How I learned to write a lot
You just had an insightful conversation about the topic so why can't you write a post about it?
If you take anything away, I’d say: write posts on your phone — yes, even essays. My writing comes out so naturally when I do this. But surely you’re a serious person and no serious person would write essays on their phone. If that’s you, the rest of this post is for you.
Why should you listen to what I have to say about writing more? Wouldn’t you rather get your advice from Stephen King, or Colin Glassey with his 8 books? You could, but they won’t make your excuses go away. But when you read me, there’s a chance I’ll offend you into writing more. The best person to teach a subject is the person who’s just getting the hang of it — me. Why would you expect Stephen King to know what you’re going through?
Don’t try to become a “writer”. Write because you were pacing back and forth with ideas in your head and you’ve done this every week for hours on end and you’ve decided that these ideas aren’t going to write themselves. Your writing will suck, but that’s ok because even if you’ve uncovered a diamond, that diamond is going to be ugly.
We write a sentence, ask ourselves if it’s the perfect first sentence, convince ourselves it isn’t, delete it, and stare at the blank page again.
We usually make sense when we talk, so why is making sense in writing so hard? We try to compare to other writing we’ve seen and expect ourselves to simply dump perfection on the first pass, and we’re frustrated when it doesn’t happen that way. We question ourselves. We write a sentence, ask ourselves if it’s the perfect first sentence, convince ourselves it isn’t, delete it, and stare at the blank page again. This kind of writing is impatient and unproductive.
The only difference between writing and speaking is that you get a chance to pause for longer than you can get away with in person. You can go back to the middle and add something, or go to the beginning and add a punchy beginning that didn’t occur to you when you first started writing — that’s what I did with this post. But don’t get it wrong, the core of writing is to turn words that you’d say out loud and put them on a page. You’ve had amazing conversations, you’re coherent and sometimes witty and funny when you speak. You can and should bring that into your writing.
The only reason I write now is that I ruminate so much and pace so much that it’s embarrassing for me to not have anything to show for it. I’ve spent hours at a time just pacing back and forth and never writing any of my thoughts down. What a waste. And another motivator is I’ll have ideas and perspectives on things and nobody to share them with. Most people care about normal things. I care about weird and esoteric things. I want there to be more people like me. I think life is better this way. But if I can just record my ideas and publish them, and have even a few readers, then I’m happy. My readers are impressive people, and I aim to please.
I had a lot of mental blocks before when trying to write. I would stare at a page and try to think of the perfect sentence. This is stupid. Don’t ever do this. Justin Murphy says you’re always having thoughts and that you’re always thinking something about whatever it is that’s happening around you. So yeah, just turn that into posts.
You can have a poorly edited and nearly incomprehensible post as long as there’s some kernel of an idea in there
I would try to write a beginning, middle, and an end. I would spend hours trying to package, find supporting evidence, etc. All of this is great, but that’s not the core of posting. The second most important thing is not bad — you just don’t want to emphasize it at the expense of the most important thing. You can have a poorly edited and nearly incomprehensible post as long as there’s some kernel of an idea in there. If you want to be a good writer just by writing perfect sentences, good luck; I don’t want to read what you have to write. The post can be polished and refined to make the idea shine, but unearthing something and polishing are two different tasks.
A lot of people who’ve never created anything artistic seem to have these fantastical ideas about what the process is like, and that somehow incomprehensibility is always intentional. It’s not.
Rene Girard comes to mind. Granted, I haven’t read him the original French. Still, the translation of one of his books was so difficult that I gave up. Suppose his writing was crap even in French. It doesn’t matter. He had good ideas. Now you can take online courses or watch YouTube explainers. But you’re right, he’s an academic. He can get away with being incomprehensible. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an academic — you should try to make some sense. A lot of people who’ve never created anything artistic seem to have these fantastical ideas about what the process is like, and that somehow incomprehensibility is always intentional. It’s not. Sometimes writers really do make very little sense. They would polish, but then they wouldn’t have time to come up with their next idea. I only speculate this because unless I publish, I’ll write my next draft before my first one is finished. Let’s not forget that everyone has time constraints. Sure, some are self-imposed, but still. A diamond, if it really is a diamond, will always find someone to polish it (even if that person is you).
I like to imagine that I work in the diamond mines, and that polishing is not my job at all. Why spend any time polishing? I might not be good at it, and any success I get will go straight to my head.
When I write now, I don’t think of my posts as perfectly packaged pieces. Instead, I realize that some thread that I might have been ruminating about, or pacing around and thinking about has something in there worth preserving. Before, I would keep pacing and come back to some ideas and sometimes I wouldn’t. And I would always think: yeah I should write a post about X or Y.
