Warning : This document is still a draft
Writing is not that easy
Writing is hard. It is not as easy as pressing the "enter" button to publish your post. It requires more than writing down a bunch of ideas. People cannot read in our mind, therefore we need to organize ideas in a coherent way, around a red line or a story. Additionally, finishing everything requires commitment, checking everything, arranging stuff in a nice way. Nevertheless, even if it is really time consuming, you learn plenty of stuff.
Introduction
I recently read a nice Github 1article about finishing projects . While the article was dedicated to project with code, this is true for other domains. Especially when making a blog or your own website: adding good content takes time.
As a “young” programmer, having a website is a way to show to potential recruiters what I know and what I could do through projects and essays. In this blog post, I will discuss about the difficulties in writing and getting done.
Technical VS Content
Setting a Website
Setting up a website takes time. You have many choice to do:
- Use WordPress or another framework ?
- Coding from scratch ?
- Self-hosting ?
- Colors and behavior ?
- …
These are technical choices. When it is done, it is done forever. You can always decide to redesign your website, but not doing it would not prevent it from running.
In contrast, writing is a never ending story.
Content is not for You
A website is not your personal notebook. The purpose is not to share drafts of your ideas to others. No one want to decipher what is in your head. And if you look at it back two months later, you will see how different you are. You might even being unable to read your stuff: memory fade away, thoughts change.
You need to write for others, not for the current “you”. The information (ideas, fact, whatever) needs to be conveyed in a way you do not need to be here to explain each sentence to your reader. You need to be clear, explicit, not referring to information, thought, or preconceived ideas you have in your mind. The best way to see if that can be understood is to wait for several days before checking your work again.
How to be Famous ? If you never start, you never gain
At the time of social networks, many people would like to have many followers, stars, comments, to be appreciated by others … There are two components necessary to be famous:
- Content
- Networking
In any cases, whatever the purpose of the network, you cannot achieve that without content. The more content, the better, and good content leads faster to success.
Networking is a catalyst. If you do not advertise yourself, people will come slowly at you. But if you do, it is easier to reach you.
Content is “instantaneous”: when you publish, then it is in. Networking takes time: When you advertise, people may or may not come to you.
This is the same as for Bitcoin: Many of my friends says “Oh, when it started, it was a few cents. If I had bought some at this time, I would have been rich”. If you never invest, you never gain (you also never lose money too !).
With other stuff that requires “learning”, such has hobbies, sports, playing music, programming, etc., If you never start, you never progress.
Many people get envious about these “Influencers”, where they gain money by doing almost nothing, photograph, video of their life, talking about a product. (There are many books about Influencers, and their day is not 5 minutes for a photo and entertaining all the day long. This is a misconception, they do spend time for their influencer job.). At some point, they started making content. Fame does not come while sitting in a sofa.
How Much can you Commit ?
So, if you want to be known, recognized as an expert, have a book, why don’t you start now ? What does it cost you to start ?
Imagine you have one idea per day and that you are able to write it down. At the end of the year, this is at least 300 posts! (assuming you take some holidays). In practice, most of the blogs do not have this amount of content.
OK, assume that you have 7 ideas a week, and you pick only one because you don’t have too much time. At the end of the year, this is 50 ideas on your blog! (assuming you are off at Christmas and New Year) This is a more realistic target. But still, this requires a lot of time. Among the blogs I have recently seen, they often have less content than that.
Not seeing that many blog with that many idea is not a proof that writing requires time. People have different reasons to have a blog, and may not do the race for articles. Nevertheless, if writing were easy, there would be blogs with more content.
Why Writing Takes so Much Time ?
Getting Concise
Compared to journal and conference articles, length in a website is unbounded. One page, ten pages, there is no constraints. Also, there is no time limit. We can easily fall in the trap where we want to add more and more information. If the target reader are random people, most of them won’t spent 30 minutes reading your article, unless it is very catchy and interesting. To prevent from falling in this trap, we need to define clearly the question we want to answer at the start before writing. Otherwise, without limits, we may end-up writing an encyclopedia, as we can always dig deeper.
Organizing Ideas
After defining your scope, you may have a list of points you want to talk about. They might be completely unrelated. Finding the best logical order, a story to move smoothly from one point to another requires some time thinking about.
Writing VS Talking VS Speech
When talking to someone, unless it is someone you met in the street, you know the person and its background (or not). You may adapt your speech to this person by providing more or less details. You can see if the person is in line with you, if he/she understand by looking at clues (on the face for instance), and explain a bit more if necessary. Also, the person can ask you questions to better understand the topic.
When you pitch, it becomes different: time-limited, no questions (unless at the end), and maybe unknown or people with different background. You need to prepare in such a way the majority could understand.
Writing is not very different than pitching, to the difference that:
- a speech is bounded in time, a web page is not;
- people must attend until the end, they cannot close the page.
It is often recommended for speech to “Start with Why ?”. Get your reader questioning, answer progressively the answer they may ask, and lead them to your conclusion. An article is not that different. You only have unlimited ressources.
Writing Style
You need to review your article, at least for removing mistakes. However, this is not enough: you need to pay attention to your writing style.
There are thousand of way to write something: adding jokes, being familiar, or instead getting straight to the point, adding sources, making critics or reserves. Readers have their “profile”: some are scientific and prefer to go strait to the point, other prefer some storytelling. It is very difficult to write something for both. You cannot switch between a paragraph with a story and a paragraph with hard math: in that case, you will lose both. So you need to stick to one style and remain consistent. You need to read multiple times the article to enforce that and get something homogeneous.
Enforcing consistency takes time.
Illustration
In computer science, we are likely to talk about abstract stuff: L1, L2 cache, memory, arrays, algorithms … It is difficult to get all readers on the same train. Those who do not have the technical background might be completely lost, and those with some imprecise images may have difficulty to completely follow your reasoning up to the end. Some things might be evident for us and experts of the field, but not for the others. Adding illustrations helps to fix the idea, get a common representation of what we are talking about.
Illustrations ease the understanding. Making an illustration (with draw.io for instance) takes time, but the most time consuming task is to find how to represent it. After we have a draft in mind (or on paper), executing it properly is an easy game.
Learnings
From making my own website, I learned different stuff:
- technical skills: how to set up quickly a website
- writing skills: how to introduce a subject, how to make information presentable
- project skills: Making a running code, documentation, and a demo
Additionally, having a place to push my project gives me much more freedom.
Conclusion
This short essay discusses some reasons why writing is a lengthy process. It is not that hard, but as it requires commitment to get everything good, getting a blog full of nicely described ideas is hard.
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