

What to Write About - sgdesign
http://sachagreif.com/what-to-write-about/

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JumpCrisscross
More important is _who_ you write for. Different audience-writer feedback
systems optimise for different things. Pithy, data-heavy, and ephemeral HN
comments won't port handsomely to a foreign policy op-ed, which values flow
and lucidity less than brevity.

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.

~~~
sgdesign
Good point. But I wouldn't say it's _more_ important, for the simple reason
that you can write for the wrong audience or with the wrong tone, and still
get writing practice and slowly sharpen up your writing skills.

But if you don't know _what_ to write about, you might very well never get
started at all.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
If you write the wrong thing for the right audience you should find out rather
quickly. If you write the wrong thing for nobody, or worse, a huddle of
idiots, you will not find out how bad you are or have bad habits encouraged.

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jonsterling
Or here's a novel idea: instead of looking for things to write about (like,
“My Top Ten Rails Tips” or “How This Single Mom Made Bank From Home Only Three
Hours A Day”), why not just only write when you have something to write about?

That is to say, wait until you have something that is so important or cool to
you that you have to show the world!

~~~
sgdesign
This is not a good idea for a simple reason: you need the practice.

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.

~~~
jonsterling
The oft-repeated soundbite, “The only way to get better at writing is to
write” certainly bears a fair amount of truth. And I definitely agree with
you, inasmuch as you say that practice writing should remain unpublished until
polished.

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.

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mbrock
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Hacker News.

~~~
shrishinde
Why do you feel so?

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jewel
These suggestions are helpful to me. I tried writing for 15 minutes every day
this year, but I really had a hard time finding what to write.

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dogma72
That is biggest problem I have on my blog. What to write about. This helped a
little but not a huge amount. Still stuck.

~~~
sgdesign
Well, are we talking about a personal blog or startup blog? What market are
you in? And what are your goals for your blog?

