So I’ve been publishing regularly on my blog for 10 years, over 1500 articles and counting. Ranging from 300 word missives to 3000 word deep digs. A couple books too.<p>Here’s what I learned:<p>It’s <i>easier</i> to be prolific. When you write every day it comes easy. Like brushing your teeth. You wake up and you’re full of thoughts on your general topic and you write them down. A quick edit, hit publish, and done. If it goes viral, fantastic. If peopel love it, amazing. If not, no big you try again next time.<p>And then life happens. You can’t just write every day, you have to create things worth writing about! Experiences, research, <i>work</i>.<p>You reduce your writing output.<p>And the ideas dry up. Writing becomes hard. You eke out 2, maybe 3, articles per week and it’s hard work. You struggle. You drag them out of your brain. It doesn’t feel right.<p>Nothing feels important enough to write about. With 2 at-bats per week, there’s a lot riding on every missive. It’s hard. It’s demoralizing. And it shows in your writing.<p>The readers can’t tell. Future you can’t tell. Neil Gaiman is right – 5 months from now you won’t see the difference between the writing that was <i>work</i> and the writing that flowed.<p>But you today, you know. You know you’re rusty. You know it wasn’t as easy as it could be. You see that it’s rough.<p>And I haven’t found a solution.
/rant Substack has literally one job: to display written information on a webpage and provide good typography for writers. The most commonly used font - "Spectral" is a complete mess. Kerning is off, letter spacing is too much and word spacing is too little. If someone is reading this at Substack, please for the love of god consult a professional typographer and ask them for a recommendation. If you can't then just use one of the many Google Fonts such as Source Serif Pro. Here is a comparison of how bad it is:<p>Original, Spectral: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/SBS8iQG.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/SBS8iQG.png</a><p>Source Serif Pro: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/AM8KSUC.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/AM8KSUC.png</a>
"The only thing I know about how to be more prolific? Write about the thing that means the most to you, then write about the thing that means more."<p>Late 2019 I started writing on a topic I'm passionate about- cheap entry into amateur radio. I wrote more than ever, about 12000 words. Not much by novelist standards, but more than I'd written on any single subject before it. And I have a lot more material to write, once I can find the brain power to sit down and fix it up. One of the subjects of my writing was a product that's been since discontinued (the BITX40 if anyone is wondering) and so it's stagnant- but it's all there and I have more writing to do.
<i>It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.</i>
- Nietzsche<p>I wish this were the motto of all writers. There is already too much “sentence inflation” online...succinctness needs a comeback.
Yup, it's on writing more, not on writing something useful. They chose quantity over quality.<p>For what it's worth, it's long and rambling. The abject incoherence of their writing fails to hold your attention.<p>> I needed write about it ...<p>> you’ll run out of things write about ...<p>> I take that as a sign that to not hold anything back.<p>> in the guise of letting you knowing me better<p>The article is riddled with various typos.<p>Let me refer to this HN commentary:<p>Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827</a>
How much content is too much? Is the job of the writer merely to produce more and more content?<p>New TV series which are slowly converting every original work of art into something that can be passively consumed on the couch. And the remakes and resurrections and remixes of proven favourites. More podcasts than there are hours in the week. Reams of self-published books, endless blog posts, often highly detailed and very well researched. Then all the tweets, social media posts, videos, not to mention very high quality youtube content...<p>It's a deluge. I find myself paralysed sometimes, unable to choose what to look at next. Being a content creator (artist?) must surely become dminished in the face of this overwhelming amount of content.<p>It isn't going away, this democratisation of content publishing. But I wonder if we will ever have any 'classics' ever again.
This thing of having one or two long paragraphs of rambling text before the writer actually gets to the point is something I find annoying.<p>It is so common nowadays that I find myself automatically skipping the first paragraph altogether.
Related thought:<p><a href="https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/" rel="nofollow">https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/</a>
As drinkers of the HN fire hydrant, we value terseness. So I suspect you,
like I, clicked here much as a conservative might click on a liberal's defense
of SF's homeless policy: what's it all about? At 2000+ words, this article
merely adds to our confirmation bias that people need to get the point in far
fewer words than they currently do in all media.