Dwarkesh Patel: What advice do you have to somebody who wants to become good at [blogging], but isn’t currently good at it.
Scott Alexander: Do it every day.
One blog post per day in October, totalling 31 posts. That was my idea. I thought about doing it in November, since that’s when the Inkhaven Residency people will be posting every day for a month, and others such as Aella have expressed interest in doing the same. But rather than contribute to a slew of posts in November, I thought I’d do it in October instead.
Then I saw this post on LessWrong, which is a similar idea, but it’s half the pace, so 30 blog posts in two months. It’s called Halfhaven, also inspired by Inkhaven.
I don’t quite like the idea as much. It lacks the simplicity of “one a day”. Instead you have to keep track of how many you’ve posted so far. You can go a few days without posting, as long as you catch up — a recipe for procrastination.
On the other hand, other people are doing it, and rather than run my own personal Inkhaven-inspired challenge alongside theirs, I may as well just join theirs. Maybe the camaraderie will be worth it. So I’m joining Halfhaven.
I’m sick, so I’m writing this out quickly. My first few posts will probably be simple, because I’m ill and I don’t want to write much.
If you’re reading this on Substack, I won’t spam you. I plan to publish each post without notifying subscribers, then publish digest posts maybe once every one or two weeks linking to the posts I’ve written since the last digest post, with a little description of each.
This’ll be a good opportunity to clear out my ideas file, which I currently add to much faster than I can actually write posts. I have written maybe 40 blog posts total, so this will nearly double the amount of posts I’ve written. I’m sure I will learn a lot. If you want to learn a lot too, feel free to join me. Even if you’re reading this a couple days after October 1st, I think you can still join, since you only have to write 30 posts by the end.
This is my first Halfhaven post, by the way. The announcement post counts? Hey, like I said, I’m sick right now. In my feverish state I wanted to just say screw it and give up on the whole thing, but in the name of agency and not being deterred by minor obstacles, I decided to join anyway. I’ve been trying to do that more. I recently wanted to email a local company to ask them a question, but I saw their website didn’t have an email, only a phone number, and they weren’t open at the time. I wasn’t that invested in asking them the question, so I could have just given up. But I decided, am I going to let a website tell me what to do? Or, having decided to reach out to the company, should I damned well reach out to them, hell or high water? Go in person, mail a registered letter, send them a strippergram, whatever. There’s a point at which the effort is legitimately not worth the cost, but there’s also value in accomplishing whatever you set out to accomplish, even if it’s harder than you initially thought it would be.
And I’m over the requisite 500 words now, so smell ya later!