Some Thoughts On Writing

I’m shamelessly ripping off Inkhaven and doing my own challenge, Egghaven. This is the seventh post.

Before starting this challenge, I had already spent periods of many months posting every day. These had led me to doubt the ideas that:

• If you write consistently, you will become better at writing.
• If you write consistently, eventually you’ll grow an audience.

Naturally, these two could be linked; maybe it’s the improvement that grows the audience more than the consistency. Merely writing a lot is not enough to improve. Nor is merely reading a lot, or developing your taste in good writing. When I read back my posts from 2017, I don’t think I’ve substantively improved the quality of my writing (at least not commensurately with the amount of practice I’ve done). Practice alone is not enough; deliberate practice is required. You must hone your attention to detail, analysing what makes the sentences of great writers sing and dance, and refine and reshape your own sentences. You must ascend the three levels of noticing. I don’t think this process is entirely pleasant, although I suspect that if it is especially painful, the pain is trying to tell you something useful.

One idea that I have wholly come to believe is the Paul Grahamism that good writing is good thinking. I often think of a great idea for a post, perhaps a clickbait-y title, and write down a few bullet points for the outline. When it comes time to write it, I struggle to build any momentum; each sentence feels heavy. My pen is being dragged through treacle. It inevitably dawns on me that my thesis is incoherent, and that I don’t understand some core part of my own premise. My original excitement about the idea was more along the lines of “I would love to have written a post that expresses XYZ” than “I have a grasp of XYZ and so I should write a post about it”.¹

The first two-thirds of Egghaven has highlighted the contrast between what I want to write and what I feel like I should write. I tell myself I should write high-effort, intellectual-sounding stuff about AI. I have some modest capacity for doing this, e.g. some of my recent posts. More of this kind of writing would be instrumentally useful for me; it might help with future jobs, funding opportunities, etc. Unfortunately, I keep bumping into the fact that I am still deeply uncertain about many relevant parts of AI, and I don’t want to admit the extent of this in my writing (not to mention that I think these posts would be dull to read).

The should vs want dichotomy has led to me spending hours this week smashing my head against the former category. This is despite having read all the usual posts about simply writing what is in your heart in this very moment. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to notice what I actually want to write. Possibly this is because I have various adaptive mechanisms for obfuscating what I generally want from myself, making it especially hard in this specific, narrow domain. I often want to write about my feelings, although another part of me pulls against that. Isn’t it feminine to write about one’s feelings? Isn’t it a little unserious? Won’t people just think I’m whining, looking for attention, etc? But then it’s often the feelings-y posts that seem to do the best; these are the ones that cause people to reach out. While part of my brain has some unshakeable fetish for Bayesianism, clearly I still haven’t learned to update all of my internal models.

When I eventually figure out what I want to write, it is enjoyable. There is something satisfying about having the words slide from my brain to my screen with so little friction. Publishing every day is good exposure therapy; my fear of looking foolish or pathetic has dwindled to the point that actually posting something is relatively painless.

I will consider doing some deliberate practice for writing well. I’m hoping I can finish out my 10 days strong and get at least one more effortpost out, but for the last three days, I will only be writing what I actually want to write. Either way, I think the challenge has already proved worth doing.