7 ms·
On Writing More
- magdyks 6y agoSuch a huge fan of her writing
- akhilcacharya 6y agoI see her work referenced here and there - what is she known for exactly? (I personally can't stand the writing style, but I get the appeal.)
- vonnik 6y agoRelated thought: https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/ https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/
- geocrasher 6y ago"The only thing I know about how to be more prolific? Write about the thing that means the most to you, then write about the thing that means more." Late 2019 I started writing on a topic I'm passionate about- cheap entry into amateur radio. I wrote more than ever, about 12000 words. Not much by novelist standards, but more than I'd written on any single subject before it. And I have a lot more material to write, once I can find the brain power to sit down and fix it up. One of the subjects of my writing was a product that's been since discontinued (the BITX40 if anyone is wondering) and so it's stagnant- but it's all there and I have more writing to do.
- koolhead17 6y agoLike a random thoughts or a daily diary entry.
- geocrasher 6y agoNo. More like a structured explanation. A book.
- systemvoltage 6y ago/rant Substack has literally one job: to display written information on a webpage and provide good typography for writers. The most commonly used font - "Spectral" is a complete mess. Kerning is off, letter spacing is too much and word spacing is too little. If someone is reading this at Substack, please for the love of god consult a professional typographer and ask them for a recommendation. If you can't then just use one of the many Google Fonts such as Source Serif Pro. Here is a comparison of how bad it is: Original, Spectral: https://i.imgur.com/SBS8iQG.png https://i.imgur.com/SBS8iQG.png Source Serif Pro: https://i.imgur.com/AM8KSUC.png https://i.imgur.com/AM8KSUC.png
- dcl 6y agoWow, you're not wrong.
- enjoyyourlife 6y agoIf you are using an ad blocker, you can add the following rules to change the font: substack.com##body:style(font-family: Arial !important)
- dartharva 6y agoIt doesn't seem that bad in a dark theme
- DetroitThrow 6y agoI can't unsee these sins now
- awestroke 6y agoSpectral might be bad, but I'd not replace it with a serif font.
- manigandham 6y agoThis is classic form over function. It's been scientifically measured that sans-serif fonts are better for screens with serif best for printed text. Something like Helvetica with good spacing and high contrast is the best for reading online.
- Swizec 6y agoSo I’ve been publishing regularly on my blog for 10 years, over 1500 articles and counting. Ranging from 300 word missives to 3000 word deep digs. A couple books too. Here’s what I learned: It’s easier to be prolific. When you write every day it comes easy. Like brushing your teeth. You wake up and you’re full of thoughts on your general topic and you write them down. A quick edit, hit publish, and done. If it goes viral, fantastic. If peopel love it, amazing. If not, no big you try again next time. And then life happens. You can’t just write every day, you have to create things worth writing about! Experiences, research, work. You reduce your writing output. And the ideas dry up. Writing becomes hard. You eke out 2, maybe 3, articles per week and it’s hard work. You struggle. You drag them out of your brain. It doesn’t feel right. Nothing feels important enough to write about. With 2 at-bats per week, there’s a lot riding on every missive. It’s hard. It’s demoralizing. And it shows in your writing. The readers can’t tell. Future you can’t tell. Neil Gaiman is right – 5 months from now you won’t see the difference between the writing that was work and the writing that flowed. But you today, you know. You know you’re rusty. You know it wasn’t as easy as it could be. You see that it’s rough. And I haven’t found a solution.
- simonw 6y agoA couple of tricks that have worked really well for me over the last two years. First: weeknotes. Every week I write a summary of what I've got done. I'm on a streak, so I can't let myself break that streak. I'm at 73 weeks now and it's ensured that I write something at least once a week - and like you said, that habit makes it easier. https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/ Second: TILs. These are basically blog entries where the only criteria is "did I just learn something" - which makes them very low friction. I often knock one out in 5-10 minutes. https://til.simonwillison.net/ https://til.simonwillison.net/
- keiferski 6y agoI have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. - Pascal I think the solution is simple: write constantly, publish rarely.
- kuu 6y ago
- keiferski 6y agoIt is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. - Nietzsche I wish this were the motto of all writers. There is already too much “sentence inflation” online...succinctness needs a comeback.
