"Everyone one wants to have written, but no one wants to sit down and do the work to write." Is how I heard it.
That's how I feel about lifting heavy weights. There's certainly a general principle to be found here. One piece of feedback I got from someone I respect very much is, "read less and write more." So far that's been limited to quality documentation and Tufte style presentations, but I can definitely see the appeal of writing a book even if I don't make a penny off it.
These days most of my writing is in the form of research blog posts for my job, which I enjoy. I used to write a lot of fiction in my teens and early 20s, but somehow lost the discipline to sit down and do so after I discovered visual art.
I think you're fighting activation energy. I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book. As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users. I've found that the second or t…
Yeah, it's definitely activation energy. Once I've actually started working on something, I can do anything, but damn, starting is tough.
That’s really interesting, I’m the opposite where starting on things is easy but pulling through to the end and actually making a finished product is tough. I wonder if there’s a word for that.
Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and exp…
I'm definitely not putting things on my blog for google rankings or ads. Those sound like they would be really boring to spend my time on, and the ads are extra pointless because the government has put a cap on my income in exchange for being paid to be a student, and I'm already at this cap with my part-time software job. I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions…
I have various blogs and outlets for putting up my writing. Only one of those has Google ads on it. It has Google ads not for the revenue (I don't think the ad revenue has even generated enough over the years to cover the hosting cost) but it is for me to understand how Google ads work on a Wordpress website. My experience of ads usually comes from "I need to integrate this SDK and provide these reporting tools so that the people who care about ad revenue can stay away from my desk" not a "I am a small-time content provider using Google ads."
At least, that's the story I tell myself to salve my ego due to not making any money from ads on my personal website :-)
Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and exp…
I'm definitely not putting things on my blog for google rankings or ads. Those sound like they would be really boring to spend my time on, and the ads are extra pointless because the government has put a cap on my income in exchange for being paid to be a student, and I'm already at this cap with my part-time software job. I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions…
As an addendum to posting your content on your own website, whenever someone reaches out to me for help, I always direct them to ask the question on the relevant forum, e.g. Unity3D or Artificial Intelligence or some such place, or post it on Stackoverflow, and then email me a link to the very public location. I have the philosophy that I will cheerfully and willingly labour over a lengthy answer and example code that will help out 10,000 people with the same problem. But I won't give the time of day to a single person.
I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…
ha, that's funny.
I found i have the same sort of procrastinating behavior. If I want to clean my house, just avoid some higher-priority thing.
You should harness it. Decide you will put in 4 hours a day doing exercise, and procrastinate by writing a book on the couch. :)
Recently I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi book. ...and that's mostly it. I don't know what could be the next step, except actually writing the thing. Are there websites/communities? I don't follow nor know of any relevant ones myself. Start with short stories? Or something longer? Self-publish whatever I write? Or start spamming "real publishers"? When I was younger I read a monthly science fiction…
Good places to start for writing fiction: - Writer's Digest publishes large yearly lists of places to submit books and short stories. - The Writing Excuses podcast covers all steps of the writing process, from research and planning to publishing with an agent or going the self-publishing route. The speakers cover a wide range of strategies on each topic. - writing.stackexchange.com is a relatively useful resource on…
I coin one rule for blogging: However you do it keep it consistent. If you do monthly long reads keep doing that. If you do short posts 5 times per day keep making them 5 times per day (its better to drop to 4 and make a buffer that auto publishes than to skip days) Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how…
I disagree with this advice. I write articles when there is a need for them. Sometimes they are 2 months apart, and sometimes 2 days. I can't plan the problems I'll face and solve in advance. I also spend a lot of time updating old articles with new information, and that new information trickles in at random intervals. Most of your readers will find you through Google, when they're trying to solve a specific problem.…
Could say that is still consistent. If your articles arise out of a need then that is the formula. What you could do is delay the publication if there is no urgency.
I found a really cool blog one time where the author was writing a book spread out over 4 blog posts (or so) that he kept updating. His daily new posts briefly described the updates he made. It was a cool rss subscription for me. I certainly didn't visit his book every day but his updates gave a sense of involvement and I ended up reading the "same" articles multiple times both for the content and to see the progress. Had he just updated the postings I would never have returned.
1) You can write it slow in your free time. No hurry.
2) You learn a lot and organize your thoughts in your head.
3) You can start selling before the book finished. It will allow you to test your audience and keep motivated.
4) When it's finished it's mostly passive income (though it's a good idea to also build a website and publish some blog posts regularly)