8 ms·

How I motivate myself to write

238 points by gregdoesit 5y ago

eatonphil 5y ago
My experience and techniques have been remarkably similar, albeit on a smaller scale than Gergely. A few years ago I decided to start writing one post per month on any subject within tech/software development. I've missed that goal a couple of times but my average since then has still been ~1.4 posts per month. I write about whatever is interesting to me and most often that's exploring topics in tech that were a mystery to me before like compilers, databases, etc. Like Gergely I keep an ever growing list of projects or topics that seem interesting to tackle at some point. One book I'd recommend most to folks writing in tech (whether it's technical or not) is On Writing Well, which teaches you the same kinds of things Gergely uses Hemingway Editor for. That is, to be concise and precise. I think the biggest benefit to writing consistently is that you improve as a writer and that you get to explore interesting topics. Even if you are doing coding projects to improve as a developer, it's a whole new level to start trying to explain that work in blog posts. It's easier in coding to get things right without understanding exactly how/why they worked. When you write to explain you have to actually dig into that how/why. Some people say tech blogging is great for getting jobs but in my experience, of all the things that helped me get work, my blog didn't contribute much. But I'm just one data point. I say this so that you don't get discouraged if you don't suddenly unlock emails from hiring managers because you start writing more.
richardatlarge 5y ago
Write regularly yes, but quantity does not lead inherently to quality. You have to hold a higher and then higher standard for what’s good
- LegitShady 5y ago
  I disagree. If you're putting effort into writing, writing often and on new themes/ideas is much more likely to lead to better habits and learning to write more effectively. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 100 hour drawings - same effort in terms of time but you're far more likely to learn how to be a better artist by learning to start quickly and progress further each time within the given amount of time. The traditional way of learning to draw is often subdivided into multiple 2 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and then longer form practice pieces. You can learn to start an artwork more efficiently with just two minute sketches that you would never get to practice if you only did long effort works. Writing more often is even better than that, since you develop better habits compared to writing less often. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 25 hour drawing, instead. Consistently practicing as often as you can be productive for is how you learn skills of all kinds.
  - richardatlarge 5y ago
    Not really disagreeing- just stressing that there is a large literature on what’s called expert performance, which shows a powerful function for what they call deliberate practice. Stressing the explicit effort to get better. Not like some who play golf for 40 years yet never improve.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      I think my point is that practice should stress 'deliberate practice' but also consistency, frequency, and also quantity. less deliberate practice is going to be worse than more deliberate practice. deliberate practice doesn't preclude quantity, and in fact quantity is a good measure of your ability to put out words. I'd rather get 500-1000 words an hour and go back to edit, than get 250 perfect words that I'm likely going to have to go back and edit anyways. The standard you talked about is related to the final draft, and the product of writing is rarely the product of the first unedited draft. Quantity has a very large value in learning to write.
      - richardatlarge 5y ago
        One very poor practice in higher ed and universities is that people rarely go through an editorial process where they can see how much early drafts can be improved through re-writes. So students write 100 essays, submitted and graded, with not a single polished work. At least that was my experience as a student and teacher
        LegitShady 5y ago
        The idea of draft and edit was taught to me in high school but my high school english teacher was an author so perhaps they had better insight than most english teachers - I can't say since I only had the one teacher and they knew how to write. I think in university the issue becomes largely one of limited time and effort budget. I was an engineering major and took some economics courses for a minor (which I never got in the end) that involved essay writing. The issue wasn't that I didnt know i could improve it by editing, it's that each piece of homework competes against each other piece of homework for time and attention. The goal is 'how good can I make it in the time I can justify putting towards it'. I'm sure I made some boneheaded errors in some of my work but I was already doing 'homework triage' and leaving the least valuable but time consuming assignments to when I might be able to get to them. Writing a work you intend to publish rather than submit to a teacher is a different exercise. It's hard to practice in an environment where you're already racing the clock to get your 4-6 hours of homework out of the way each night.
LeicaLatte 5y ago
Very useful. Thank you.
- bschoone 5y ago
  Agreed!
anyfactor 5y ago
> I also use Grammarly to catch spelling, and grammar issues, and sometimes take suggestions the tool gives - though I just as frequently reject them. Grammarly has become a crutch. It either fails to catch typos or distracts me when I am writing. Moreover, I feel like I am progressively becoming bad at catching grammar mistakes.
- richardatlarge 5y ago
  I began writing recently in a browser editor (substack) that doesn't do the corrective spelling. I could barely write because I had to constant stop and figure out how to really spell the word. Totally revealed, for better or worse, how sloppy I had become as a typist.
  - anyfactor 5y ago
    My go to is MS notepad. I will write everything in paragraphs in notepad then copy paste it in. Nothing is more fast and convenient than the classic Notepad. If only I could find something that is as fast as notepad, as convenient as notepad, as easy to work with as notepad but with Vim key bindings. That would be fantastic. Tried Gvim but that is no notepad.
    - i_am_proteus 5y ago
      ...perhaps vim or neovim?
      - anyfactor 5y ago
        Now that I REALLY think about it.... I guess I don't need vim. I am one of those persons who tries to convince themselves they need vim for everything to fit in the with the cool kids. I understand the hypocrisy and I kinda need this hypocrisy for motivation reasons I guess. Modifying Vim to the point it replicates notepad defeats the purpose of using vim. I need a handful of Vim key bindings but beyond that customizing the rc file to make it more like notepad is just too much of a hassle. I use text wrap and frequently use the scroll zoom. I miss 2-3 letters words in my writing so I have to get to them quickly when I am revising. Being a vim novice vim is great for me as I am writing but not for editing and revising. And Windows environment really isn't great for rapid typing with vim. Initializing the terminal takes me 10-20 seconds.
