Day 15 of Daily Writing

This is post 15 of my unannounced, self-imposed month of daily writing. I’ve been making soft promises to myself and others to write more for… years. I was inspired by a few of the folks who wrote daily last month for Inkhaven, and so decided to do my own super unofficial version of that.

It’s been fun so far! And by “fun” I mean it’s been a rewarding challenge. :)

Some thoughts:

• Sitting down to “do writing” is a lot easier if you’ve scratched down some notes, or started on an outline of a post already. I’ve been using a mishmash of iA Writer, Obsidian, and Drafts to outline and ideate.
• Writing for a deadline is helpful. There have been a couple posts where in the past, I would have endlessly tweaked and wordsmithed before publishing. When the forcing function is “I want to finish this so I can go to bed”, suddenly editing decisions become easier. Similarly, writing daily helps me stay in the rhythm of writing and build up “muscle memory”. Only writing when I feel “inspired” is a recipe for not writing much.
• Writing is mentally taxing, but “doable” on low mental energy. Ideating is a more enjoyable / open activity, but is not doable with low mental energy.
• Posting more means I am less precious about each post. I think this is good. Having variance in article quality is healthy. For my preferences, a mixture of high-effort and mid-effort posts seems like a good mix. Only posting high-effort content is less rewarding, ultimately, since most of my more “popular” posts are my mid-effort ones, but most of the posts that I’m “most glad I’ve written” are the high-effort ones. Each of these is rewarding in its own way.
• High-effort posts, unsurprisingly, take a lot of time. Both book reviews I’ve posted this month were done on weekends; this isn’t an accident, though it wasn’t intentionally planned.
• Running is a good time for ideation. I already knew this, but when I’m in the mode of “it would be nice to have things to write about”, it’s nice to know that I have an activity that readily fosters idea generation.
• Writing more made me tidy house a bit, digitally. I’ve been tweaking on the margins with my personal site as I now look at it more frequently. I improved the blog archive page, added a markdown output to each post for LLMs¹, improved my image loading performance, and so on. This sort of digital garden tending feels wholesome.

What’s been working:

• Using iA Writer has been legitimately delightful, even though I likely use <5% of its full feature set.
• Allowing myself to post articles that I think are past the 80% quality line has made me feel much freer to “just write more”. Move on to the next idea.

What’s NOT been working:

• I still want to write on some less directly technical topics (e.g. psychology, philosophy, etc.), and have been finding it somewhat tricky to find an “in” there. I think I’ll just need to accept that those posts will be intentionally not in my normal lane and bite that bullet.
• Writing pieces that take more than one sitting is hard in this mode. I generally ideate in the morning and write in the evening, and “need” to get a post out by the evening. I tend to have a fairly single-track mind for writing, and so parallelism is hard. Which means sequentially writing one post per day. Which means, mostly, writing them in one sitting – and that places a (likely constructive) limit on how much effort I can put into any individual post.

Beyond the mechanics, writing more intentionally has also made me think about my projected online identity. My blog has always held a bit of a weird niche in my mind – it’s part public journal, part “performative display of competence”, part curiosity log. I primarily write on technical topics, but I wouldn’t call this a “tech blog”. Sometimes my articles get picked up HackerNews; sometimes my coworkers read my blog, or inspire a post. Sometimes I’m writing just because I want something to exist, for having thought of a connection between some ideas that I find interesting. Upon reflection, my ideal reader is the person who resonates with many of the same topics that I’m interested in, has my blog as one of many in an RSS reader, and (if the stars align) gets a little bit of joy or curiosity when clicking on a new piece of my writing.

In any case, I have the explicit awareness while doing this month-long writing exercise that this is not maintainable as a daily practice. Part of this effort is to shake out all the cobwebs of ideas that I’ve had on my “to write” list for far too long. The Antimemetics review was one, but there’s one or two other personally important topics that I’d like to get in writing before the month is over. The hope, though, is that I find some pieces of this experience that I enjoy enough or am able to integrate well enough to exit this with a “more frequent than quarterly” writing routine.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it. (And do drop an email if you ever feel inclined, I enjoy hearing from folks!)