted to their craft [0].

So, yeah, just write. If you want to write good stuff, there's a non-zero probability that you'll get there. But if you don't write, the probability drops to zero.

[0]: https://newsletter.param.codes/p/five-beats-a-day-for-three-...

Repetition creates mastery is the saying, but that's only part of it. In truth, repetition only creates habit. To create mastery you also need to focus on technique, progressive difficulty, and have a source of high quality feedback.

But isn't the habit necessary in the first place on the path to mastery?

Yes, but only if your creating a habit of something good. I can rewrite the same passage every day and I'll be very good at writing that passage. I don't think that is working toward mastery of writing.

My elementary music teacher would say: "practice makes permanent". If you practice bad habits, you get bad habits.

  I can rewrite the same passage every day and I'll be very good at writing that passage. I don't think that is working toward mastery of writing.

Theres a quote Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is insanity, I was not referring to that.

I was referring to the repetition of habit in this context of the post about writing, not about what you are writing.

I guess you need a set of habits. The habit to practice daily, the habit to improve, the habit to find and accept feedback...

But the main point of the article is "do it, and do it because you love it". That's the key. Forget about mastery and go with the flow. Experts can may make fun of you but if you do it because you love /doing it/ you don't care about comparisons.

I had to make a service for myself to get me to do just that. Just one text file and I add to it. No ceremony whatsoever, so no excuses not to write: https://post.mw

I had never heard of markwhen until today. It captures a tiny fraction of ideas that i had...but, you've had same/similar thoughts and gone and built the thing! Its amazingly impressive! Kudos to you for making this!

I agree with the article, but I have also found that taking breaks from a task, such as 'Don't do X,' and allowing my subconscious mind to process the information while I focus on other things, actually improves my performance. Although I cannot fully explain the science behind it, I have noticed that when I return to the task after a few days, it becomes easier to grasp.

For instance, if I want to improve my writing, I would practice writing frequently, but I would also take breaks from writing to let my mind rest and process the information. This way, I can become better at writing more quickly.

I am curious if this is related to burnout prevention.

Alternatively studies show that we "learn" from what we did, physically, during the day while we sleep.

At a macro level, this is the only reason I miss smoking. I used to solve problems during a smoke-break, and there's no compelling way to simulate it (however, I have no regrets about giving that habit up).

I've never smoked. But I get up from my desk and go for a walk when I get stuck and sometimes just when things are going a bit slowly. Occasionally I continue thinking about the problem but mostly I just enjoy the sunshine, the view of the river, etc. Works just the same

I started to smoke because it looked cool. Just like in the movies, in black and white. But in reality I did not look as good, it was expensice and bad for my health and my teeth got yellow. So I thought the only way to solve this is to transport myself into those old movies somehow. I could just be smoking away, looking great.

I have a foam ball. It's bigger than a tennis ball and very light, it's mean to teach children. And it's very cheap!

When I feel saturated and stuck I bounce the ball against the wall. It's so light that doesn't make any sound. It relaxes me and makes me feel refreshed. Give it a try if you work at home.

There are two sides to it, giving some habit a break which you built can be a good thing as you mentioned in some context as you get a fresh new look at the habit/hobby/topic after a break but it also could lead to not able to continue with it as you used to.

This definitely is a personality trait and not everyone has this issue but this inherently is why most people end up saying "I used to write 500 words a day but now I barely write 500 words a week". And then they start looking for learning to build new habits all over again...

I fall into that category by the way, short breaks are fine but if I take a long-ish break its really hard for me to go back to it as I now have occupied that time with something else which I struggle giving up.

So for people like me, instead of breaks I have started following this advice I read about building sustainable habits is to do things in moderation. Basically the idea being we tend to start a new habit with a lot enthusiasm which leads us to being overzealous and spend a lot of times some days on it as our creative juices are flowing but these are the things that lead to burnout eventually, so instead we set x amount of time per day for it and not cross that time this way we always have energy to do more, the excess energy of one day can be used to build more anticipation and let your subconscious mind plan for tomorrow as you do other things till the next time comes.

Writing is the easy part. I get stuck on the publishing part. I always worry that I'm going to publish something that people will dislike, and I think that reddit tainted my thinking in that way.

Often people critique a small part of what you wrote. If I'm feeling attacked, it helps to remember that it's often about one or two sentences in a several page article.

If the critique covers the entire article, either the person holds a different opinion (in which no one is 'right') or the premise of the article is false. Either way, it's good to hear why.

On the one off occasion that someone is writing hurtful comments (and you can't seem to get it out of your head), looking through that persons comment history often reveals a pattern of abrasive commentary and at least for me makes it easier not to take it personally.

If you have something to share, publish! There's always someone who will enjoy reading it, and that makes it worth it.

Don't publish it then.

I had this blocker to writing as well. The key for me was to stop writing for your readers, write for yourself. Who cares if someone disagrees with your thoughts?

https://bower.sh/on-will-to-action

Not sure if "writing" is the easy part if.. say, you're trying to write a book.

