4 ms·

This is a really great point. I'm a big advocate of Kathy Sierra's "minimum badass user" strategy. Basically, try to write as little about yourself and write w

This is a really great point. I'm a big advocate of Kathy Sierra's "minimum badass user" strategy. Basically, try to write as little about yourself and write what will be most useful to improve someone else's abilities. I'm not amazing at this (yet), but it's my main goal. Identifying too closely with being a "writer" or "coder" or whatever can be detrimental to doing more meaningful work. That's because it's all about you. But really, it should be all about your users and how you are making their lives better. The more you can focus on "What will help my reader be awesome?" instead of "What will I write?", the better your writing will be. Nobody cares about how awesome I am (and they shouldn't!), but everyone cares about becoming more awesome themselves. Resist the temptation to focus on yourself and shift that focus to them and you'll automatically be better than 99% of writers out there. If you spend a week learning something remarkable and then show others how to do it in only an hour, it's a huge win for them. By focusing on learning and then sharing what you learned in a succinct way, you are accelerating the progress of others. That, more than anything else, will make you a great writer. The metric should be how much more powerful your readers are after reading your writing. (Naturally, I'm talking about a specific type of writing here, not fiction or historical writing, etc.)

brudgers 13y ago
"I'm a..." What matters is that the topic about which a person is writing is something about which they feel passionate - for example the process of writing in the original article...and in your post...and in this post. So, while I agree that anyone who cares about how awesome I am will be sorely disappointed, my goal is to say something interesting and entertaining - not necessarily entertaining in the sense of amusement but in the sense of engaging the reader's mind. I suppose that the Pythonic Mr. Anchovy has no more likelihood of going from a chartered accountant to writer in one go than he does of becoming a lion tamer. But that seems a wanting-to-be-a-writer-strawman. I read somewhere that there's no such thing as a person who is passionate about writing who doesn't write, and I am too lazy to google it. The strong sense of wanting to be a writer is wanting to be a better writer, and that means practicing the craft and throwing manuscripts over the transom and the internet is a great place for doing that, e.g. HN provides an excellent opportunity to obtain feedback about one's writing, and not just from internet trolls, but from "really fucking smart people."® Of course that's just my opinion.
- cafard 13y ago
  As I look at my office bookshelf--which runs from tech stuff to random stuff bought downtown and not taken home, I question "about which they feel passionate". It is certainly reasonable to say that Hennessy and Patterson have a consuming interest in hardware design, but do they feel passionate about it? Would Wright Morris or Anthony Burgess have used "feel passionate" as a reason for writing those volumes of autobiography?

brudgers 13y ago

"I'm a..." What matters is that the topic about which a person is writing is something about which they feel passionate - for example the process of writing in the original article...and in your post...and in this post. So, while I agree that anyone who cares about how awesome I am will be sorely disappointed, my goal is to say something interesting and entertaining - not necessarily entertaining in the sense of amusement but in the sense of engaging the reader's mind. I suppose that the Pythonic Mr. Anchovy has no more likelihood of going from a chartered accountant to writer in one go than he does of becoming a lion tamer. But that seems a wanting-to-be-a-writer-strawman. I read somewhere that there's no such thing as a person who is passionate about writing who doesn't write, and I am too lazy to google it. The strong sense of wanting to be a writer is wanting to be a better writer, and that means practicing the craft and throwing manuscripts over the transom and the internet is a great place for doing that, e.g. HN provides an excellent opportunity to obtain feedback about one's writing, and not just from internet trolls, but from "really fucking smart people."® Of course that's just my opinion.

cafard 13y ago
As I look at my office bookshelf--which runs from tech stuff to random stuff bought downtown and not taken home, I question "about which they feel passionate". It is certainly reasonable to say that Hennessy and Patterson have a consuming interest in hardware design, but do they feel passionate about it? Would Wright Morris or Anthony Burgess have used "feel passionate" as a reason for writing those volumes of autobiography?