maroonblazer 5y ago
Regarding item 4 "Copy Writing Styles You Like": Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, describes an exercise he subjected himself to which consisted of, roughly: 1. Read an article or piece of writing you like. 2. Wait a few days for the specifics of the article to fade from your memory, but not so long that you forget the main arguments. 3. Rewrite the article without looking at the original 4. Compare what you wrote to the original. I absolutely love this approach. His entire autobiography is wonderful, and a quick read.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  The autobiography is wonderful, and brilliant, but understand it is not so truthful. The type of aphorism you cited is typical of his output. It most likely never happened, but it should have happened. This is like Franklin's great public persona of temperance even though he was a notorious drunk. Franklin was a scoundrel, an inveterate liar, skirt-chaser, always obese, and extremely lazy. A man of great intelligence, appetites, and very little in the way of self-restraint. He would generally sleep till noon or later. He'd lie naked on his bed until the afternoon, opening the windows, and calling it an "air shower". He had many mistresses, a knack for self-promotion, and swindled several business partners. At the same time, he was one of the most brilliant, wise, and influential men in the colonies, making important scientific discoveries, establishing hospitals, fire departments, post offices, libraries, schools, and many other projects. A successful author, inventor, diplomat, business man, and polymath, his work infused with wisdom, creativity, and common sense. He makes the modern "3 hour work week" sound like an amateur enterprise. It's incredibly how productive he was. Well, at least he claimed the bulk of the credit for the public works -- his drinking buddy and dear friend Chief Justice William Allen also played a big role (until the relationship soured and Allen had him fired from trusteeship of the Academy of Philadelphia due to yet another financial dispute). But Franklin was a great schmoozer, and he knew what needed to be done, how to get it done, and then how to take credit. He was extremely popular, told great stories, and was generally the smartest man in the room wherever he went. But later in his life, when he discovered his own son was following down the same dissolute path, he wrote this autobiography as a hagiography to hard work and self-discipline, and had the big brass balls to portray himself as that early-to-bed, early-to-rise, temperate moral paragon, even though all of his contemporaries understood exactly what kind of a man he was, and must have laughed their asses off when reading that book. And yet, it's a masterpiece. A critically important historical document while at the same time being enjoyable to read and inspiring millions. Franklin wins again.
pcmaffey 5y ago
I would love to work with an editor. If any editors are reading this and are interested in a) working with a new client, and b) think they can help me improve, I’d love to hear from you. My website is in my profile.
nonbirithm 5y ago
I liked this article as a collection of tips for effective writing, but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it. The author appears to be internally driven to write from the outset, and the advice given assumes that you also have the volition to write yourself and want to improve. Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit. In one of the comment threads for the last "how to write" article that was submitted recently, there was an opinion that it is not. There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary. Does the concept of interest have some kind of divide between "mental" (the subjects your brain is capable of focusing on at a biological level) and "volitional" (the things you say you want to focus on)? Certain mental conditions include symptoms like "specific interests" as diagnostic criteria, which makes me believe that biology plays a part in motivation in addition to routine. Ideas such as those have made me question many other things. Assuming that lack of motivation is not solvable, is it justifiable to have interest in nothing (productive/creative/cultural) in particular, yet still be dissatisfied with the ways you spend your time? There is some kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when I think that "writing would be nice," when attempting to write is an activity that I lose interest in within days of actively returning to it, but the original thought of "writing would be nice" never goes away.
- rahulpadalkar 5y ago
  I think the lack of interest is because of lack of information. Eg. I don't like making YouTube videos but if it helps me make some money then i can find motivation to make videos.
- strken 5y ago
  I don't think there's a binary of writers/non-writers. I think there's an energy threshold, above which people with an inclination to write would start doing so. If you took the average person, put them at a desk in a locked room with pen and paper, and left them there, they'd eventually write or draw something out of sheer boredom.
  - 5y ago
rpastuszak 5y ago
Re the point regarding writing regularly, I built an app to develop my daily writing habit. I’ve been writing every day for almost 2 years, averaging around 800 words per day. I’m pretty happy with it:) https://enso.sonnet.io https://enso.sonnet.io
- fijiaarone 5y ago
  A checkin a day is also a great habit for coding. Or, since I'm a tester -- a new passing test, every day.
trms 5y ago
The post touts writing and publishing regularly as the most important factors in having a blog, as many posts of this style do. I figured I'd give it a shot, so last summer I set myself the goal of writing one blog post each week, for at least a year. So far, I've never missed the deadline. The audience/reach of my blog, however, didn't change significantly, and it gets progressively harder to go on since it feels like I'm writing "to the void." A lot of people talk about consistency, but I have come to realize that after a certain point, "marketing," (e.g. spreading your stuff) is even more important. I'd love to see a post talking about that.
wayanon 5y ago
What motivates me to create is a vague memory of what the process gives me back - especially in tough times.
launchiterate 5y ago
I always find these sort of articles about the creative process remarkably useful because the principles are quite generally applicable. Write for yourself = Solve your own problem in startups :D Pick a writing schedule = Seinfeld does this. Writes jokes 4 hours a day every day for decades. Also known as time blocking.
- hellectronic 5y ago
  "Don't break the chain!"
Zababa 5y ago
I don't understand how $30 a month can motivate you to write when you make $15000 (1000 subsribers, $15 a month).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pca006132 5y ago
I have the motivation to write and did write some short articles about things that I learned, but I feel that those are too trivial and mentioned elsewhere on the web and too shy to publish them. I feel that publishing a blog with trivial articles looks dumb. Is this normal? Is there a way to overcome this?

