In 1946, George Orwell’s essay entitled “Why I Write” was published in some magazine nobody has ever heard of because they only ever put out four issues. At the heart of this essay, Orwell presents us with the following four great motives for writing, that “exist in different degrees in every writer”:

  1. Sheer egoism – the desire to be immortalised in writing.
  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm – the love of the game.
  3. Historical impulse – the “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”. (This is a really boring reason, sorry Orwell.)
  4. Political purpose – the desire to argue that we should improve society somewhat!

These motives all drive you to write something that is good. These motives all drive you to write something that truly deserves to be published. These motives all drive you to write literature.

However, I am about to argue that you should write

  1. blog posts (or similar) on the internet
  2. even if they’re not very good.

A blog post is a very different beast to literature. By all means, pour your heart and soul into the sort of thing Orwell (and legions of Real Writers) have lived their lives in dogged pursuit of. But if you don’t think you can hack that, recognise that writing something for the internet on your personal website can be a different thing! The internet blog post is weird because it:

  • Has no barriers to publishing except basic computer literacy
  • Can be edited or enhanced later at any time
  • Can be embedded/linked to from anywhere else in the internet, forever(-ish)

There’s nothing stopping you from posting stuff in bullet point form or stuff you’ve rushed or stuff you think is too obscure for anyone to find useful, because there’s nothing stopping you from posting stuff, full stop. And you can always clean your posts up later.

But why would you publish that stuff anyway?

Write something that people will want to link to.

This looks like Orwell’s “sheer egoism” motive (with shades of the “aestheticism” motive), and it kind of is, but I think that this is a useful alternate framing because it removes some of the expectation that the crisp sparkling beauty of your prose is what people are going to appreciate. People might link to your post primarily for other reasons:

  • It recounts a good/funny/didactic anecdote
  • It has some good advice
  • It encapsulates an original, insightful idea sketched out in sufficient detail
    • Readers find it a useful enough insight that they start referencing it when they write or talk, necessitating linking to your post to explain the reference
    • A lot of writers seem to do this by giving something (a phenomenon, a concept) a catchy name, or by taking something that’s already been given a name but putting real effort in to communicate the underlying concept.
      • E.g. the idea of a “black swan” as examined in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan (not a blog post, probably could have been)
  • It investigates something niche and that no one else has covered, thus becoming the main source of information on that thing
  • It’s not original but a good summary of some specific topic
    • It covers some foundational/fundamental topic well enough that when someone is being ignorant of the basics of the topic online, someone else will link them to your thing to get them up to speed
    • Alternatively, it explains one pre-existing concept in enough detail that it becomes the gold standard in communicating that concept. E.g. much of 3Blue1Brown’s stuff

Your writing may not win the Pulitzer, but if it’s communicative enough to serve as a sketch or a reference, just send it, y’know?

Most blog posts I have read on the internet that I consider “good” fall into this category, because someone linked me to them. (Funny how that works.) Some examples (unfortunately biased towards tech, because blogging tends to be a Tech Guy Thing™):

Philosophical tangent: Second-order influence

“Sure,” you say, “this is all well and good if I’m writing to be useful. But what if I just want to journal something that happened to me? What if I’m just writing because I want to? Or, what if I am trying to write something useful, but can’t seem to make it work?”

If you’re writing just because you feel like it, just write because you feel like it! Good for you!

But even if your writing doesn’t achieve its primary (first-order) purpose, it still sheds some light on the fact that you existed somewhere, at some point in time, and had some unique perspective on the world, and decided to write something that reflected it. There is a certain degree of historical utility in anything that you write regardless of its actual purpose.

Also, I claim that a lot of writing still has power in a second-order way. Maybe you’re reading a book, and 99% of it is utterly forgettable, but then you come across some absolutely sublime paragraph buried in it, something that truly captures the essence of the human condition, and that’s what sticks with you, even if the author “failed” at everything else.

