

How do I write so much, you ask? Well, glad you asked - lionhearted
http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=195

======
avinashv
#11 FTA:

> Try to think of every visitor as an honored guest. If you think of “web
> traffic,” 15 visitors is disappointing. If you think of 15 people deciding
> to spend time with you they could spend anywhere, and they’re choosing to
> spend it with you – they’re choosing to spend their life energy reading your
> thoughts – that’s very cool and humbling, and suddenly chugging along with
> 15 readers feels pretty good.

That really resonates well with me. Blogging feels--at least to me--like an
isolated platform. It's me writing, and people may or may not read. But the
idea that the author presents here is almost like sitting in a room with
friends and telling them a story. It's a nice image.

~~~
reitzensteinm
It really is a nice way to think about things. Once, an early Microsoft
employee reviewed one of my games on his blog, saying he'd been playing it for
hours and enjoying it. Surrounding the review were posts about taking his
Ferrari racing on track days.

I got a huge kick out of the fact that he chose to spend those hours with my
game, given the entertainment it was competing against... though to be honest,
given the choice I'd take the Ferrari!

------
jacquesm
So, is this one of the crappy ones or one of the good ones ;) ?

Agreed whole heartedly though, if you are a 'producer' there will be tons of
stuff that is not fantastic but that might be useful to somebody.

The funny thing is that it is unpredictable, what will be appreciated and what
not. Sometimes I fire off a 10 minute blog post and it gets retweeted for days
or even weeks after, and sometimes I work for hours and hours on something and
nobody cares.

I see the 'lower grade stuff' as taking a break from the other stuff whilst
still keeping busy. Sooner or later you find yourself engaged with more
interesting things again, if you 'broke the routine' just because you're not
doing anything worthwhile you'd find your source of inspiration dried up
pretty quickly.

So keep busy, by all means, and fail often, looking forward to the gems. Like
this one: <http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=95>

~~~
lionhearted
> So, is this one of the crappy ones or one of the good ones ;) ?

I don't think it'll ever go into a museum, but I'm hoping there's some value
in there for people :)

> The funny thing is that it is unpredictable, what will be appreciated and
> what not. Sometimes I fire off a 10 minute blog post and it gets retweeted
> for days or even weeks after, and sometimes I work for hours and hours on
> something and nobody cares.

Isn't that the strangest thing? Yeah. Consistency of output leads to results.

> I see the 'lower grade stuff' as taking a break from the other stuff whilst
> still keeping busy. Sooner or later you find yourself engaged with more
> interesting things again, if you 'broke the routine' just because you're not
> doing anything worthwhile you'd find your source of inspiration dried up
> pretty quickly.

Great observation, this. I re-read it a couple times to get it down. Yes, even
if the magnificent work isn't flowing, you keep going for inspiration.

> So keep busy, by all means, and fail often, looking forward to the gems.
> Like this one: <http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=95>

Ah, cheers for the kind words. Didn't realize you read my site Jacques, gosh
that pleases the hell out of me. By the way, I was so impressed by
<http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+start-up+from+hell> \- I won't say I enjoyed
it, per se, I was cringing through a lot of it. But wow, what a story and
learned a lot from it. Regular reader of your site as well, cheers for the
kind words.

------
dtrizzle
As an attorney, I’m always concerned that my writing will not be my best work
and people will think that I suck. Or that something I write will come back
and bite me in the ass when I run for office or get vetted for some high
powered job. However, fear or perfectionism can be paralyzing. Even as an
attorney, you have to produce a lot of crap to produce good stuff. Judge
Posner comes to mind. He blogs, writes about everything under the sun, and is
brutally honest about his opinions regardless of the cost. Some of it is
probably not the best and some of his opinions are off the wall. He also
happens to be the most cited American appellate judge. Ben Casnocha touched on
this here: [http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/05/career-lessons-from-elena-
ka...](http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/05/career-lessons-from-elena-kagan-vs-
richard-posner.html)

------
EricBurnett
Contrast this with <http://freestylemind.com/how-much-do-you-value-your-time>
, where Oscar contends that the internet is filled with mediocre content
already, so traffic-wise you are better off to write less often but spend more
time on each post than attempt to be prolific.

------
shortformblog
A few things, as someone with a daily blogging schedule myself:

1: Fixing permalinks on WP requires messing with MOD_REWRITE. It's not hard,
it just requires some .htaccess stuff.

2: Really, you're absolutely right. It's a matter of getting on the horse and
forcing yourself to do it every day. I've given myself SOME time off this
year, but I've largely blogged 95% of the time this year. It's pretty
important that you write and don't stop.

