What to Write About
sachagreif.com
sachagreif.com
I am most proud of my short essays, often on humanitarian or mathematical topica, emailed to a few close friends, colleagues, and academics. Perhaps this is out of nostalgia given how much my long-form writing has degraded over the years.
But if you don't know what to write about, you might very well never get started at all.
That is to say, wait until you have something that is so important or cool to you that you have to show the world!
The only way to get better at writing is to write. So I strongly suggest you make an active effort to regularly find things to write about, instead of just waiting for inspiration to strike.
Now on the other hand that doesn't mean you necessarily need to publish everything you write. If it sucks, keep it in your drafts folder and maybe revisit it later.
But I suggest that reading, as a complementary activity, can also improve your writing quite a bit. In fact, it's probably the case that if the sorts of people who insist on writing one vapid article per day as “practice” would write a bit less and read a bit more, they might even learn something.
In my (rather short so far) life, I’ve found for my part that where the received wisdom is to trade dignity and professionalism for practice and experience, something along the lines of the opposite tends to work pretty well. My experience is that you don’t need to “throw it all out there” and produce a large body of substandard work in order to learn to do good work (although, this certainly does work for many people). I’ve been more happy with systematic approaches, where one tries to improve skills not by public brute force, but rather by private practice, emulation, and deliberation.
"I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them." -- Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html
For example if you were into statistics you might collect data while you play your game(s) and create something to explain it to others.
As you can see I am not great at finding ideas myself.
Even after you have the topic it's difficult. I am hoping that practice makes it easier. I am currently facing this where I am trying to write a post but can't figure out who am I writing to? Before having written anything I thought it would be just fine; I've written essays creating a post should be easy.