I’ve written over 220,000 words on my blog since 2014, when I first started writing online. This year, I finally feel like I can write well, in a way that’s useful for you, the people reading what I write, and myself, who wants to communicate something to the rest of the world.
In the intervening half-decade, my writing workflow has changed dramatically as I’ve become more efficient and expressive in my writing. This is a story of how a blog post like this one gets made.
Most of my blog posts start from a spark of an idea that I discover in conversations or reading. Sometimes, it’s as straightforward as a question I get so often that I want to put down an answer in writing. But usually, these “sparks” are things like:
The first time I get an idea like this, whether in the shower or at a coffee shop talking to a friend, I just write it down on my phone, in the moment. The point here is not to have a fleshed-out idea or to spend a lot of time thinking about it, but to keep it in my mental periphery so that the idea has the time and space to grow and snowball into something more interesting and meaty. I’ll commonly have 3-5 “seeds” of blog posts like this at any moment, that I come back to on a regular basis.
Once the idea is in my mental space, I’ll add related ideas and approaches to it over time, until there’s enough substance to the idea on which to build a post. When I read articles online relating to the topic, I’ll throw those links into my notes. At this point, I’m just collecting raw material that I might need later, to mold into something more structured.
The most useful thing I’ve started doing at this stage is to bring it up in conversation with smart people, and try to explain the idea and get their feedback or disagreements. Besides the obvious benefit of feedback on the idea, I also get better at choosing the right words and phrases to describe it, so when it comes time to write it down more permanently, I know the right way to put the idea onto paper that’ll resonate with you, who’s reading what I write.
Sometimes, I’ll only stay in this sort of “collecting ideas” phase for only a day or two. Other times, with more high level ideas or arguments drawing from experience, I’ll let it simmer for months until I’m confident that I’ve found the right way to articulate it in a way that resonates with people I’ve talked to.
I think this phase of calibration and polish, even before I’ve started writing, is the number one thing that’s made me a better writer over the last couple of years. Writing isn’t just the transformation of thoughts into sentences; it serves the purpose of communication. Good ideas, communicated ineffectively, isn’t good writing. My best writing is on ideas I’ve spoken about dozens of times, precisely because I’ve practiced and calibrated myself to the best way to communicate that particular idea. The phrases, word choice, order of arguments, what I mention first, what I leave until the end, what I omit completely – these are all things that I can experiment with, to calibrate the expression of my idea into someone else’s mind to match the version of it in my mind as closely as possible.