3: The getting judged on your best work thing is important. You can't blog
assuming that every post you do is going to be a big hit with the right
readers. But some will hit very hard. I've had a few that have connected VERY
well – a thing I posted on Ikea's switch to Verdana, a post on BP's
photoshopping, and general political stuff that's kind of the bread and butter
of my blog right now – but the important thing is that I keep writing and I
can improve the quality of my work as I keep going.

4: I'm a fan of having some basic ideas in mind but not relying too heavily on
notes. I'll do a lot of basic research on a topic, grabbing worth-reading
pieces from HN, certain bloggers of choice, hearting them in Pulse, e-mailing
them to myself or throwing them on Instapaper, but I think it's better to let
the sparks come to you on the fly. Sometimes, my best post of the day will be
something I spent less than ten minutes on, because I was able to put an
interesting twist on it.

5: Sometimes you get lucky. My blog's been linked by Andrew Sullivan a couple
of times. The Atlantic Wire links to me semi-regularly. Slate linked to me
once. I get the occasional follow or retweet from someone I look up to. And
it's even led to some freelance work. But the more important part is that
you're not doing it for those occasional notices (though they're nice). You're
doing interesting things because you want to do them and you can give them an
interesting, unique focus. And that focus builds you an audience.

Look, there's a reason why a blogger like Instapundit has an audience. His
blog is anemically designed by today's standards. He might as well be using
Twitter/Tumblr (rather than using Twitterfeed to link back to his page). But
he's owned his style of blogging. Same with Daring Fireball. The key to
blogging is finding a niche, or a unique way of saying things, and making it
yours.

Once you have that focus, the daily blogging comes easy.

------
jyothi
>> "You’ll get judged by your best work."

well till you get an audience, then they are going to watch your back and you
cannot the do something always, good or bad rule. you will have to be
cautious.

also there are cases where your best work gets ignored given the bad
reputation of the bad work. As long as there is humans infer this will be
there, it is extremely hard not to be influenced by previous work.

------
IsaacSchlueter
"Branches of science", eh?

I kind of think the moral of the story here is: "Wanna write a lot? Write
crap! That's why I'm so awesome!"

It's true, of course, to an extent. "Writing crap" is absolutely essential in
any creative endeavor. Otherwise that crap gets impacted, and the good ideas
can't get out.

However, the editing and refinement process is at least as important, I think.
If all you do is _just_ write a lot, most of it being bad, it might just all
stay bad. You have to be _trying_ not to write crap, knowing that's what
you'll often end up doing, and be ok with that.

It's the same in software development. Over-reliance on design can lead to
analysis paralysis. Software is best when there's code first, and analysis
afterwards.

It's probably worthwhile to have a dev branch and release branch in blogs, for
the same reason as it makes sense for code. Friends and regulars can see the
just-released content, but the mainstream page doesn't show anything that
hasn't been vetted and carefully edited.

------
kgroll
Some people, such as the author, choose to write every day. Others, like PG
for example, post much less frequently (thus keeping the SNR much higher). For
most people, I think the sweet spot lies somewhere in between.

Whenever I strive to do something every day, it ends up feeling forced or
contrived, and inevitably the quality drops. (I might be atypical in that
regard?)

Furthermore, I think there _is_ such a thing as wearing down your audience.
It’s like you’re lowering your own value. Sure, you might still produce really
good piece on a weekly basis, but they live in the same house as all your
other, potentially mediocre posts.

That said, I strongly agree that we should all try to write every day. I
started blogging earlier this year, and only at that point did I realize how
difficult it is. So, taking my first point into account – my suggestion is
that you _do_ write every day, but not necessarily share everything you write.
A journal is good for this, or even write it on your computer without
publishing it. Whatever works. By doing so, I think you still develop your
voice and style, without obligating yourself to add to your blog every day.
This approach has helped me avoid burnout. Plus, there's something I really
enjoy about writing things just for myself.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
My feeling is that you should produce a lot, but that doesn't mean you need to
_publish_ everything you produce. Writing every day is a good way to keep
thoughts flowing (most writing self-improvement books recommend doing so).
Publishing every day can be a good way to oversaturate your audience with
drivel.

~~~
robryan
Yeah that's the thing really, writing every day helps your writing, publishing
every day doesn't necessarily get you a better or more engaged readership.
Most of us follow many peoples writing online, if everyone is writing everyday
lots of it is going to be missed.

------
PStamatiou
I wish more people would bold various parts of the article and break it up
into sections like this - makes skimming much easier. I have been doing this
on my blog for sometime and it's really the best thing for my readers. You can
write the longest post ever but as long as it's well broken up and important
parts highlighted/bolded you'll still get people commenting etc

~~~
jseliger
I do this occasionally but never did it in earnest for reasons I hadn't really
thought much about until I read "A list of N things":
<http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html> .

