Some Opinions on How to Write Online
Principally: how to get it out the door
Because I write online regularly, people sometimes ask me how they can do that too. The world of advice on this subject is virtually infinite, but here are some things I wind up repeating regularly.
Side note: writing is deeply embedded in questions like “why do you want to write, anyway?” but I am sidestepping those in their entirety and putting them off for another post.
How to find things to write about
Write about the meta question
I have a friend who’s an artist, and he wanted to write a piece about how to make a living as an artist. But he was having some trouble getting started with the piece, and so I suggested going one level higher on the question: “Why do so many artists have trouble answering that question for themselves?”
As it turns out, there are a lot of psychological blocks that artists have about making money, and those might need to be discussed before writing about market tactics! This is true for both the author and their potential audience. Our culture has ideas like “selling out” and “going corporate,” and these cloud many would-be artistic entrepreneurs’ ideas about exchanging their art for monetary value.
Writing about the meta questions has the effect of disengaging the cognitive parking brake you (and your readers) might have otherwise had if you’d gone directly at your original idea.
Write about what is, not what ought to be
Everyone wants to write about the way the world should be, and that’s great. But everyone in every domain chronically underestimates how little any of us actually knows about most things. Generally, writing about what is can be more immediately interesting to many people, because they probably don’t know! You might also realize, once you take a step back, that you don’t either.
Reality is stranger than fiction, so just take a good crack at reality before constructing an oughtitious fiction.
Want to write about what the government should be? Well guess what, no one even knows what the current one is or how it works. Your audience might not get how your proposal is different from what we have, if at all.
Want to write about how much government officials should be paid? Write about how much they are paid (no one knows!).
All that said, I do think there’s a place for oughtitious writing coming first in this process. It reveals what needs to be investigated about what is, usually in the form of a baseline. For example, if you want to write about what government salaries should be, you’re naturally prompted to wonder “how much are they paid now, anyway? Is that more or less than I thought?”
Don’t worry about originality
Humans have rediscovered the same ideas for millennia, and the thing you want to write about has likely been written about somewhere by someone. But that doesn’t really matter. The real question isn’t “who wrote it?” but “who read it?” Not “has it been written?” but “has it been read?”
Almost no one has read Aristotle, nor will they under any circumstances, but he’s got a lot of good ideas. If you write about those same ideas, there’s a good chance you’ll be introducing them to an audience that wouldn’t have otherwise thought about them—and certainly not in the manner inflected by your personality, life context, and writing style.
Don’t think about other authors; think about other audiences. Most people have not heard of most things.
How to get writing out the door
Face your fears
Many people are afraid of saying something incorrect and being nailed to the wall for it, rather than being treated charitably. Or they’re worried about revealing too much personal information in a way that will be embarrassing in the future. Etc.
These are real things to worry about, but here’s how I think about them: you need to cultivate enough strength within yourself to endure being wrong on the internet. The internet will get mad at you even if you’re right; correctness is no shield. If you let the potential of being wrong stop you from writing, you will stunt the growth of your own courage, presentation strategy, and thinking.
Regarding embarrassing yourself: you can’t always predict what will embarrass you in the future anyway. You also don’t have to share anything you don’t want to, and you shouldn’t share things that would critically hurt you. But the art of writing in a compelling fashion often requires earnestness, sincerity, and conviction. When I read other people’s writing, I don’t want to read endlessly hedged, fuzzy essays. I want to read a great point of view.
Tend toward conviction, and tend toward taking some risk in your writing. You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.
Further: some people only focus on the potential downsides of writing. These same people don’t often think about the upsides: what if someone reads your writing and loves it? What if it changes their life? What if they DM you about it, and you gain a new friend/husband/co-founder? What if you build a great reputation on a certain subject? What if your own thinking is greatly enhanced?
In any case, the reality of writing, especially when you’re getting started, is that very few people will read it at all. Cut yourself some slack and publish. If something goes awry, learn and become a better writer. You are strong enough to do that.
Narrow scope, decrease resolution
Scope: the breadth of your topic. Resolution: the detail of those topics.
