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I made a tool to help motivate me write every day. After sharing it with some writers for their feedback, one of them had a really insightful comment: “Wow, wan
by rcme 3y ago
I made a tool to help motivate me write every day. After sharing it with some writers for their feedback, one of them had a really insightful comment: “Wow, wanna-be writers will really do anything to avoid writing!” I had spent a lot of time writing a tool to help me write when I could have been writing instead! Writing is an ancient technology. We more or less know how to do it efficiently. I think it’s important to ask ourselves why we spend time writing tools to write.
- antigonemerlin 3y agoI remember when I was a kid, writing an essay on a laptop for the first time, and realizing that the reason the page was blank was because I had nothing to say. At the end of the day, writing isn't scratching graphite onto paper. It's putting ideas into words, and it's the ideas part that form the main bottleneck for me. As it turns out, having interesting life experiences and or insightful analysis is hard. The former can only be gained by doing stuff in the real world, while the latter can only be gained by staring at a blank page really hard for a while, and or flashes of insight that seem almost random to me. Writing is thinking. Programming is thinking. Thinking is hard. Procrastination is easy. I find what helps is to keep a notebook. Ideas come. I jot them down before they disappear. Now I have much more to say, much more work to do, and procrastination is still easy, but at least that's one problem ameliorated.