238 points by gregdoesit 5y ago

My experience and techniques have been remarkably similar, albeit on a smaller scale than Gergely. A few years ago I decided to start writing one post per month on any subject within tech/software development. I've missed that goal a couple of times but my average since then has still been ~1.4 posts per month. I write about whatever is interesting to me and most often that's exploring topics in tech that were a mystery to me before like compilers, databases, etc. Like Gergely I keep an ever growing list of projects or topics that seem interesting to tackle at some point. One book I'd recommend most to folks writing in tech (whether it's technical or not) is On Writing Well, which teaches you the same kinds of things Gergely uses Hemingway Editor for. That is, to be concise and precise. I think the biggest benefit to writing consistently is that you improve as a writer and that you get to explore interesting topics. Even if you are doing coding projects to improve as a developer, it's a whole new level to start trying to explain that work in blog posts. It's easier in coding to get things right without understanding exactly how/why they worked. When you write to explain you have to actually dig into that how/why. Some people say tech blogging is great for getting jobs but in my experience, of all the things that helped me get work, my blog didn't contribute much. But I'm just one data point. I say this so that you don't get discouraged if you don't suddenly unlock emails from hiring managers because you start writing more.

richardatlarge 5y ago

Write regularly yes, but quantity does not lead inherently to quality. You have to hold a higher and then higher standard for what’s good