I once read a blog post about some ways we could transform our society or look at our society through the lens of the connection to the environment, or something – I really have forgotten it. I have since tried to find the article, because obviously it had some real insights, but it eludes me still. The one thing that I didn’t forget is a passage that went something like, “as an anarchist, I am always suspicious of dichotomies, and always strive to try and find at least three different factors at play in any given system.” I think that’s a really interesting way of looking at things. That’s a second-order influence – it wasn’t the author’s main argument, but it influenced my thinking anyway.

It really is impossible to see all the ways your writing might be interpreted or have an influence on other people, so just embrace the uncertainty. Post ‘em if you got ‘em.

For your own personal reference

Write to get some information across to a future version of yourself.

If anything, this is even easier than writing to be linked to. When you write to be linked to, you have to identify your audience and continually challenge your own assumptions about what this audience knows. If you’re writing for yourself, this task becomes more or less trivial.

This is basically what I did with my “How I got this site running” article, and it saved my butt when the SSL certificate expired recently and I forgot how I got the SSL certificate working in the first place. It might have taken me half an hour to figure out how to replace the expired certificate from internet searches again, but it took me less than 5 minutes with the help of my own writing.

Your notes can be psychological instead of technical, too. For example, you might write about some piece of advice you found useful at a specific moment in time if you reckon you might need to be reminded of it later.

Why host any of this publically, though? Well, if you’re expecting to find your crappy notes even a little bit useful, maybe one other soul out there might find them useful too. Plus, if you take notes on interesting, esoteric stuff, you’re telling people what stuff you’re into and how much you know about it, attracting people who are into the same kind of stuff and know approximately as much as you, or maybe piquing the interest of curious passerbys who have never heard of whatever you’re banging on about. You might even have more knowledgable readers contact you with answers to any problems you complain about.

Personally, I just think looking at a web page is nicer than looking at some notes app, and encourages more clarity of writing because of the sense of it being “published”.

Examples:

Because you might learn something in the process

Write because you might learn something in the process.

Writing is a way of synthesising something moderately intelligent from a bunch of moderately dumb versions of yourself, because you can incrementally improve a piece of your writing every time you revisit it. A blog post can evolve from a loose idea that you want to explore further to a more-or-less structured argument that might, against all odds, be somewhat convincing.

When I read something I have written from a day or a week or a month ago, I think: “Well, do I really think this? Or is this just something I’ve copied from somewhere else?” Writing really elicits this kind of thought process, at least for me, because the current version of something I’m supposedly arguing is literally all there on the page, splayed out in front of me, as opposed to kind of swimming around in my head. So it’s way easier to take the scalpel to parts that I’m not sure about, identify weak links, try new ways of phrasing things – edit, in other words – and end up with something that’s ever-so-slightly stronger than it was before.

A Tumblr post that reads: 'i will always change my mind. ill look at things i said yesterday and go what the fuck am i talking about'

And once you’ve dueled it out in the arena of the text editor, you can then kind of redownload the better versions of what you’re thinking back into your brain. Conglaturations, you just got more smarter.

Finally…

Because you’re not going to get better at writing otherwise

Write to practice writing.

Communicating ideas is hard, and writing blog posts is practice. (Just make sure you seek out criticism and continuously evaluate your own work if you do actually want to improve.)

Final thoughts

Once you start writing, you start looking for things to write about. You start to see the world around you differently. You observe. You take notes. As the saying goes, once you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Think of writing as a hammer. Do you have enough nails in your life? Do you feel like your life is lacking in nails? Have I stretched this metaphor well past its breaking point?

WRITE, DAMN YOU. Even if you write garbage. The infrastructure of the internet isn’t going to notice a couple extra kilobytes either way.

Thanks to LiterallyHifumi and [REDACTED] for giving feedback on drafts of this post.

Appendix: What if I want to write stuff that isn’t garbage?

Why the hell are you asking me? I’m not a Real Writer. You’re in luck, though, because writing is a topic that every Real Writer will be all too happy to write about. Writers are vain and selfish and lazy. “Write what you know.” What does every writer know about? Answer: writing.

You can read all the stuff various writers have written on the subject without me getting in the way. Look up interviews of your favourite authors; they’ve probably given some interesting advice on writing at some point or another.

And, as Dorothy Parker once said:

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.

(I would also recommend Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. And to start buying alcohol in bulk.)