writing thrusts me into uncharted territory

14 Aug, 2024

there's lots of discourse on writing in the Bear Den (lol). the purposes of writing, who you should write for, why you should write, etc. All great discussions, and everyone should come to their own conclusions on these things. Once you find something that works, double down! shove!

for me writing is a tool for crystallizing thought. a snapshot of how I would describe a topic in my own words at that point in time. There are 3 ways I see this as useful:

It's powerful like how any picture at any point in time is. Like a picture, you can see progress (taking the delta of the snapshot and some future point). Plus, as you continue to write, you have a body of work to point to that monotonically increases¹.

Different from pictures, one of the biggest advantages I leverage is the ability to move on. Once my thoughts are on the page, I am free. I no longer have to hold on to them so tightly². This allows me to think of the next thought. And the next. It's like taking a big step forward, thinking of second-order thoughts after the initial catalyst. The faster I can move forward, the more ground I can cover, the more discoveries I can make. In practice, I've been practicing Morning Pages (which is such a great way to start journaling, highly recommend) and writing this blog for more conscious posts.

Lastly, writing is at the end of the day used for communication. I've loved reading all the conversations happening on this part of the internet. I've loved all the posts about birdwatching, all the blog challenges, the high effort posts and the low effort ones. All your pages are also so beautiful and tasteful!

here are the posts that have inspired me to write the most. I seriously recommend all of them:

• why you should write more – bookbear express
• Writing, Briefly – Paul Graham
• Some thoughts on writing – Dan Luu
• you-should-write-blogs – Steve Yegge

Thanks again for reading ❤️ Even though I think writing is so beneficial, I find that I have trouble smashing that "Publish" button, as my internal critic stops me from publicizing anything less than perfect. I think a lot of us have this problem, and seeing all these wonderful posts inspire me to publish more. This post took 20 minutes to write.