Now I don’t care about the perfect post. My goal is to record the moment of inspiration. I already pace and think. Now, I catch myself and routinely turn the threads in my head into words. I don’t just sit down and spit out the perfect post. I’m often tempted to look things up to make sure I haven’t gotten something wrong, but this instinct is also wrong. No, the best thing I can do is dump everything that I’ve been carrying in my mind for the last hour into the computer as quickly as possible as if I was trying to record a dream moments after waking.
The process of writing often distorts the very thoughts I’m trying to record
The process of writing often distorts the very thoughts I’m trying to record. I don’t want the writer voice to contaminate the ideas I’m trying to put down. If there are jump cuts, let there be jump cuts. And God said let there be jump cuts, and there were jump cuts. And God saw the jump cuts, that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
An idea doesn’t have to be complete, and it doesn’t need to have every detail that could conceivably be in there, but that doesn’t mean “anything goes”.
If there’s a core and a thread, it’s essential I get that down. I might not have a clear idea of the core while I’m writing, but I do have threads and trains of thought. I don’t try to put clear boundaries around these threads or even explicitly link them with other threads I’ve thought about before. Instead, I simply put down the trains of thought as they’ve occurred to me. I don’t concern myself with comprehensibly or in trying to remember some related idea I had a while ago. I just write down what I was just thinking. Ironically, this process makes more comprehensible. I also don’t think about the specific words or phrases as they occur in my mind. I just figure I’ll be able to somehow get that across if I type it all out quickly enough before the writing brain takes over and starts trying to edit sentences or reword things.
What matters to me is to 1) preserve the connections between different ideas, and 2) to get as much of them down as possible. Sometimes I’ll keep thinking about the topic as I’m writing and I’ll add something to the ideas I’m trying to record. Maybe that’s fine? — I haven’t made up my mind. Maybe it would be even better if I could simply record and avoid thinking anything about what I’m writing?
Artists aren’t printers.
So the ideal writing process would be for me to go through phases just as any artist does. I don’t start with the eye and draw outward until I get a portrait. Instead, I start with a blurry ghost of a picture and sharpen it in phases. It’s just like how sculptors don’t start by revealing a head from the stone and work their way down until they get a bust of Julius Caesar. Artists aren’t printers. I try to stay in flow the whole time. I don’t want to think too hard especially when I’m writing my first draft. All the thinking happened when I was pacing. When I’m writing, I’m merely recording, and just trying to get as much of it onto a page in one go as I can.
So the ideal writing process looks something like this:
Get the through-line of my train of thought down and make sure to hit and highlight the basic landmarks along the way. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, wording, supporting evidence, an introduction, or a conclusion. All that matters is that your idea makes some sense, and it will as long as I don’t try to mangle it in the recording process. You shouldn’t be editing. Just keep writing a stream of consciousness until you find yourself slowing down. Sometimes this happens after a couple sentences. If so, leave it at that. Maybe you return to it, but maybe you don’t.
Once you’ve written this first draft, immediately read through it and punch up various pieces while you still have all the mental context. There might be an aside that was too long to explain on the first run through, and you might choose to add it. You might notice a jump cut and you immediately know how to fix it, so you fix it. If nothing occurs to you, move on. This is your second draft.
Now comes the serious work. You go online and double-check your facts. There’s a chance you’ll find something important that invalidates your entire writing session so far. No biggie, it happens all the time. But you might also look for books and quotes that you referenced implicitly or explicitly. At this stage you’re not looking for new evidence. You want to publish as quickly as possible. You might not even try to work this information into your post in any way. Instead, you throw in a horizontal rule at the end of the post, and dump the quotes and information until you’ve researched everything you’ve referenced.
Now you have the bare minimum of facts that you can work into your essay, touch it up, and press publish. You might do this part the next day so you can see your work with fresh eyes and catch any glaring mistakes you might have otherwise missed.
I could split this list of 4 steps into 5, or maybe remove some, or even add steps in between. I’m not giving you a set of rules to follow, but a basic process that I happen to recall using when I think about why I used to struggle writing, and why it seems to come much more naturally now. Writing isn’t as laborious and tortured as it once was for me. And one of the things that makes words fly off the page is not even confidence, but a lack of being precious about every key I type into the computer. Whereas before, I would torture every word, I now make up for it by reading my post in multiple passes.
Instead of calling it being stuck, I call it “I don’t know what to do here yet”, and I move on
Instead of calling it being stuck, I call it “I don’t know what to do here yet”, and I move on. I’ll go back to sentences I’ve just written, but only if I know exactly how I’d change them. Actually, that’s not true. I’ll go back and fix as it occurs to me, and I’ll usually move on. I don’t think of it as “giving up” on a sentence or sore point.
This is where I publish for my newsletter. And this description makes me sound even more structured about this than I really am. The only real rule I follow is that I pace for a while, and then dump my thoughts onto a page. I then try to publish as quickly as possible before my next idea hits me so that I don’t get backed up.
