from Hacker News

More people should write (2012)

by jsomers on 11/16/23, 1:30 AM with 84 comments

  • by ravenstine on 11/18/23, 4:42 PM

    The reason I don't write is that I'm unconvinced that a worthwhile number of people will find my writings and actually read them in 2023.

    I'm fine with doing all my writing on HN. If you look at the comments section of my profile, it might as well be a microblog.

  • by yawnxyz on 11/18/23, 10:47 PM

    What about people who write for themselves, and somehow end up on the homepage of Hacker News? You'll end up getting roasted by people like this guy: > Disagree. Writing a blog post is like getting on stage. You need to come on stage with a dream that you’re going to dazzle the audience with your show. Your blog is so interesting that it’s worth the time to read it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324486

  • by Apocryphon on 11/18/23, 2:11 PM

    Is to post different from writing? Considering that so much of online user-generated content these days are posts, comments, replies. I’m not even talking about fluffy exhibitionist social media posts or incoherent comments on news articles. I mean supposedly more highbrow comments on special interest aggregator sites such as this. Forums and bulletin boards.

    Does that constitute writing? Or are we just creating more ephemeral chaff?

  • by hasoleju on 11/18/23, 12:40 PM

    As someone who just started writing regularly a few weeks ago this piece is very encouraging!

    I'm very curious if I will be able to make writing a habit. In the past I often quit new behaviors after a few months.

    I discovered this quitting behavior a year ago and since I'm aware of it I found a lot of examples where this happened in my past. Now I see everything I start as part of a big experiment to test which things stick. So that I can learn which properties of a habit make it stick with me.

  • by BizarreByte on 11/18/23, 4:01 PM

    I don’t write because writing is tied to some very bad memories. I’m terrified of people reading what I write and humiliating me, it wouldn’t be the first time.

    Me innermost thoughts remain mine alone as a result.

  • by mrcsd on 11/18/23, 4:39 PM

    I've recently started writing daily, since September. Setting a daily word target was what worked for me, I do at least 1600 a day and try not to write too much more. If you're writing a first draft of around 90k words then it will take only 56 days to get there at 1.6k a day. My realisation that this was actually a pretty small time commitment really helped me finally take the plunge.

    This is obviously an old idea, and indeed I'm just copying a similar process to Haruki Murakami's. I definitely recommend his series of essays on being a novelist: Novelist as a Vocation (this really helped me).

    On to second draft now and moving from daily word count to number of chapters or paragraphs edited has helped as just a metric for pace. Doesn't mean it's quality writing, just that I have a sensation of movement and progress.

  • by photochemsyn on 11/18/23, 2:25 PM

    related & useful:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061078

    Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well (pragmaticengineer.com)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37033403

    Some tactics for writing in public (jvns.ca)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118883

    Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better (addyosmani.com)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143853

    Vim Is Saving Me Hours of Work When Writing Books and Courses (nickjanetakis.com)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854332

    Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim (keleshev.com)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24628549

    Writing a book: is it worth it? (kleppmann.com)

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 11/19/23, 1:09 AM

    I agree about the topic.

    I'm not really a fan of "You should" stuff. I always try to word it as "I do this," or "When we do this", etc.

    Little less "dictatorial," but then, I'm used to dealing with folks that are very contrarian, and have learned the futility of trying to get others to do something; even when it directly benefits them.

    Because of this, I have been accused of "narcism," and "making it all about me." I guess we can't win for losing.

    But I love to write. The problem is, it takes a lot of time and energy. I have been quite occupied with a project, the last couple of years, and that has interfered with my writing.

  • by Animats on 11/18/23, 10:38 PM

    > write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.

    This is from 2012, when social media had not yet taken over the world. Now we're drowning in a sea of verbiage from people writing about themselves.

  • by burritofanatic on 11/18/23, 7:02 PM

    Your writing has stayed with me, and I occasionally remember bits of your essays many years later. Pleased to see your articles in recent months in the New Yorker. Congrats on being a dad!

  • by inglor_cz on 11/18/23, 3:36 PM

    I love writing. I have more than 1000 articles under my belt and eight books, all in the last 7 years.

    Writing helps you discipline your thoughts. All too often, logical gaps or nuggets of ignorance in a seemingly watertight argument only turn up when you commit your thoughts to the paper. (Well, word processor.) And, vice versa, thinking without writing things down tends to be infected with sloppiness.

    Write things, if only for yourself and your future self. You may also find out that you have a knack for it. In that case, godspeed.

  • by imhoguy on 11/18/23, 10:48 PM

    I don't write because: 1) I don't find writing in my native language interesting, 2) I am not fluent enough to write in English, 3) I think I would feel quite embarrassed to share my views under my name.

    But I am contemplating about writing under pseudonyms with LLM proofreader assistant. Actually I do it right now with HN but without AI part although these are short creations.

  • by jheriko on 11/18/23, 2:43 PM

  • by banzz on 11/19/23, 2:04 PM

    I would write but the problem is that I write (and say) things that at first are mildly incoherent, not particularly well formed -- as you can see in my comment -- and don't always align with what I think. First impressions matter, and I don't want people to remember the bad ones. I regret writing about Python when I was just starting out in programming as a kid, and then having that blog post mentioned on Reddit almost 20 years later, with people being rude about it because it's trendy to be like that online. Fortunately I was smart enough not to post under my real name.

  • by kingkongjaffa on 11/18/23, 1:26 PM

    I love reading and writing. Do you all have any advice for writing more and writing better?

  • by jodrellblank on 11/18/23, 5:38 PM

    > "It’s like what happens to a room during a game of “I Spy”: if your friend spies something red, the red stuff glows."

    The only I Spy I know is "I spy with my little eye something beginning with...". Is there another common version where people describe the appearance of the thing instead of the spelling of the name?

  • by Obscurity4340 on 11/18/23, 4:16 PM

    Dialectical formats and "responding" to shit is seemingly the most I can generally handle. If I was "comfier" I would probably put my heart into it a bit more but I think I do ok on the creating/consuming balance

  • by adamquek on 11/16/23, 1:48 AM

    Insightful. Too bad the author apparently stopped writing for 10 years now.

  • by narinxas on 11/18/23, 1:16 PM

    the more people out there that write, the less writtings by people are worth

    scarcity never creates value, but it always incresases it

    but also: the more pople have written, the cheaper text and AI bot training become

    which makes me feel in a funny situation, the more I write, the better I get at it, but it also makes it simpler for AIs bots to learn my style and make it worthless by the inverse-scarcity phenomenon