LegitShady 5y ago
I disagree. If you're putting effort into writing, writing often and on new themes/ideas is much more likely to lead to better habits and learning to write more effectively. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 100 hour drawings - same effort in terms of time but you're far more likely to learn how to be a better artist by learning to start quickly and progress further each time within the given amount of time. The traditional way of learning to draw is often subdivided into multiple 2 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, and then longer form practice pieces. You can learn to start an artwork more efficiently with just two minute sketches that you would never get to practice if you only did long effort works. Writing more often is even better than that, since you develop better habits compared to writing less often. It's like drawing 100 one hour drawings vs one 25 hour drawing, instead. Consistently practicing as often as you can be productive for is how you learn skills of all kinds.
- richardatlarge 5y ago
  Not really disagreeing- just stressing that there is a large literature on what’s called expert performance, which shows a powerful function for what they call deliberate practice. Stressing the explicit effort to get better. Not like some who play golf for 40 years yet never improve.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I think my point is that practice should stress 'deliberate practice' but also consistency, frequency, and also quantity. less deliberate practice is going to be worse than more deliberate practice. deliberate practice doesn't preclude quantity, and in fact quantity is a good measure of your ability to put out words. I'd rather get 500-1000 words an hour and go back to edit, than get 250 perfect words that I'm likely going to have to go back and edit anyways. The standard you talked about is related to the final draft, and the product of writing is rarely the product of the first unedited draft. Quantity has a very large value in learning to write.
    - richardatlarge 5y ago
      One very poor practice in higher ed and universities is that people rarely go through an editorial process where they can see how much early drafts can be improved through re-writes. So students write 100 essays, submitted and graded, with not a single polished work. At least that was my experience as a student and teacher
      - LegitShady 5y ago
        The idea of draft and edit was taught to me in high school but my high school english teacher was an author so perhaps they had better insight than most english teachers - I can't say since I only had the one teacher and they knew how to write. I think in university the issue becomes largely one of limited time and effort budget. I was an engineering major and took some economics courses for a minor (which I never got in the end) that involved essay writing. The issue wasn't that I didnt know i could improve it by editing, it's that each piece of homework competes against each other piece of homework for time and attention. The goal is 'how good can I make it in the time I can justify putting towards it'. I'm sure I made some boneheaded errors in some of my work but I was already doing 'homework triage' and leaving the least valuable but time consuming assignments to when I might be able to get to them. Writing a work you intend to publish rather than submit to a teacher is a different exercise. It's hard to practice in an environment where you're already racing the clock to get your 4-6 hours of homework out of the way each night.

LeicaLatte 5y ago

Very useful. Thank you.

bschoone 5y ago
Agreed!

anyfactor 5y ago

> I also use Grammarly to catch spelling, and grammar issues, and sometimes take suggestions the tool gives - though I just as frequently reject them. Grammarly has become a crutch. It either fails to catch typos or distracts me when I am writing. Moreover, I feel like I am progressively becoming bad at catching grammar mistakes.

richardatlarge 5y ago
I began writing recently in a browser editor (substack) that doesn't do the corrective spelling. I could barely write because I had to constant stop and figure out how to really spell the word. Totally revealed, for better or worse, how sloppy I had become as a typist.
- anyfactor 5y ago
  My go to is MS notepad. I will write everything in paragraphs in notepad then copy paste it in. Nothing is more fast and convenient than the classic Notepad. If only I could find something that is as fast as notepad, as convenient as notepad, as easy to work with as notepad but with Vim key bindings. That would be fantastic. Tried Gvim but that is no notepad.
  - i_am_proteus 5y ago
    ...perhaps vim or neovim?
    - anyfactor 5y ago
      Now that I REALLY think about it.... I guess I don't need vim. I am one of those persons who tries to convince themselves they need vim for everything to fit in the with the cool kids. I understand the hypocrisy and I kinda need this hypocrisy for motivation reasons I guess. Modifying Vim to the point it replicates notepad defeats the purpose of using vim. I need a handful of Vim key bindings but beyond that customizing the rc file to make it more like notepad is just too much of a hassle. I use text wrap and frequently use the scroll zoom. I miss 2-3 letters words in my writing so I have to get to them quickly when I am revising. Being a vim novice vim is great for me as I am writing but not for editing and revising. And Windows environment really isn't great for rapid typing with vim. Initializing the terminal takes me 10-20 seconds.

maroonblazer 5y ago

Regarding item 4 "Copy Writing Styles You Like": Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, describes an exercise he subjected himself to which consisted of, roughly: 1. Read an article or piece of writing you like. 2. Wait a few days for the specifics of the article to fade from your memory, but not so long that you forget the main arguments. 3. Rewrite the article without looking at the original 4. Compare what you wrote to the original. I absolutely love this approach. His entire autobiography is wonderful, and a quick read.

