6 ms·
What to Write About
- jewel 14y agoThese suggestions are helpful to me. I tried writing for 15 minutes every day this year, but I really had a hard time finding what to write.
- dogma72 14y agoThat is biggest problem I have on my blog. What to write about. This helped a little but not a huge amount. Still stuck.
- sgdesign 14y agoWell, are we talking about a personal blog or startup blog? What market are you in? And what are your goals for your blog?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kalimatas 14y agoJust a few advice about blogging http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/dont-be-a-commodity-blogger.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/dont-be-a-commodity...
- hfsktr 14y agoSimilar here. It depends on your interests and skills. For example if you were into statistics you might collect data while you play your game(s) and create something to explain it to others. As you can see I am not great at finding ideas myself. Even after you have the topic it's difficult. I am hoping that practice makes it easier. I am currently facing this where I am trying to write a post but can't figure out who am I writing to? Before having written anything I thought it would be just fine; I've written essays creating a post should be easy.
- pkhamre 14y agoWrite about the problems you have.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoMore important is who you write for. Different audience-writer feedback systems optimise for different things. Pithy, data-heavy, and ephemeral HN comments won't port handsomely to a foreign policy op-ed, which values flow and lucidity less than brevity. I am most proud of my short essays, often on humanitarian or mathematical topica, emailed to a few close friends, colleagues, and academics. Perhaps this is out of nostalgia given how much my long-form writing has degraded over the years.
- sgdesign 14y agoGood point. But I wouldn't say it's more important, for the simple reason that you can write for the wrong audience or with the wrong tone, and still get writing practice and slowly sharpen up your writing skills. But if you don't know what to write about, you might very well never get started at all.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoIf you write the wrong thing for the right audience you should find out rather quickly. If you write the wrong thing for nobody, or worse, a huddle of idiots, you will not find out how bad you are or have bad habits encouraged.
- peterhajas 14y agoMaybe this is overly-cliche, but I would pick the answer "I write for myself". My writing is a representation of how I feel, I do it for me.
- jonsterling 14y agoOr here's a novel idea: instead of looking for things to write about (like, “My Top Ten Rails Tips” or “How This Single Mom Made Bank From Home Only Three Hours A Day”), why not just only write when you have something to write about? That is to say, wait until you have something that is so important or cool to you that you have to show the world!
- sgdesign 14y agoThis is not a good idea for a simple reason: you need the practice. The only way to get better at writing is to write. So I strongly suggest you make an active effort to regularly find things to write about, instead of just waiting for inspiration to strike. Now on the other hand that doesn't mean you necessarily need to publish everything you write. If it sucks, keep it in your drafts folder and maybe revisit it later.
- jonsterling 14y agoThe oft-repeated soundbite, “The only way to get better at writing is to write” certainly bears a fair amount of truth. And I definitely agree with you, inasmuch as you say that practice writing should remain unpublished until polished. But I suggest that reading, as a complementary activity, can also improve your writing quite a bit. In fact, it's probably the case that if the sorts of people who insist on writing one vapid article per day as “practice” would write a bit less and read a bit more, they might even learn something. In my (rather short so far) life, I’ve found for my part that where the received wisdom is to trade dignity and professionalism for practice and experience, something along the lines of the opposite tends to work pretty well. My experience is that you don’t need to “throw it all out there” and produce a large body of substandard work in order to learn to do good work (although, this certainly does work for many people). I’ve been more happy with systematic approaches, where one tries to improve skills not by public brute force, but rather by private practice, emulation, and deliberation.
- jamesrcole 14y agoIn addition to the good point sgdesign made, writing helps you to generate ideas. "I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them." -- Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html
- mbrock 14y agoI saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Hacker News.
- shrishinde 14y agoWhy do you feel so?
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThat has a high angst to word ratio right there.