Great to see you doing this! I would be happy to see more good writers, and even if I personally don’t end up reading them, writing helps people think.
One post per day sounds too much for me. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do this: I mean this literally that it sounds too much for me personally to try, but clearly there are people (like Eliezer and Duncan) who have had very good results doing it. And probably the people who’d try this are selected for being the kinds of people that it might work for.
The reason why I’m bringing this up is that it’s easy for a certain type of person to look at this, go “oh if I want to be a serious writer then I should manage to hit once per day”, and become demotivated when they fail. Or, they might seemingly succeed and burn out from writing.
You mention NaNoWriMo, which I used to do in my late teens. At one point doing Nano had the consequence that after going through that ordeal, I didn’t want to do any fiction writing anymore for a long time, the experience had been so bad. (I forget if I hit or failed to hit 50K words on that particular year, but a consequence of the “quantity over quality” mindset was that hitting it often didn’t feel particularly satisfying even on the years when I managed it. Even if it did occasionally give me some so-bad-it’s-funny anecdotes to share.)
For the last month or so I’ve been trying to get to regular blogging and found that a pace of one article a week seems to work quite well for me. I might outline an essay in one day, work on it for a couple of more days, then feel that it’s essentially finished and feel impatient to post it… but then hold off on posting it because I want to pace myself, and then a couple of days later think of various improvements to it that make me happy that I didn’t post it earlier.
I expect that some of the people reading this comment will benefit immensely from the residency and being told “hey you can do more than you think, see what happens if you write a post a day”. At the same time, I also expect that some other readers would benefit from being told “it’s fine to do just one post a week or even one post a month, even that is still vastly more often than what anyone else produces”.
Unfortunately I don’t have a good way to tell who should take which kind of advice. But maybe they could be combined into something like “if you’ve never tried anything like this, then do give it a serious shot and try to honestly write a post a day, and also remember that you shouldn’t stake your self-worth or identity as a writer on it, and that you can also try a slower pace later if that feels better”.
Great to see you doing this! I would be happy to see more good writers, and even if I personally don’t end up reading them, writing helps people think.
One post per day sounds too much for me. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do this: I mean this literally that it sounds too much for me personally to try, but clearly there are people (like Eliezer and Duncan) who have had very good results doing it. And probably the people who’d try this are selected for being the kinds of people that it might work for.
The reason why I’m bringing this up is that it’s easy for a certain type of person to look at this, go “oh if I want to be a serious writer then I should manage to hit once per day”, and become demotivated when they fail. Or, they might seemingly succeed and burn out from writing.
You mention NaNoWriMo, which I used to do in my late teens. At one point doing Nano had the consequence that after going through that ordeal, I didn’t want to do any fiction writing anymore for a long time, the experience had been so bad. (I forget if I hit or failed to hit 50K words on that particular year, but a consequence of the “quantity over quality” mindset was that hitting it often didn’t feel particularly satisfying even on the years when I managed it. Even if it did occasionally give me some so-bad-it’s-funny anecdotes to share.)
For the last month or so I’ve been trying to get to regular blogging and found that a pace of one article a week seems to work quite well for me. I might outline an essay in one day, work on it for a couple of more days, then feel that it’s essentially finished and feel impatient to post it… but then hold off on posting it because I want to pace myself, and then a couple of days later think of various improvements to it that make me happy that I didn’t post it earlier.
I expect that some of the people reading this comment will benefit immensely from the residency and being told “hey you can do more than you think, see what happens if you write a post a day”. At the same time, I also expect that some other readers would benefit from being told “it’s fine to do just one post a week or even one post a month, even that is still vastly more often than what anyone else produces”.
Unfortunately I don’t have a good way to tell who should take which kind of advice. But maybe they could be combined into something like “if you’ve never tried anything like this, then do give it a serious shot and try to honestly write a post a day, and also remember that you shouldn’t stake your self-worth or identity as a writer on it, and that you can also try a slower pace later if that feels better”.