The internet is full of articles about ‘starting a blog that changes your life’. This isn’t one of them. This is an honest reflection of my first six months of writing. It’s also a guide on how to start writing online: have a look at the four-step playbook at the end of this post.

Reflections

High level reflections

Writing is one of the most important skills in the modern economy. It’s an enabler: quicker and better you can write, the more productive you’ll be. My original goals for this blog were to improve my writing1 and to explore my interests. I’ve mainly focussed on consistency and have made an effort to publish roughly every week. As William Zinsser says in On Writing Well:

You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.

Clarifying thinking

Most people believe writing is just about communicating ideas, but a major element is clarifying your thinking. I’ve especially noticed this when summarising books: I thought I had understood them well, but writing about them has helped me find nuances that I had initially missed. It’s also helped me connect disparate ideas. Paul Graham writes:

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Writing quickly

I was initially spending too much time writing these posts. After a few months I started using a process: I’d set a countdown timer for around 3 hours and try my best to stick to that limit2. In nearly all cases I go over by at least 30 minutes - but that’s still quicker than writing without any time limits. I’ve become a quicker writer: over time I’ve produced longer articles in a shorter amount of time (see chart for the average length3 of my posts this year).

a-z

Building in public

I didn’t appreciate this at the beginning. By sharing ideas online, I’ve had a number of good discussions based on the posts I’ve written. This has mainly been people sharing their experience or recommending books, but there have also been times when people disagree with parts of what I’ve written. This ultimately helps you build a better understanding of the topic.

Things to write about

Before starting I was worried I’d run out of topics after a few months. In fact, the opposite is true: when I wrote about topics I often found related questions to investigate. For example, I wrote about the origins of money and debt and then found a paper on how commercial banks create money, which led to another post.

Improved writing

This is really hard to measure. I can’t say whether the quality of my writing has improved since I started this blog. I’ve focused on consistency and am trusting that quantity leads to quality.

Looking forward

There are a few things I want to work on in the coming months:

  • Writing engaging pieces - I want to work on improving the quality of my writing and storytelling (even for technical posts). I’ve picked up a copy of Storyworthy as a guide.
  • Writing quicker - I still want to focus on speed. Although this is the most apparent improvement in my writing, I know there’s more to work on. I’ll likely experiment with other processes that help improve speed.
  • Increasing depth - I’d like to reduce the breadth of some posts and focus more on depth. For example, instead of summarising an entire book into one post, I’d like to go into detail on particular themes.

Getting started

I wish I had started earlier. Even when I knew about the benefits of writing, I didn’t start because I thought it was complicated.

Here’s a simple process:

A favour

I normally don’t have a call to action at the end of these posts, but I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this blog. Which posts have you enjoyed? What could have been different? Other good writing resources?

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  1. Having studied sciences and engineering, I’ve generally over-indexed on the quantitative side
  2. I don’t write in one sitting. I usually spread this time over a few days
  3. I’m trying to keep posts relatively short, so I don’t expect this trend to continue
  4. I overthought this step. The main thing is getting started. You can easily move between platforms if you decide to.