Honestly, I often publish after going through the piece a couple times. When I read my older posts, I cringe. There are so many weird phrases. Sometimes, in my desire to rework a sentence quickly, I end up half mangling it — leaving the first and second half disjointed. Sometimes you get more with less effort.
If I had more time, I could spend maybe an additional 4-6 hours researching and polishing each piece while I still had the inspiration.
If it’s wrong, let it be wrong. This is the scientific way to write, and I’m not kidding.
One problem I have is that I’ll have a lot of what ifs when I’m just thinking, and my writing can be too speculative. I deal with this by stating my assumptions. I might phrase something like “if you believe X, then…” But more commonly, I’ll just state what I think. If it’s wrong, let it be wrong. This is the scientific way to write, and I’m not kidding. It’s literally the scientific method applied to writing essays. If I’m wrong, I want to be obviously wrong so I can update my model of the universe and write something better next time. If an argument depends on something being true and it turns out not to be, I don’t care about this when I’m writing my first draft, but I do care when I’m about to publish. Sure, I could publish hypotheses, and I do, but I can be more useful to my readers if I fact-check as much of my writing myself.
And how do you write bigger pieces and whole books? I now think the best way to write a book is to take a look at your collection of writings after some period of time and notice that you’re at a high enough word count that it deserves a book. It’s not that you’ve had dreams of becoming a published writer and you can just picture yourself at a book signing event and your entire family being proud of your new book on shelves of Barnes and Noble. No, that’s dumb. You write because you have something to say. You can so easily screw this up by writing when you have nothing to say, and not writing when you really do.
You have something to say when you don’t agree with something mainstream, and that’s exactly when your fear of criticism will descend on you like a dark cloud and scare away the beautiful birds and bees that inhabited your mental space just moments before.
Maybe you realize you could include more facts in your posts, but you’d need some time to dig them up. Maybe you look back at your posts and notice how much better and tighter the whole thing could be. You have a set of posts that all go together and you decide to write a book to put a fence around everything you’ve thought about for the last year or whatever, and put a bow on it. In the end, you’re still not setting out to write a book out of nothing but ambition. You explore ideas you find valuable and interesting and you keep writing. After something like a few months of writing you’ll find yourself returning to the same topics and you’ll have enough there to serve as the bones for a book. In the end, there should always be a common thread and some core or landmarks in there.
A book is an accomplishment, but so is an essay and even a spicy tweet. What matters isn’t the accomplishment, but whether the thing you’re creating makes sense as a tweet, a tweet thread, a little 3 paragraph post on Substack, an essay, a collection of essays, a book, a collection of books, etc.
Instead of writing from the outside in, you write from the inside out.
And you shouldn’t be “trying” to find the core, or trying to punch up the core you do have beyond reason. The core is what it is. The threads are what they are. So this writing process I’m proposing isn’t about trying to find a list of things any good work needs to have and then trying to hit those points, but for you to take the good ideas you do have, and do those ideas justice. Instead of writing from the outside in, you write from the inside out.
Maybe you’re a big reader and have a refined taste in literature. This is great, but you’ll never write a book like that and you know it. Actually, you might. But my point is that writing is a means to an end. The goal isn’t a book, but for some thought to reach someone’ and cause them to do something.
If the stakes to getting every word right are that high, you’re not writing from your heart. You’re in a hostage situation and your problem isn’t that you can’t write, but that you’re in a hostage situation.
Think about all the times you’ve had trouble figuring out what to say. Say it’s a message to a lover. If the stakes to getting every word right are that high, you’re not writing from your heart. You’re in a hostage situation and your problem isn’t that you can’t write, but that you’re in a hostage situation. Maybe the right answer there is to call a friend.
If you have insights, you write them out. And as you have more, you get better at writing. And maybe you return to an idea you’ve had long ago and you can finally do it complete justice, but you would never have gotten good at writing if you never started writing down what you thought, and publishing in whatever way you can and getting any kind of audience that responds to what you have to say.
I think one of the biggest tragedies of the education system is that education is a special profession separate from practice. I get the benefits of the educational establishment, but you don’t want to forget what it ultimately exists for. The goal is to make you an informed voter. The goal isn’t to make you a writer, a poet, a scientist, or anything else. Individual teachers might be excited to see their students get into these subjects, but unless the teachers are themselves making a living off this work, it’s hard for them to convey what it means to succeed in these professions.
We teach students grammar not so they know how to write, but arguably so that they can spot good writing from bad. It’s much easier to validate something than to create it. So it might take time to actually get good. That’s totally fine. And this idea of finding your voice — why? You have a voice when you speak. Use that voice. Find the punctuation that makes it sound like you when you speak.
beautiful defence of cringestack posting :,)