Some of my favorite posts here are my most downvoted.

I write a lot in this HN comment box and post and then immediately delete. Probably my favorite.

But I've written a couple of books and that kind of writing, re-writing, editing and publishing is radically different from posting online.

I would agree that making something good, large, and structured is quite hard. I never finished at least two ideas along those lines because I could never decide where to go and how to finish them.

If the muses strike me just right I feel like I could write for ages though. Then it goes in a directory somewhere, never to be seen again.

And, the more you write, the better you'll get at it too. Same goes for reading, my desire to read has always been greater than my actual...well reading. But the more you "just do it", the better you'll be at it. I remember reading and just having a hard time retaining anything I read. But the more I did it, the better I got and now I can retain almost every kind of book/article I read (and I also cannot put some books down, haha).

"Just do it"! And the more you do it, the better you'll get.

> It doesn't matter how you do it, just keep doing it. The same mindset can be applied to just about any kind of creative work.

I like to make videos. I don't care if people view them. I like flying my drone, capturing video, editing video, etc. I have a YouTube channel, but honestly, I'd be doing this because I want to.

Making video is my writing. I do it for myself. Sometimes others enjoy it too, but that's not its primary purpose.

For those that have writer's block, I highly recommend listening or reading Steven Pressfield's talks about overcoming resistance.

Here's one of hist blog posts titled Is Writing Fun https://stevenpressfield.com/2010/05/is-writing-fun/

I want to highlight another point of this post:

"I just finished listening to a podcast about Lena Dunham. I didn't know anything about her, have never seen any of her work and maybe never will."

This is something I do regularly, I listen to interviews/conversations of people that have nothing to do with what I do, and let me tell you: I learn a ton... I really, really recommend it...

A while ago, I started writing small guides for myself. As a growing developer, everyday I learn and have to do something new. I think it would be nice to write a blog, because most of those new things I've figured out by my own (with research and little help of docs and articles), not everything is done and well explained on the internet.

I play the guitar, every day, for no reason. But I'd like to add that it's very hard to play guitar on a napkin.

Very true. I experienced it first hand. My colleague kept writing blog posts. After a while he had enough material to make several books out of it. He told me it was not difficult because he loved the subject he was writing about. The only difficulty he had to overcome was his innate laziness :)

Yours, KodingKitty

Huh, it was a couple days back I wrote a poem titled just the same. For anyone interested, here you go https://i.hsen.tech/verse/just-write/ :)

Nice, but ... I wanted an article about old school WordPress, way back in the day. Wasn't that saying part of the Admin interface up until they added pages?

When he see's Throw Momma From the Train it's really going to bake his noodle.

> "A writer writes, always." -- Larry Donner (Billy Crystal)

100 Days to Offload: https://100daystooffload.com/

Probably, but this is not enough. You also need to to have low expectations.

Now, will chart gee pee tee play a role in your writing efforts?

Lena Dunham? The girl who molested her sister?

Thanks for the motivation

Will AI play a role?

Maybe he should write about opportunity costs.

> Just write

> I just finished listening to a podcast

Ironic.

Or just get GPT to do it for you, probably better as well.

The nice thing about AI being able to do it is that it gives you the freedom to simply enjoy things with far reduced performance pressure.

I'm not a professional chef, I don't cook as well as one, but it's still satisfying to prepare a meal.

I'm not as good at Korean as a native speaker and not as effective at acquiring it as many other students, but it's still nice to progress at my own pace.

Just write if you want to.

This is my attitude. Doing these kinds of things for your own satisfaction is something that gets majorly overlooked. Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut talking about writing a poem every day just for the heck of it.

Even if you're not actively trying to progress, writing/coding/working out/cooking/whatever else can be done for its own sake and still be rewarding, and sometimes it's good to resist the urge to compete with others or even monetize hobbies.

It's true freedom! The ability to live and fill life as we choose. Something we don't value enough.

As a person who loves playing chess but will never be as good as an IM (let alone GMs or Magnus or engines), I've had to internalize this. It's a good feeling.

I think there's an important point embedded here, but it's subtle. That is, the important thing to realize is that you're having an improvisational conversation with an intelligent agent, but one that is not sentient. And like two jazz musicians riffing over a mode, there is a much deeper architecture to that conversation than may not be apparent to the casual observer.

So while I think regular writing is an important part of thinking, and AI is an important part of our evolution in thinking, it is a mistake to think that we should just "let the AI do the writing" or "get GPT to do it for you" as it will be frequently wrong, particularly when the conversation rises to the complexity of requiring sensemaking, i.e. it's not just objective fact that's not difficult for machines to compute, but rather messy, subjective consensus where the need for the conversation with AI becomes particularly powerful and may, in fact, change our course in ways we could not anticipate. That is, the emergent sensemaking we require is a collaboration of humans and machines that arises just as Kubernetes did, by realizing that the need is for improvisation AND orchestration, not one OR the other.

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