Show HN: How to Build a Writing Habit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How to Build a Writing Habit

writinghabit.com

29 pointspeter_suhm9 comments

I've been using a combination of Obsidian and Otter/AndroidRecorder to get writing more frequently. I have daily notes for streaming odd thoughts into and while I walk the dog I turn on Otter (or if I have no signal Android Recorder) and just talk to myself as I walk.

I come back from my walk with 1000-2000 words which I run through AI to clean up and remove all the dog commands and garbled bits. I use another preconfigured setup to link those to existing subjects and extract tags, topics and summaries. All of a sudden I have a wealth fragments of my thinking.

Often I will listen to a chapter of a book while I walk and then try to note down my thoughts about the chapter. With the same result, I've now got an enormous PKM covering all of the things I care about.

When I come to actually write a blog post I'm just pulling all my already written notes and snippets together.

It has taken a lot of time but I've imported and organised lots of old notes and notebooks into Obsidian as well. Putting them in dedicated notes or just into daily notes. My PKM is now ~120k words (not all of them mine, there are quotes and snippets from elsewhere as well)

Thanks for sharing Peter because this has a lot of practical advice. I will use some of it.

May I ask about editing: how long would you spend editing something like that blog post? What's your editing process? How do you know when you are finished editing? Do you edit as a soon as you have finished writing, do you edit the same day? or a few days later?

When I was writing my tech book "A Developer's Guide to .NET in Azure," I had a little trouble getting into a writing streak, but I tried every day for at least 20 minutes to get my thoughts on a page. It's easier when you have a technical book. I built out a templatized format for my chapters, and I could work on the background of the resource, the security, the code example, etc., and then put it together. Keeping your writing simple on some days looked like just making bullet points of ideas and sections, then sitting down another day and formulating them into paragraphs.

I really enjoyed this little page and cheat sheet! I've wanted to start writing more frequently. Not that I feel my thoughts are all that valuable or groundbreaking, but I like the concept of forcing it to get out of my mind and allowing it to live somewhere else so I don't feel the need to "hold it" mentally. The issue I run into is when writing for something other than a blog post, I'm just not really sure where to start. If I don't have an end-goal in mind with the content, I find it really hard to begin. How did you work through that?

Yep — I wrote a bit about under "How to always have something to write about": https://writinghabit.com/#avoid-writers-block

I'm trying not to think about the end goal too much and just train the writing muscle instead. Then when you have something you actually want to write, the writing is so much easier.

> Writing is an effective way to achieve this because you don’t need to find another person who wants to hear about your idea

Shouldn't you still have some sort of idea of the audience you're writing for? And for example, I am more accustomed to seeing myself in different spheres of life, where I behave differently, is it possible to combine all of this?

If your goal is publishing something, I think it's great to keep an audience in mind. But if you're struggling to get a writing habit going, forget about all that stuff and just write. Thinking about all that stuff is why it's so hard to get started! It's the root of writer's block. I talk about that a bunch in the guide.

That’s usually the same advice I give to people when they ask the question in the context of personal blogs: just write. About whatever. Anything you find interesting to you is a worthy subject.

Communicating through words is a big weakness of mine and writing regularly is something I'm trying to do for several years now.

This guide is great. I hope it will help me to actually establish this habit now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com