Let’s say you wanted to write an overview of New York City’s history. That’s a large task! Not only is the scope wide (NYC has hundreds of years of history), but you could potentially include any level of detail. The very idea of writing this piece can be paralyzing.
So: make the project much smaller. Write about one thing that happened, or just one thing that existed (limit scope), and don’t worry about describing it in much detail (limit resolution). As I mentioned above, even this will likely be new and cool info to most people. Literally just write that NYC’s five boroughs joined together in 1898 to make the city we know today, and before that “New York City” referred only to Manhattan and a chunk of what is now called The Bronx.1 Bam, cool piece of writing with information that’s new to most people.
Not every essay needs to be a magnum opus. You don’t have to write thousands of words. Slap 100 words in a Substack editor along with a picture and you’re in business!
Once you write enough of these smaller essays, you’ll realize that you’ve done a lot of the work of writing the longer one you envisioned first—but it was less painful this way.
Write bricks, not facades
Related to the point above: decrease scope.
Once you write enough of these smaller essays, you’ll realize that you’ve done a lot of the work of writing the longer one you envisioned first—but it was less painful this way.
Write disclaimers
Are you worried that your thought process isn’t complete? Are you worried that you’ll want to revise your piece in the future? Just write that at the top of your essay, and say you’ll likely revisit it. This takes psychological pressure off of you to get it perfect, or do more work than you have bandwidth for.
I wrote a disclaimer at the top of this very essay: “Side note: writing is deeply embedded in questions like ‘why do you want to write, anyway?’ but I am sidestepping those in their entirety…” I have relieved myself of the pressure to wildly increase the scope of this piece. Easy!
Embrace the epistolary format
Writing a letter/email/DM to a specific person can be easier than writing “to the internet.” Why? Because you know exactly who your audience is, what they might know, how they might interpret what you write, etc. You must figure out who you’re addressing in order to use this format (“Dear [whoever]”).
The epistolary format’s distinct advantage is that is helps you identify your audience quickly—and it might even be yourself.
You can use this format implicitly or explicitly. Explicit usage means you keep the salutation at the top of your essay, like “Dear Andrew and Priya…” or some equivalent.
If you are familiar with the Bible, you’ll have noticed a lot of the New Testament is explicit epistles.2
Implicit usage can take multiple forms, like writing a response to someone else’s essay, or writing an essay and then erasing the salutation at the top—you don’t have to leave it in, but it can help guide and focus you during the writing process.
Ride the dragon, chase the spark, stay up too late
Sometimes you get the urge to write about something. You just feel like you need to write about it.
But many people then notice that they feel tired, that writing would be work, that maybe they just want to watch Netflix, or whatever.
I’m not going to tell you what you should do here, because everyone has a different set of cost-benefit analyses to perform in their life. I’m just going to tell you what I usually do.
I take a deep breath, and then tell myself: “every time in the past that you’ve leaned into writing, it has mostly paid off.” Writing when you feel the urge is a great advantage—your mind has settled on some idea and is already subconsciously probing it, trying to form novel connections that cry out to you for exploration. You might not be able to recapture the moment later.
So: I write, and let the world be damned.
I stay up way too late, my energy surging as I get deeper into the writing process, and I happily lose track of how low the metaphorical candles burn. I wreck my mornings, and make getting up terrible. And it’s glorious and worth it.
Do you know what it’s like to stay up writing and thinking until 7:30am, the sunlight spilling through your window from between Manhattan skyscrapers, only to realize with a panicked jolt that you have to be at work in one of those skyscrapers in an hour for an important meeting? I do. It’s horrendous.
And yet I did it over and over again when I was in the corporate in-office 9-5 world.
When it comes to the urge to write, I simply cannot be moved to change my behavior, nor do I want to be. The writing must be prioritized. It must come out.
See this atlas from 1897, the year before NYC’s consolidation.
For example, Paul begins 1 Corinthians with: “To the church of God which is at Corinth…” The title of that book of the Bible is just who originally received it.