My favorite writing advice bears repeating:
Writer's block is what happens when you try to write a final draft on the first try.
To write better, develop a habit of writing
41–50 of 81 posts
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have experience as a professional writer? I'm curious, how you think a person without a degree on journalism, writing, etc, can get a job writing? I'm a software engineer, by the way. Not that I'm interested in changing my career or anything, but your comment was interesting and I do like writing, so I think it's worth knowing!
It depends on what you mean by professional writer. Being a developer advocate, at many companies, is equivalent to writing full-time, and a software engineer who has recently developed an interest in writing is typically an easier sell for those roles than a writer who has recently developed an interest in code. This is basically true for all domain-specific writing jobs as well. Being an expert in the domain and be…
The caveat I'd make about devrel and related jobs is that they tend to be pretty people-oriented--which doesn't necessarily appeal to a lot of software engineers (or writers).
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#43In the recent pianojacq discussion there were tons of people commenting "don't try to learn an instrument on your own just by doing, all you'll learn is bad habits and limit your progress".
How come there's never much comment like that in writing threads?
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#44For anyone interested in writing “for real” (professionally or as a hobby) I highly recommend John Scalzi’s blog [1]. He’s cynical, he’s funny, and above all he’s practical. Among his advice over the years a few things have really stuck with me: 1) Don’t get an MFA, it’s a waste of money. If you need a grammar class, take one. If you need more of a basis in x literary genre because that’s what you want to write in, t…
Do you have experience as a professional writer? I'm curious, how you think a person without a degree on journalism, writing, etc, can get a job writing? I'm a software engineer, by the way. Not that I'm interested in changing my career or anything, but your comment was interesting and I do like writing, so I think it's worth knowing!
I'm a technical writer for a tech software start-up, but I started in sales. There's always some content that needs to be written. Blogposts, documentation, whitepapers, etc.
I started by... well writing. I wrote a some blogposts, and a few of them trended on HN. Eventually, when we hired our CMO, he saw what I had been putting out and asked me to help out more. At a certain point, it made sense for me to transition entirely to writing.
Since you're not a professional writer, don't expect to be given a lot of writing responsibility. You basically have to prove yourself. If you have an editor at your company, work with them. I didn't have any formal writing training, but I applied the feedback I got from our editor and slowly my quality improved. It took me about 4-5 months before I was fully trusted to write quality pieces without hand-holding.
Given that you're a software engineer, you have the domain knowledge to write some very useful content. It's just about finding your style.
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have experience as a professional writer? I'm curious, how you think a person without a degree on journalism, writing, etc, can get a job writing? I'm a software engineer, by the way. Not that I'm interested in changing my career or anything, but your comment was interesting and I do like writing, so I think it's worth knowing!
Any decent writer can make money from writing, but depending on how you want to be hired/paid then the approach could be very different. So, I guess it depends on... 1. What do you want to write? Ad copy? News? Fiction? 2. What do you bring to that subject matter that has value? Here's a real life example: About 10 years ago, a friend of mine was a business major and had a day job in marketing. He liked to write so h…
You'll probably need a portfolio to get hired as a writer (or even into a job that has writing as a significant component).
For journalism, the issue isn't the lack of a journalism degree--which many/most journalists don't have. It's the general lack of jobs, especially those that pay more than subsistence wages. (And, even then, a lot of them are at pretty low quality sites. And the sort of local newspapers that a lot of journalists got started at are gone in large part.)
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#46Bit of a shameless plug, but I started a project for people (like myself) looking to get better at fiction writing through practice in collaborative storytelling: https://storylocks.com
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#47I'm furiously working on a project that I want to do a Show HN on at some point that's relevant to this.
I'm basically making a Lovecraftian text editor / puzzle game / walking simulator(?) where progress is gated by writing. My goal has been to nudge players into being more prolific writers.
There's little content aware changes to the environment based on what you write, and lots of little touches intended to spark ideas.
If you play it "right", you'll have a pile of art you created that's yours, that you can export. It's not opinionated on what you write, there will be some prompts you can take advantage of if you want, but players can type nonsense if their hearts and souls are truly, irredeemably empty.
I apologize for the shameless self promotion. My suspicion is that my target audience is rare and razor thin. I feel pressure to evangelize for a genre that to my knowledge doesn't exist. ( latest tweet showing this crazy thing. https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1316830278644531200 )
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#48I'm furiously working on a project that I want to do a Show HN on at some point that's relevant to this. I'm basically making a Lovecraftian text editor / puzzle game / walking simulator(?) where progress is gated by writing. My goal has been to nudge players into being more prolific writers. There's little content aware changes to the environment based on what you write, and lots of little touches intended to spark…
I'm your target market. Twitter thread looked messy. How do I sign up?
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#49For anyone interested in writing “for real” (professionally or as a hobby) I highly recommend John Scalzi’s blog [1]. He’s cynical, he’s funny, and above all he’s practical. Among his advice over the years a few things have really stuck with me: 1) Don’t get an MFA, it’s a waste of money. If you need a grammar class, take one. If you need more of a basis in x literary genre because that’s what you want to write in, t…
I don't suppose you have more specific links to the places where he's talked about this? I'd be interested in reading more. The suggestion: > 3) Don’t quit your day job. Is interested advice. Does he actually have advice for how to do this, and maintain any sort of reasonable writing schedule? I can see the practicality, but the obvious downside is having your time squeezed into smaller and smaller pieces (especially…
Get up at 430am. It's possible, even with a baby/toddler.
Having read about the habits of writers, a lot of writers limit their "writing" to a few hours/day and spend the rest of their time in the business of being a writer. If you're just starting, you mostly need to do the writing part.
Re: To write better, develop a habit of writing
#50I have been doing morning pages for 10 years and have been attempting to to force the habit of writing for longer. I don't like writing. You definitely get better at writing, but some things just don't get easier. Same for running. Daily runner. It is the best thing I have ever done. But it sucks and never gets easier. Is there anything to get rid of this feeling of suck?
For me:
First, getting on a streak reduces the suck. Breaking the streak and getting back into it multiplies the suck.
Second, have no thoughts about the suck. Let it leave but a whisper in the mind. Dismiss it as quietly, casually and quickly as possible and get to the next thought, or no-thought.