Ask HN: What's your writing process?

My comfort zone when writing is short posts on no real schedule. As a result I have a couple of hundred outlines and fragments of posts that might well never get published, mostly because they require writing at greater length than I'm used to. But recently I've been pushing my own envelope by writing a series of longer (1500-2500 word) guest posts to an externally imposed deadline. My 'process' has been to:

a) Agonize and procrastinate all day for several weekends, b) Somehow miraculously come up with an idea and write a lot, c) Circulate a first draft to a couple of friends that nobody understands, d) Use their comments to publish a much improved post that's still of questionable intelligibility.

It's been a great experience even if just to help me clarify what's in my own head: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/blogging-residencies/#consensualhe...

I used to write in my diary from a very early age so blogging came very naturally to me. When I write I like to present the topic to a reader as I saw it. So if I do a movie or a game review (I do those a lot :) I would write it as if I was describing the movie or a game to a friend. I would talk about the experience of it.

For instance I reviewed Dead man(http://www.staticshin.com/dead-man/) last year and I opened the review with the following lines

>William Blake( Johnny Depp) has nothing to look forward to in his home town. He is unemployed. His parents are dead. His lover has left him. He has only enough savings to pay for his fare to the machine town where he has been promised a job as an accountant. But when he arrives there he finds that the position has already been filled by some one else.

It immediately told the reader what I thought of William Blake which is exactly how I would have described the movie to a friend.

A constant that I have noticed in my writing is that I write well on topics that I want to write about. How do I know what I want to write? By writing. It is funny but it works every time. I have tonnes of half finished blog posts/ideas that I initially thought would be interesting but turned out commonplace.

Two things that I feel are very important for writing (digitally) are

1. A good text editor.

2. A quiet place.

I think it would be a good investment for any blogger to learn markdown and yet I see a lot of writers fiddling around with wsywig editors that constantly break their chain of thought.

Point 2 is self explanatory, I think, since a large part of writing is thinking and if you can think clearly you will write clearly.

One adivce that I absolutely hate is

> write on a niche topic

I don't like blogs that talk about a single topic. When I read a blog I want to know more about the writer as much as I want to know more on the topic. And I know that every individual has many different tastes so why limit yourself?

Sometimes I record a voice memo and transcribe it. Most of the time I just write and re-write and re-write and re-write until i'm happy.

First I just get the content out of my brain and into written form, then move things around, add stuff, remove etc till i'm happy with the flow. Once i've fixed flow, then I get a few people from my target audience to read it just in case they have any objections to the content in anyway. I then make adjustments based on feedback and then i put my content in hemingwayapp and tighten up the text to make the writing bolder.

After that, i get my wife to check it for general readbility and then i re-read it myself once more.

Mostly it's just writing and re-writing till i'm happy.

I write mostly about movies and I started writing my first reviews with a notepad inside the theater, making quick notes without looking as I notice something (just anything since it will be filtered later).

After four months I got confidence to just make quick notes on my brain and remember the more important ones in the final creditd. When it is write time, I dump a lot of ideas growing up with these notes.

This is my hobby so I am not interessed in spend too much time doing this (better watch another movie) so I force myself to write for every movie I watch and do it as quick as possible. The brute force is slowly improving my writing skills, do I am now more interessed in style guiding.

I wouldn't say I have much of a "process" to be completely honest. I just start with a theme or idea that is on my mind, then start writing. When I get to a certain point, I may start looking for references to cite, or other material to link to, or whatever. If it's something really important, I may actually go Google around looking for a specific quote or other piece of supporting material. But mostly, it's a sort of "stream of consciousness" thing where I just write.

At times (but hardly always) I will try to stick to something roughly like the "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em" thing, but even then, it's not like I sit down, draw out an outline, or use a mind-map or anything.

After I have something that seems like it's "in the ballpark" I edit and tweak and revise and massage it until I consider it good enough to publish.

That's about it.

Start with a note memo. Boil down to 140 chars, tweet it and see if I get engagement. Outline. Research for related writing. Write too much against outline. Edit to 500 words. Add links. Promote on Twitter, Facebook.

Writing.

It's a habit and the more of it I do, the better I get on average. It's easier to come up with a blog post if I'm writing in a journal. It's easier to write in the journal if I've written in it the day before, or earlier in the day, etc.

At the end of the day, writers write. Here's Charles Stross writing about not writing:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-redacte...

I begin with an outline. Then write stream of consciousness until I get stuck. Then I go back and edit what I wrote.

When I get to the place I left off, I return to stream of consciousness writing.

This style really preserves my voice.

Finally, I try to cut the length down by 50% or more.

Before I forget I love this post on writing by james la fond

http://www.jameslafond.com/article.php?id=210

My writing process starts with things I think about and talk about with other people. I often mentally hash something out while walking well before I sit down to write.

I also try to collect snippets of things I want to develop at some point and create stubs that I come back to later, sometimes months later. It's something of a collage and sometimes it results in something good. (Made the front page of HN a few times this year, so I think it's better than it used to be. In theory.)