Write Cause You Have Something to Say
The ones who are most successful at writeathons (Inkhaven, NaNoWriMo) are those with an overhang of things to say, usually in the form of:
draft posts
daydreams
When Scott Alexander said:
Whenever I see a new person who blogs every day, it’s very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don’t get good. That’s like my best leading indicator for who’s going to be a good blogger.
, it may seem you can just write every day, but that’d be Goodharting. There’s something hidden in the writing process you can’t see: they have something to say.
They’ll have an idea (somehow) and think it through by [writing it out/sitting quietly/etc]. This can then generate more ideas, some of which aren’t even related to the original idea!
At this point, though, my imaginary interlocutor would like to say:
I’m trying to publish a blog post every day, so of course I’ll eventually be bottlenecked on ideas! How do you generate them though?
Catching Ideas
Have an idea? Write down the idea. This is equivalent to giving your idea-generating process a cookie, reinforcing the habit of generating ideas.
Sometimes, when I’m writing one post, a different idea will pop into my head. If I don’t write down a filler-title and basic idea within ~1 min, it’s gone.
Other times I get ideas from:
Reading others’ work
Writing in my journal every night
Conversations
Long drives
Showers, walks, and when I’m lying in bed after I wake up
For several of these, I can’t write the idea down quickly, but my mind is focused on the idea, building off of it. It’s much easier to start writing once I have this overhang of things-to-say that I’ve been working on while lying in bed for [15] min.
From this process, I have ~80 “draft” posts at the moment [1](most are just a title and a few words); I’m bottlenecked on actually putting in time to finish posts. The drafts make it quite easy to get back into the mind-state I was in when I generated the idea, as if I’m prompting myself, lol.
Just [Write] and Nobody Will Get Hurt
When I wrote the most was when I was constantly babble-writing. It’d be the first thing I’d do: write what I wanted to do that day, do those things, then go back to writing. To be clear, I’d be typing very incorrectly. There can easily be friction to starting writing, so stack everything in your favor to get the writing-train rolling.
We now have Claude and voice-to-text, which have similarly helped me get out of slumps (I still might prefer just writing, unsure). There’s an additional component here: Claude’s a decent editor & secretary, so I’m not too blocked on “ugh, I have to look up the correct link or quote here, or the actual phrase people use” when writing.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Communicate what you wanted to say; later you can focus on [standard writing advice] and actually including a proper conclusion to your
- ^
Here’s an example of my drafts. I use roam research with [[Title Post]] notation to quickly make a post. I think Notion is free and also works. I don’t like writing drafts in the LW editor because it feels like I should have a higher standard of writing here (or I’m scared of writing something stupid when I was just “babbling” and incidentally hit “publish”.
As someone with a decent amount of ideas but not a lot of published writings, I notice I have a few things blocking me from writing more:
Writing taking (me with my current skillset and behaviors) a long time, and being very busy
Good writing taking a long time; not having internalized various methods of making writing good; needing to look up and reflect on such methods while writing, which is a very slow process until those methods are internalized
not wanting to waste people’s time with low quality writing
noticing that if I do iterate on a draft, I do (at least feel like) I am learning about writing and making progress in my abilities. So spending a long time on a draft doesn’t feel like wasted time. But it also doesn’t produce output, so reward is low.
not wanting to “dilute” my account with mediocre posts compared to a few posts that have seen much much more effort and with which I’m much happier / more proud.
I do enjoy the few times I have simply taken 20min to write a draft without the intention of publishing it. Those have usually been helpful in shaping my ideas.
This doesn’t really relate to your posts but it came to mind and I guess your post incentivized me to write more, resulting in this comment
Fundamentally, when “write a blog post” is something available as an action in your mind, you will notice more thoughts that could become blog posts. In addition, it helps encourage thinking independently.