Wow, this thread resonates with me. Up until 2003, I’d published a handful of magazine articles, mostly pro bono. In February 2003 I started blogging and have since published well over 2 million words on the blog. It absolutely changed my life; got me two pretty juicy jobs, helped me get others hired, made friends, helped me win big industry arguments even when maybe I didn’t deserve to.
Take-aways that stand out for me: - Writing is a lousy way to make money. But if you have another employable skill (in my case, software), writing can supercharge your career, the product of having a skill and being able to communicate about how you’re using it is much greater than the sum of the parts. - All the conventional wisdom is true: Shorter words in shorter sentences, less is more, crush out the passive voice and empty words like “some”, write what you know, etc etc etc - I suspect most writers (a) enjoy getting attention and (b) hate to admit it. So, confession: I get a huge dopamine rush when something I write goes viral and gets lots of attention, or when it gets a small number of readers but they include the people who I really want to reach. - All these years later, I have absolutely no ability to predict whether anything I write will be popular or not. Finely crafted three-thousand-word essays representing days of work on issues of vital importance sink like a stone, while little squibs that I dash of in 45 minutes while watching TV get 75K reads and start big debates. In conversations with other social-media authors, I keep getting asked “How do you write things that people will want to read?” and they just don’t believe me when I admit that I totally don’t know. But, having said all that… On Apr 4, 2024 at 6:06:11 AM, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > I found this perspective (from a newsletter on, of all things, Brit > politics) fasinating. Basically, "everything is interesting." > I don’t buy it. On the grounds that, empirically, some of the things I wrote are not found interesting by the audience. 😉 Maybe there are writers who are so skilled that people will enjoy reading their writing about boring stuff?
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