 _You can write the longest post ever but as long as it's well broken up and
important parts highlighted/bolded you'll still get people commenting etc_

I would tend to say that if some parts are important and others aren't, remove
the unimportant parts until there aren't any left, then publish what remains.
This is another practice I use, although sometimes with more success than
others.

------
petercooper
Perhaps I misunderstand the industry, but isn't this how many photographers
tend to operate? Sure, they're trained in technique, have a particular
aesthetic, etc, but if you take 1000 pictures at an event and boil it down to
the 20 "best" ones, you're going to be doing better than finding 20 out of 50?

------
Andrew_Quentin
Average does not necessarily mean crap.

------
ww520
This is an excellent blog, at least to me. I've stopped blogging for over 6
months, for one reason or the other. This will make me start again. Thank you.

------
xtho
As somebody who doesn't blog (and never did), I wonder if there is a
difference whether you want people to follow your news feed or whether you
market your articles on social news sites like this one. If it is news feeds,
I'd say one of the things that make people stop reading a blog is too many
unrelated articles with little original content. If it is social news sites a
ton of mediocre, boring articles doesn't hurt.

------
purpledove
The equal-odds rule is simply wrong. A few examples: Andrew Wiles, Charles
Darwin, John Forbes Nash. These people produced a small amount of work, but
they shook the earth. Some people are geniuses, and some are not. It appears
rather that some geniuses are prolific while others are not. Examples of some
prolific ones: Einstein, Serge Lang.

Edit: A commenter pointed out that Charles Darwin goes in the second list.

~~~
knowtheory
I think it is difficult to actually assess the veracity of the equal-odds
hypothesis. You don't know how much Darwin or Einstein threw away, or how much
of their stuff was irrelevant and forgotten.

I was just reading this: <http://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/>
which notes that Einstein's phd thesis is both obscure and forgotten, and
inaccurate compared to his later greatness.

I should add however, that the equal-odds thing is the way that i learned to
be a better photographer. Shoot as much as you can, figure out what you did to
take the good ones (I guess it's like the monte carlo method for artistic
improvement).

~~~
purpledove
I agree - there is a vagueness issue with the rule, and it is not obviously
falsifiable. But as stated, the rule does not discuss unpublished works - it
is a statement about published work, and the statement is that each scientist
is throwing the dice when they publish, and there is nothing the scientist can
do to increase his chances.

~~~
knowtheory
yes, fair point, the domain is published works. The observation about Einstein
still stands though yeh? :)

------
hoopadoop
Sadly, you are only as good as your last piece of work - not your best piece
of work.

------
sabat
The lesson here: if you have a tendency toward perfectionism, like me, _fight
it_. Produce things, a lot of things. Let your abilities develop by actually
producing. Don't try to make One Great Thing. You're probably wrong about
which thing is your One Great Thing anyway.

I was just reading the new introduction that Ray Bradbury wrote for _The
Martian Chronicles_. It came together from a bunch of "asides" that he wrote
just for fun -- he wasn't taking them very seriously. Then an editor saw them
and suggested that they formed a whole story.

~~~
wallflower
A repost here but an important one:

> Back around the age of 19, I had started sending my short stories out for
> publication. My goal was to publish something (anything, anywhere) before I
> died. I collected only massive piles of rejection notes for years. I cannot
> explain exactly why I had the confidence to be sending off my short stories
> at the age of 19 to, say, The New Yorker, or why it did not destroy me when
> I was inevitably rejected. I sort of figured I’d be rejected. But I also
> thought: “Hey – somebody has to write all those stories: why not me?” I
> didn’t love being rejected, but my expectations were low and my patience was
> high. (Again – the goal was to get published before death. And I was young
> and healthy.) It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so
> hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone,
> for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to
> communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off
> to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors,
> plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and
> suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your
> manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear
> people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite
> possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that.
> Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a
> year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back
> letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t
> pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write
> your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.

Elizabeth Gilbert, NY Times Best Selling author of "Eat, Pray, Love"

<http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm>

~~~
jacquesm
So, did you get published?

~~~
binomial
I believe that was a quote, in case you missed it. See the bottom of the GP's
post.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah ok, I thought a repost from her own stuff with a follow up link. I get it
now. Sorry... (I should get more sleep).

------
jw84
Geeky way of saying a million monkeys at a typewriter.

This is Michael Jordan's philosophy:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc>

Ira Glass believes that some people start out producing work that isn't as
good or match their good taste. It's after a lot of work, trial and error, and
mistakes that the disparity between your good taste and your good work match
up.

Be patient, keep trying, be confidant. I should have joined a football team.

