Why and how to write things on the Internet
January was my first month back to writing my blog. As I’ve become more invested in the habit and the online writing community, I started reading articles that offer personal takes on the why and how of writing. I especially enjoyed Ben Kuhn's suggestions and wanted to take some notes for myself as a reminder.
I decided to share them here in case they are useful for anyone else starting out.
What follows is the content of Ben's article; some sentences are rephrased, some are edited, and others are original. For the full version, you can check out the original article on Ben's website.
Why to start
1. More awesome friendships
The strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships:
- meet new awesome people as a result of your blog
- writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
From other people’s blogs:
- My friend Ben wrote a post about how he likes to work (https://tbenthompson.com/post/maintaining_momentum/) that has led to both actual, and potential future, jobs.
2. The bar is lower than you think
Most people dramatically underestimate the impact that their writing has on others. It’s easy to think that you have to put out really “interesting” writing in order for other people to like it.
Lower your bar for what’s worth writing about: my personal standard is anything that I’ve said more than once in a conversation.
How to start writing
Top suggestions for writing on the internet are: (1) publish consistently and (2) pay attention to feedback.
1. Build a consistent writing habit
My ability to write improved the most when I committed to writing every week and, briefly, every day. Blog posts are one of the ultimate examples of searching for outliers and one of the best ways to improve your chances is just to take lots of shots
2. Come up with ideas to write about
As mentioned above, an important first step here is to lower your bar for what’s worth writing about.
Start paying attention to topic ideas. These can come from lots of different places:
- Something you said in a conversation with a friend that surprised them
- Document a project you did recently
- Explain how to do something you do
- Explain how something works
- Review a book
- Curate a set of links about a topic
- A rant
- Something internet commenters/public intellectuals frequently say that seems wrong
The most important thing here is to write about whatever you’re most excited to write about (n.b. not what you think you should be most excited to write about, or what you’re most excited to have written about)
I recommend trying to keep your list of topics roughly ranked by how excited you are.
3. Get your initial set of readers
You want two things from your initial set of readers:
- More-involved feedback from a few draft readers.
- A larger set of normal subscribers whose reaction can help understand what resonates
A note on draft readers: The main value of draft readers is often getting their overall reaction rather than those detailed improvement suggestions.
Appendix 1: Writing quality tips
- Come up with a good title. A good title makes a promise about what the reader will get from reading the post that is (1) exciting, and (2) accurate. I used to just title posts based on the general topic. This doesn’t promise anything about takeaways.
- Find the right framing. By “framing” I mean the part of the post that ties it up into an overall takeaway and makes it clear why it’s important and worth reading.
- Use lots of examples. Writing without examples tends to be dry and abstract.
- Write like you talk. It comes from an essay by Paul Graham
Appendix 2: “... but writing takes a lot of time!”
A typical blog post for me might be around 1500 words, or about 2.5 hours to write. Multiply by two for outlining and editing, and I could do one post a week with about 45 minutes a day of writing.
Writing takes a lot longer than that if you’re trying to make one particular post very good, but I don’t think that’s the right strategy for someone who's starting out.