Thirty Reflections from Thirty Days of Writing
This is the longest period of time that I’ve been in “deep work”. Turns out I normally live in a state of constant low-grade distraction—the first week of its absence was mildly psychedelic.
It is a delight to have a sanctioned excuse for why I am being unresponsive to people’s texts. I will be looking to collect more such excuses (“oh sorry I didn’t RSVP to your partiful, Virgos in the 11th house or whatever and therefore my phone is in the freezer”).
The best time to write is as soon as you get out of bed, before the world gets a hold of you or your brain has the opportunity to generate reasons to shy away from saying what it really thinks.
I have a newfound empathy for the absentminded writer. Belated apologies to all the researchers I’ve been mad at over the years for missing scheduled meetings.
I have a newfound empathy for the pundit. It’s very hard to write a comprehensive argument in any reasonable amount of time which doesn’t bloat a piece beyond all recognition.
There’s gold in the streets, just waiting for someone to come and scoop it up. From Gwern’s opening speech:
Never let a joke go to waste. People are constantly saying interesting things and good starting points for a blog post. The problem is that they laugh and immediately forget everything. Resolve to never let a funny line or a good question or a rant go to waste, whether it is a shower thought, an online chat, or an in-person conversation.
You are allowed to conduct surveys, do research, talk to people, and generally figure things out so that you can write a post. Caveated appropriately (“level of confidence: I spent an hour on this I’m just some guy can any of us know anything”) it’s good, fun, useful, and leave you feeling more “grounded” in the world.
Perhaps because understanding requires meaningful effort, having to write a post on a topic takes much longer than you’d expect, even when writing about a topic you think you know.
Writing makes you care about more stuff. Following my idle curiosity about whether we could cure the common cold and writing a piece on it has sparked my interest in multi-valent-diy-vaccines; many other ideas I wrote this month, including half-started drafts, feel significantly more alive to me.
My seemingly ‘low-effort’ posts often felt better to read and write. For instance I loved writing A Toast to Love, it felt like it emerged fully formed, with no editing needed. Maybe certain ideas have been cooking for a while, maybe because I’m writing on easier topics (love, a famously easy topic), maybe I’m being less precious, maybe some topics are more fun.
Having someone else read a draft and add comments or talk with you about it does wonders for momentum and clarity. Access to experienced writers helps (Georgia Ray fielded my pings every other day), but really you just need a small group of fellow-travelers (Kave and Harri in particular endured many early drafts).
There were a lot of great people at this retreat; unfortunately my grindset mindset - along with other work life responsibilities - made it hard to socialize, and I didn’t get to know many of them as well as I would have liked. I don’t regret my prioritization, but it is bittersweet.
It’s hard to switch between “executing” mode (I’ve got three hours to publish jfc) and “reflective” mode (engaging with peers and coaches to get feedback and reflect on ways I could improve). If I were doing this again, I would’ve liked to have built up more slack, such that I could take every Saturday off to review and reflect.
Counter to the above, I liked that this was first and foremost about me writing a lot, and not about me trying to write and integrate a bunch of people’s feedback. I like holding the pen and trusting that at the end of the day it’s coming from my voice.
Timed writing exercises - like ten minutes of writing, five minutes of peer editing, twenty minutes of writing, peer editing, repeat - are helpful.
LLMs are bad at microhumor: I add jokes and asides during the writing process because otherwise I get bored. LLMs, maybe because they don’t get bored when completing the next token, don’t do a good job of that. They are, however, good at helping you quickly trying out different sentence formulations and get ideas for how to continue a piece.
Dictating an initial draft with Wispr Flow is great.
Ahead of time I have no idea what posts will be popular. It was a delight getting messages from friends about a piece, and it always felt like it came out of the blue. I am still really surprised HN liked Unexpected Things that are People.
I got bingo!1
Every draft makes it better. Open up a new tab in a google doc in a different chrome window, put it side by side with your last draft, and rewrite it.
You can say “I wrote a post on that topic”, pull out your phone, and make people read it. If they’re not laughing when you expect them to laugh, you can ask if they got the joke. There’s no law against this.
View your work as a continuing conversation with the world and with your readers; it relieves the pressure of having one piece be the end all be all. h/t Sasha Chapin.
The first few days I agonized over getting anything out that I liked and which would hit the word count. By now it’s relatively straightforward to write 500 words that at least don’t make me want to kill myself.
I like obsidian - when I write with it I feel clean and free of distraction and like I fit in at a hip coffee shop; however it seems my revealed preference is to put all of my writing ideas into one giant google doc.
The vibe matters. It’s hard to write in a sterile office building, it’s hard to write when you’re nearby people whom your attention swirls around in some way (beautiful and unhappy people both have this effect on me). It’s easy in a quiet room with natural sunlight and a good strong table, it’s crazy ridiculously easy on an airplane (as long as the person in front of you doesn’t recline).
It is scary to get negative comments about your writing. But in the same vein that I don’t know what might resonate for other people, it’s helpful to remind myself that person might not be the person I want to reach, that I don’t want to compress my writing down to something that would have been written by committee, that the point is to start a conversation.
Also I remind myself, fuck that guy.Book reviews let you use a book as a jumping off point to talk about whatever it is you actually want to talk about. This explains like, 99% of the genre.
If I’m blocked in writing something it’s probably because a.) I don’t understand what I’m trying to say b.) I have something else on my mind and I should just write about that.
It still feels ‘edgy’ for me to write about myself and my opinions/feelings/my personal life. But I notice there’s a spark when I write and read those posts. Sometimes people read for the ideas, sometimes they read for the spark, the best pieces probably have both.
I regret not doing something like this a decade ago.
Thank you to the program staff, the coaches and advisors, and all of the residents at Inkhaven.
“Gear (stuff) roundup”: You Can Just Buy Things.
“Pastiche”: The First Thanksgiving.
“Exactly 500 Words”: Favorite Four Character Chinese Idioms, which is why there are only three idioms instead of four. This is my answer to Vishad’s implicit question in his agh-much-better-than-anything-I’ve-written-parody-of-me.
“Step by Step Instructions”: How to Run Small Group Workshops - The Ball might also count but that’s less step by step and more how to have manic breakdowns in pursuit of your OKRs.
“A love letter to a thing/place/idea”: A Toast to Love, which was either a love letter to the idea of love or to the mid-tier reality tv show F-Boy Island.
“Sequence of interconnected posts”: My AI for Epistemics series (1,2,3,4)
“Piece with a Chart”: Several, but let’s go with the Chinese Peptides one since I gathered that data.
> Every draft makes it better. Open up a new tab in a google doc in a different chrome window, put it side by side with your last draft, and rewrite it.
While this does work, don't apply it too widely. For a long blog post, even an ACX Much More Than You Wanted to Know (like 30k words), it will probably be a reasonably good use of time, once or twice.
It still works for a novel but it's no longer a good use of time. I think. I don't seem to have learned any better way to edit my novels, though, so IDK.