- dazc 6y agoThis thing of having one or two long paragraphs of rambling text before the writer actually gets to the point is something I find annoying. It is so common nowadays that I find myself automatically skipping the first paragraph altogether.
- Rainymood 6y agoI find her articles a bit too long and flowery as well, but I personally enjoyed reading the first story. And for some reason people on HN seem to like it.
- Veen 6y agoI think these things go in cycles, and have more to do with stylistic preference than objective value. I've recently been reading essays by G.K Chesteron and William Hazlitt. They are incredibly verbose by modern standards. They spend many long sentences teasing out shades of meaning and subtle implications. They take extremely long run-ups to their topic, often starting with several paragraphs on something that seems unrelated before cleverly integrating it into the main thesis. Instead of clearly stating a thesis and arguing for it, they often layer related concepts and arguments, and they expect the reader to figure out the associations, analogies, and references. But both writers are widely acknowledged to been masters of prose style Some people appreciate "a fancy prose style" in the same way they appreciate complex music. It's more about using language and argument to craft something intricate and elegant than a plain information dump.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- trashme 6y agoYup, it's on writing more, not on writing something useful. They chose quantity over quality. For what it's worth, it's long and rambling. The abject incoherence of their writing fails to hold your attention. > I needed write about it ... > you’ll run out of things write about ... > I take that as a sign that to not hold anything back. > in the guise of letting you knowing me better The article is riddled with various typos. Let me refer to this HN commentary: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
- jrh206 6y agoThere's a human on the other end of this who has put a lot of time into creating this article. For what it's worth, I agree with you. But I think this criticism could have been phrased more constructively. For instance, 'Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People' is a perfectly fine article in isolation, but to bring it up in direct response to an article is tantamount to calling the author insane.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y agoOut of curiosity, did you copy and paste this article into some grammer-checker to identify these typos? I didn't spot any of these during my (admittedly quick) initial read, and having something like this would be helpful for my own writing.
- Gatsky 6y agoHow much content is too much? Is the job of the writer merely to produce more and more content? New TV series which are slowly converting every original work of art into something that can be passively consumed on the couch. And the remakes and resurrections and remixes of proven favourites. More podcasts than there are hours in the week. Reams of self-published books, endless blog posts, often highly detailed and very well researched. Then all the tweets, social media posts, videos, not to mention very high quality youtube content... It's a deluge. I find myself paralysed sometimes, unable to choose what to look at next. Being a content creator (artist?) must surely become dminished in the face of this overwhelming amount of content. It isn't going away, this democratisation of content publishing. But I wonder if we will ever have any 'classics' ever again.
- WA 6y agoMaybe the classics are classics because of the time they were written in and you KNOW this as a reader. If you read a classic with a new cover, new title, and believe it's from a contemporary author, it might be garbage. Also: less books and fewer authors in the past, so some books bubble to the top and are considered a classic for several reasons. Many people read them. Nowadays, everything is more fragmented, which can be a good thing.
- hnarn 6y agoI don’t really care if “we” don’t like Louis CK anymore, he did one weird thing that he has surely learned his lesson about, but even saying that buys into the idea of the court of public opinion: CK is an artist and like any artist I believe his works should be taken as-is. This new world on social media steroids has everyone thinking that they’re a public person and that their private consumption of culture and their stated public opinion somehow matters and needs to be curated. It doesn’t. I’ll listen to black metal music made by a murderer and I’ll watch stand up made by a guy who offended someone by masturbating if I feel like it, and I suggest any thinking person applies their own preferences to the culture they consume rather than buy into this societal image of “public responsibility” that is hypocritical beyond imagination. Just drop it, live your life and let others live theirs. We already have a relatively well functioning system for prosecuting crimes, your public statements and outrage isn’t needed, regardless of how important and jacked in to the zeitgeist they make you feel.
- jimmyvalmer 6y agoAs drinkers of the HN fire hydrant, we value terseness. So I suspect you, like I, clicked here much as a conservative might click on a liberal's defense of SF's homeless policy: what's it all about? At 2000+ words, this article merely adds to our confirmation bias that people need to get the point in far fewer words than they currently do in all media.