The Theory and the Practice
Later this year—October 25 to be precise—will be the 20th anniversary of this blog, if you can believe that. In its original incarnation, this blog started in LiveJournal and then migrated to WordPress a few years later. But the first post I sat down to write was written in LiveJournal, and having created my account, I wrote without much thought. To some extent, after nearly 20 years and nearly 7,300 posts, not much has changed in that regard.
At some point, as my writing got more serious, I stopped with the more frivolous posts and attempted to put more thought into what I was writing. Reading the earliest posts and those posts from a few years later, I can see the difference.
For most of the twenty years I’ve written here, I’ve had a theory about how I want to approach my work. It goes something like this:
Maintain a list of ideas, culling those ideas that seem dumb while and keeping the good ones around.Plan out my post. Outline it carefully. Consider all the angles.Write a draft, set it aside for a few days, and then come back to it, read it and then rewrite the whole thing getting rid of the bad parts and punching up the good parts.Carefully proofread every word of the final draft. Eliminate all the typos that creep in mainly due to the speed with which I write.Post the thing.Repeat.A more disciplined writer would work this way. They would manage their craft like any other type of work, finding a process, breaking down into manageable chunks. There would be goals and deadlines and an infrastructure of some kind to support the writing. There would be time to research pieces and carefully collate notes.There would be a schedule for daily writing. Ideally, there would be someone else to worry about the “platform” and promotion since all I really want to do is write. For nearly twenty years, this has been the theory behind seven thousand plus posts and countless millions of words.
In practice, I’ve never come close to the theory. Indeed, I’ve mostly given up on the theory although at times it still appeals to me. My recent post, “Memory Leak” is a perfect example of how I write this blog in practice.
I do keep an informal list of ideas, mixed in among grocery lists and other notes. See the sample of a two-page spread of such notes below.On the bottom of the first page, I scribbled an idea called “Sick in Bed.” This was the post I set out to write when I began what ultimately turned into “Memory Leak.”I opened my Blog Post template in Microsoft Word1 and began typing. No outline, no consideration of all the angles. I remembered something my dad had said on a Zoom call over the weekend and I just started writing about various times I’d been sick in bed. Halfway through the original post, as I went back to my diary to verify just how long I’d been down with the flu, I discovered that my memory had failed me: while I had been sick on the day I finished David Hartwell’s Age of Wonders, it was only for a single day, not the week-long flu that I remembered. I recast the post on the fly and instead wrote about a time when my memory failed. I think business leaders call this a “pivot,” which to me is something that Ross shouts at Chandler when moving a couch up a staircase.I used to get so excited about my posts that as soon as I was done drafting them, I’d publish them. Half the comments I got were from good-natured readers pointing out a typo here or there, to which I’d respond, borrowing a line from Isaac Asimov, that I willingly traded accuracy of typing for speed. But in this regard, I have changed. I run the post through an LLM with the following prompt: “Proofread this post and list out spelling and grammar errors and any typos you find along with suggested corrections. Do not change any of my text, just list the errors and corrections.” There are usually 10-12 “corrections” the LLM identifies, and I’ll make those changes I think appropriate, at the very least fixing the spelling and grammar errors. Sometimes what an LLM thinks is a typo is not a typo.Depending on how I feel about the post, I’ll post it right away, or, if I can pass the marshmallow test, I’ll schedule it for a later date. This post, for instance, is being written on a Tuesday, but won’t appear until Thursday.
A page from my current Field Notes notebook with various post ideas.Where practice most differs from theory is the “planning” phase. In theory, I want to be better at planning out my writing. I often find that I miss things I want to say after I’ve published the post, and at that point, I’m reluctant to go back and update things. I just as soon write a new post. In practice, I rarely plan out a post, beyond an occasional set of bullet points that I work off for longer posts like the Vacation in the Golden Age pieces, or these days, the Shelf-Life pieces.
There are some things I’ve gotten pretty good at through sheer exhaustive experience. By default, for instance, if I sit down to write a post, it will be about 500 words, or roughly a page and a half in my Word template. I’ve just learned to naturally write to that length. For a post like this one2, I’ll aim for a thousand words (about 3 pages in my template) and I usually hit close to my mark.
Perhaps the most important point I emphasize here, especially to anyone considering starting a blog in theory: it took me a lot of practice to get going. In fact, nearly 20 years and 7,300 posts later, I am still practicing, aiming for that elusive “perfect.”
Did you enjoy this post?
If so, consider subscribing to the blog using the form below or clicking on the button below to follow the blog. And consider telling a friend about it. Already a reader or subscriber to the blog? Thanks for reading!
︎1,019 words, it turns out. ︎