rsj_hn 5y ago
The autobiography is wonderful, and brilliant, but understand it is not so truthful. The type of aphorism you cited is typical of his output. It most likely never happened, but it should have happened. This is like Franklin's great public persona of temperance even though he was a notorious drunk. Franklin was a scoundrel, an inveterate liar, skirt-chaser, always obese, and extremely lazy. A man of great intelligence, appetites, and very little in the way of self-restraint. He would generally sleep till noon or later. He'd lie naked on his bed until the afternoon, opening the windows, and calling it an "air shower". He had many mistresses, a knack for self-promotion, and swindled several business partners. At the same time, he was one of the most brilliant, wise, and influential men in the colonies, making important scientific discoveries, establishing hospitals, fire departments, post offices, libraries, schools, and many other projects. A successful author, inventor, diplomat, business man, and polymath, his work infused with wisdom, creativity, and common sense. He makes the modern "3 hour work week" sound like an amateur enterprise. It's incredibly how productive he was. Well, at least he claimed the bulk of the credit for the public works -- his drinking buddy and dear friend Chief Justice William Allen also played a big role (until the relationship soured and Allen had him fired from trusteeship of the Academy of Philadelphia due to yet another financial dispute). But Franklin was a great schmoozer, and he knew what needed to be done, how to get it done, and then how to take credit. He was extremely popular, told great stories, and was generally the smartest man in the room wherever he went. But later in his life, when he discovered his own son was following down the same dissolute path, he wrote this autobiography as a hagiography to hard work and self-discipline, and had the big brass balls to portray himself as that early-to-bed, early-to-rise, temperate moral paragon, even though all of his contemporaries understood exactly what kind of a man he was, and must have laughed their asses off when reading that book. And yet, it's a masterpiece. A critically important historical document while at the same time being enjoyable to read and inspiring millions. Franklin wins again.

pcmaffey 5y ago

I would love to work with an editor. If any editors are reading this and are interested in a) working with a new client, and b) think they can help me improve, I’d love to hear from you. My website is in my profile.

nonbirithm 5y ago

I liked this article as a collection of tips for effective writing, but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it. The author appears to be internally driven to write from the outset, and the advice given assumes that you also have the volition to write yourself and want to improve. Is lack of interest a solvable problem? This is a question I continually revisit. In one of the comment threads for the last "how to write" article that was submitted recently, there was an opinion that it is not. There is nothing you can do to motivate someone who is fundamentally a non-writer to be a writer. The interest will never be there, no matter what the person chooses to say or think on the contrary. Does the concept of interest have some kind of divide between "mental" (the subjects your brain is capable of focusing on at a biological level) and "volitional" (the things you say you want to focus on)? Certain mental conditions include symptoms like "specific interests" as diagnostic criteria, which makes me believe that biology plays a part in motivation in addition to routine. Ideas such as those have made me question many other things. Assuming that lack of motivation is not solvable, is it justifiable to have interest in nothing (productive/creative/cultural) in particular, yet still be dissatisfied with the ways you spend your time? There is some kind of cognitive dissonance that arises when I think that "writing would be nice," when attempting to write is an activity that I lose interest in within days of actively returning to it, but the original thought of "writing would be nice" never goes away.

rahulpadalkar 5y ago
I think the lack of interest is because of lack of information. Eg. I don't like making YouTube videos but if it helps me make some money then i can find motivation to make videos.
strken 5y ago
I don't think there's a binary of writers/non-writers. I think there's an energy threshold, above which people with an inclination to write would start doing so. If you took the average person, put them at a desk in a locked room with pen and paper, and left them there, they'd eventually write or draw something out of sheer boredom.
- 5y ago

rpastuszak 5y ago

Re the point regarding writing regularly, I built an app to develop my daily writing habit. I’ve been writing every day for almost 2 years, averaging around 800 words per day. I’m pretty happy with it:) https://enso.sonnet.io https://enso.sonnet.io

fijiaarone 5y ago
A checkin a day is also a great habit for coding. Or, since I'm a tester -- a new passing test, every day.

trms 5y ago

The post touts writing and publishing regularly as the most important factors in having a blog, as many posts of this style do. I figured I'd give it a shot, so last summer I set myself the goal of writing one blog post each week, for at least a year. So far, I've never missed the deadline. The audience/reach of my blog, however, didn't change significantly, and it gets progressively harder to go on since it feels like I'm writing "to the void." A lot of people talk about consistency, but I have come to realize that after a certain point, "marketing," (e.g. spreading your stuff) is even more important. I'd love to see a post talking about that.

wayanon 5y ago

What motivates me to create is a vague memory of what the process gives me back - especially in tough times.

launchiterate 5y ago

I always find these sort of articles about the creative process remarkably useful because the principles are quite generally applicable. Write for yourself = Solve your own problem in startups :D Pick a writing schedule = Seinfeld does this. Writes jokes 4 hours a day every day for decades. Also known as time blocking.

hellectronic 5y ago
"Don't break the chain!"

Zababa 5y ago

I don't understand how $30 a month can motivate you to write when you make $15000 (1000 subsribers, $15 a month).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pca006132 5y ago

I have the motivation to write and did write some short articles about things that I learned, but I feel that those are too trivial and mentioned elsewhere on the web and too shy to publish them. I feel that publishing a blog with trivial articles looks dumb. Is this normal? Is there a way to overcome this?