Category Archives: Writing

What cured my writer’s/publisher’s block

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I’ve managed to make writing fun again and have been publishing a lot on my blog lately.

It’s due to three reasons:

1 – Having explicit content categories creates the freedom to post things that aren’t highly effort intensive deep dives.

By introducing explicit post categories (i.e. Micropost, Lab Notes, Essay, Deep Dive, etc) I feel much more free to post without the expectation that every post needs to be a time consuming, deeply researched technical post (which are the kind of posts that are popular).

I don’t have time for those lately, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write or post anything! Explicitly tagging something as a micropost or lab notes takes a lot of the pressure off, and makes me much more willing to write and publish.

2 – I stopped sharing on Twitter.

The curse of growing an audience is that posting to that audience has increasing weight as the audience grows, which creates stress and friction about posting. What if I post something that people don’t like and I lose a bunch of followers? What if I’m straight up wrong? What if I want to share something but don’t have time to fully polish it and people judge me? What if I post too often?

It’s also distracting to share on Twitter, and very difficult to not monitor notifications afterwards.

Furthermore, writing on Twitter was actually difficult in that it took extra energy to abide by the character limits, or fit things into threads otherwise. Writing freeform of my own blog is easier in this regard.

Not posting on Twitter removes a nontrivial amount of friction and stress that used to prevent me from sharing.

3 – Using WordPress (i.e. not a static site generator) removes a ton of friction.

The fact that I can click buttons in a web interface, write and post as easily as sending a tweet makes all the difference.

It’s so nice being able to change the website without coding. For instance, I just added a “Popular posts” feature in the sidebar in the last 5 minutes. Turns out Jetpack already has the feature included and I just had to enable it. I don’t even want to imagine what it would have taken to implement that by hand or with a static site generator.

Though not as fast a static site, the blog loads fast enough and I’m more than happy to take the performance hit.

It’s also awesome that I can quickly edit posts to fix typos, even from my phone with the WordPress app. I do this very often.

(bonus reason: It’s also due to the realization that posts don’t have to be long, can be written in one sitting, and don’t have to be absolutely perfect!)

Experiment: Categories for my posts

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I’m trying something new. I added WordPress tags for higher level categories of content that cut across the typical tags:

  • Deep Dive: Longer, more detailed posts that require significant research. Very expensive to produce.
  • Tech: Normal technical blog post. More polished than Lab Notes, less researched than Deep Dive.
  • Lab Notes: Rough notes, typically technical, usually bullet points about some topic.
  • Essay: Nonfiction writing, usually nontechnical.
  • Micropost: Tiny, short thought.

I hope that by categorizing things this way and acknowledging that this blog is a collection of different art forms (that appear similar because they’re all writing), I’ll be more comfortable publishing publicly. For a while I was scared to publish because I don’t have as much time for deep dives as before, which is what people seemed to really like, but acknowledging these different categories and specifically calling out a shorter, rougher, less polished piece as such takes the pressure off of publishing it.

Why I write in public

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Note to self. I write because:

  • Improved clarity of thought
  • Archive of thought
  • Improves writing skills

In addition, I write in public because:

  • It reinforces a mindset of speaking my mind in public (i.e. courage)
  • Receive valuable feedback and external perspectives
  • Build & maintain relationships — people can learn about me and keep up with what I’m up to

Furthermore, I’ve found that it’s addicting to write in public.

  • It feels good to look back on writing and realize you’ve expressed yourself clear and well. And that you understand the topic well know.
  • It feels good to develop a voice.
  • It feels good to watch yourself improve. You can write better, faster with practice.
  • You become more self-observant of your thoughts, and realize that there are so many interesting things to write about.
  • It feels good to get positive feedback on your writing.

Edit: 2023-08-01

Furthermore, I think it’s a good idea to even default to sharing in public (vs writing in a private Note app, then selectively copying to publish).

If you get busy and don’t get around to that explicit publish step, there is a 0% chance that anybody else might discover your work, which might actually be very good. If you default to publishing publicly, that doesn’t mean you need to actively promote it, but at least there’s a nonzero chance of someone finding it eventually.