I’m not supposed to be writing this blog post this morning, but I got writer-sniped by Robin Moffatt who wrote an excellent blog post on writing for developers as a target audience.
Robin’s Bluesky post was what triggered me. It was a twist on the legendary owl meme…
Robin Moffatt’s twist on the owl meme.
How does one go from an idea through to a (self) published piece that is effective/beautiful/inspiring/useful? Whether it’s some analysis, creative writing, how-to developer material, writing is an art form. Getting from idea to completed work is not always straightforward.
My response on Bluesky was
“… it's about getting past the shitty first draft. Having the taste to know it's not right, then iterating on it until your gut tells you it's good. The well-known challenge is that decent writers start out with a sense of taste, but lack the writing skills. That comes with time.“
I believe this to be fundamentally true.
But there are two notions embedded in that response:
Your first draft probably won’t be good. It is just the beginning.
Taste will tell you when something is done, or perhaps cannot be saved.
Because I blog a lot, I end up reviewing other people’s blog posts as a favor. From years of reviewing I think the greatest indicator of long term success is having a good sense of taste (as well as an enjoyment of writing). I don’t know if taste is mostly innate or whether it mostly comes from reading a lot of other good writers. A bit of both. For myself I believe my own sense of taste has developed over the years, especially when I started taking writing more seriously.
That taste is important is not a new observation but one I absolutely stand by. Early on your writing can be pretty bad (for all kinds of reasons), and if you have good taste you’ll know it. Sometimes your writing is just bad, sometimes it’s bad in a subtle way but your gut knows it without you even having to think. That’s your taste saying “Nice try, but try again”.
The first draft, and definitely a half written, half baked first draft will likely be pretty bad. Sometimes it’s just a matter continuing to develop it until it works, sometimes it actually has two underlying narratives that got mixed up together and need to be separated, or one discarded. Sometimes, the whole thing needs to be discarded. It’s your taste that is telling you it’s not right, but taste isn’t always enough for you to fix it. Writing is a craft and there are practices and approaches for successful writing, Robin mentioned many of them in his post. Also, the now famous Larry McEnerney lecture is incredibly useful. Robin called out his lecture twice, now I’m doing so to make it a third time. Seriously, it will change how you think about writing!
Robin then asked me:
As someone whose writing I admire, I'd love to hear how you manage to judge that point at which you stop iterating? How good is good enough?
I responded:
“It sounds wishy washy but honestly, it comes down to a feeling. I feel it. Like my conscious and unconscious mind are in agreement. Also no more tweaks, or rearrangements make it better. There are no more insights coming to me. Sometimes it's obvious, it just feels right or wrong. Sometimes I feel uneasy, like perhaps the whole premise is wrong but I'm not sure why. In those cases I ask for feedback from others, or leave it a while and come back with fresh eyes a few days later. It also depends on how abstract/creative vs practical/hands on the writing is.”
This is how it is for me, the way my brain works, but I think from reading many books on writing that it is not uncommon. I write a lot, from technical blog posts, to commentary, analysis documents for work, and creative writing (that only I see right now). It pretty much applies to all my writing. I think a similar thing can happen for visual design work (though I myself and pretty terrible at that).
There is a well known story of a pottery class where the teacher split them into two groups. Half were told to focus on quantity and they would be judged by the number of works they produced. The other half were told they should go for quality over quantity, and would be judged by the quality of their work. The surprising result, as the story goes, was that the quantity over quality group produced more great pottery works than the group going for perfection.
My own anecdotal experience with writing aligns with this story quite well. I write, some of it is good and some of it is bad. Sometimes I don’t know until I’ve written it or half written it. Usually, insights come out of the writing process so it’s hard to know upfront whether it’s going to be worthwhile or not. I just write without pressure, let the words and ideas develop and be judged later. The stuff I like, I publish or share at work, the rest remains unseen. This is the idea of quantity leading to quality. Or in other words, doing something without prior pressure for it to be good allows you the freedom to explore, to enjoy what you’re doing, which can lead to surprising quality (as well as failure).
From my experience, this phenomenon doesn’t have to be creative writing, it can be somewhat mechanical writing of explaining how something works. It’s hard to predict what will come out of any writing experience, sometimes you just land on a gem you didn’t expect.
Even discarded works have value, sometimes huge value. I never throw away my discarded writing, or writing I left half written in a kind of abandoned state. I also write quite a few one-liners, just the title, but keep it for the future. If I don’t have time right now to explore a topic, I write it down, a title, a sentence or paragraph. May be a set of bullet points. Thinking about it, this is something that Anne Lamott wrote about in Bird by bird, she used sticky notes if I remember correctly. A number of times, I’ve resurrected a discarded/abandoned blog post or internal document I never shared and used it as inspiration for a new work. Sometimes I actually go “abandoned-writing-diving” to see if there were some ideas that 2-3 years later actually have some kind of interesting nugget of truth that I can flesh into something. Sometimes I can combine two abandoned ideas into something new.
So how do you go from the two circles to the detailed owl? Keep writing, keep reading, develop that sense of taste. Learn the craft of writing. Then write and write some more, without pressure to produce quality work. If you write enough, the quality will come by itself. Don’t throw stuff away. Listen to your gut, seek reviews from peers, incorporate feedback to get unstuck but let your own taste be the ultimate guide. As Robin said: Write for yourself. Work out what you would like to read, and write it.