I'm really of two minds about the write for you/write for an audience argument. I started blogging early this year, and so far I've written and published four posts that don't make me want to gouge my eyes out. That's not to say that what I've written is especially good, just that it's passable. When I started I was shooting for one post a month, so I'm obviously way behind on what I thought was a conservative goal.
What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly bad I am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away. If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog posts.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.
So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.
I, too, feel like I'm just muddling through my first foray into a personal blog. (For what it's worth, I found your four posts pretty interesting. Hadn't heard of Design for Hackers and I'm definitely checking it out now.)
I think the "write for you" advice is good, because it gets you through the early stages of writing and posting content. This might lead to a lack of restraint in some, but it reminds me that I don't need every post to be super-insightful or essay-of-the-year worthy. I just need to write about what interests me, which takes a lot of the pressure off.
I get what you're saying and I'm on board but the way you put it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. It came across just a little bit like you haven't considered that you can just stop reading when you come across bad writing. I'm a poster child for poorly thought out blog posts. Luckily, no one reads them. That's the thing I've learned about blogging. You suck at it for a long time and with practice you get better and then people can stand to read your writing.
A few years ago, I thought to myself, "Self, you haven't started a really stupid business with a remarkably high chance of failure in a long time. Why don't you start a magazine?"
I was bored, so I did.
Within a few months, I had founded a magazine. My co-founder and I bootstrapped it, so we didn't have access to the highest caliber of writers. Consequently, we did a whole lot of development work; taking writers with passion and some technical flaws and working with them until they could bang out some good quality content.
I learned something really valuable working with young writers. The 'write for you' advice is great...to a point. If you really want to become a good writer, you need to write for an editor. Find someone you trust and get him/her to butcher your writing. Write for that person.
The problem with writing for yourself is that it is too easy to say, "well, the audience didn't come because x." (where x != my writing sucks)
The joy of writing for a good editor is that you will improve faster than you can possibly imagine. And then, you can say, "who cares about an audience, I'm a better writer now."
You can become a great writer...anyone can. Hell, if you can write code, you're already 95% of the way there. My email address is on my profile - if you want someone to edit your stuff, send me some mail...
Little controversial, but this is the first time in my life I actively care for a blog I've created. And the reason? I don't care about the statistics.
Previously my main priority was getting traffic. I became obsessed with looking at statistics to see how much traffic I'd gained. I spent far far too much time looking at statistics, when instead, I should have been doing, what I hope I'm doing now. Writing content that I will want to read again.
Really great advice. I take too much consideration of my stats on other sites and it really shouldn't be about that unless I'm in full-on sell mode, and that isn't what most personal blogs should be.
I write a personal blog because I want to get an idea out of my head. It's almost a pathological need to put it to paper or bits, or else it festers inside and distracts me from what I want to do. This post here is here because of that need.
Other ways I deal with this need is carrying physical notebooks and a pen just about everywhere I go. Sometimes I turn them into blog posts. Sometimes I turn them into stories. Right now there are about six game ideas and four business ideas in the notebook next to me, as well as dozens of proto-essays. My blog likewise has almost twice as many "draft" essays than published posts.
This wasn't the norm for me two years ago. If you were to give me a page and a pen then, it would be blank for months. I made a decision to make it easy and effortless to write down ideas and thoughts. That meant carrying around a notebook and pen to many places I went. I also started doing stream-of-thought notes to try and jog my noggin when I was first starting out.
The takeaway here is to just get started. All my early stuff is garbage now, but it served as a good first wave to get me in the habit of writing.
Like everything else, this advice is highly contextual: in this case, the context depends on where the writer is starting from.
The goal is to write things that come from the heart as well as the brain, that leverage your passions and appeal to an audience, all at the same time. In other words, the goal is, as usual, somewhere in the middle.
If your starting point is that you think nothing of your own passions, interests, and write whatever you think will please an audience, then yes, this advice is right on the ball for you: you should write for you, because it's about you.
If, on the other hand, your tendency is to boldly write what you care about, following your passions and interests and not giving the audience much of a second thought, then the opposite advice applies: write for your audience - because it's about them, not you.
Of course, "write for both the audience and yourself" doesn't make such a good sound bite...
I'm reminded of a quote, by Niels Bohr, I thin, which said that the opposite of a Deep Truth is another Deep Truth...
I agree with your points. It is hard to make something this small have meaning across the board. This is part of the reason why I targeted the thought at tech blogging in particular. This net may also be too wide, but in my opinion the point holds when it comes to that type of writing.
1.) Only post stuff I myself would be interested to read if somebody else had written it.
2.) Do not force myself to post simply because I haven't posted in a while.
3.) Do not simply regurgitate stuff I have read elsewhere.
A lot of articles on tech blogs violate rule #1 and the vast majority violate rule #3. Rule #2 seems to be violated by any site which is making a serious attempt at making money.
I really like the short style of this post, but the only thing I kept in mind while reading the piece is that it wasn't written for the author himself. A nice morning read, by the way!
Thanks for the comment. You're correct, I didn't write this for myself. I decided to post it after a conversation with a few people on Twitter earlier today. I wanted to post something short which summed up how I felt about things.
While this wasn't written for me it is the summation of how I approach the way I write. My goal is for me to learn or to share the things that I think I've learned. This approach has worked well for me. While writing I learn a lot, and I do mean a LOT. When I finish, I like to publish because there's a whole world of people out there who are waiting to tell me I'm wrong. Even when you get things wrong you have the chance to learn. The key here is that the focus is on me.
If I can help other people at the same time then that's just a great side-effect. Thankfully so far I think I've managed it on more than one occasion I do hope I do it again. But if I don't it isn't going to worry me, as I will have got something from the experience.
Thanks again, I'm glad you enjoyed the read. Have an awesome day!
That is definitely part of it. When I first started writing I needed to remind myself of this quite a lot. Thankfully I haven't really needed to do that for quite a while now. I enjoy writing and I do it when I can. The goal continues to be learning with the added bonus of helping others along the way. It hasn't ever been, nor will be, about traffic.
I like writing, because of it structures my thought and forces me to think it through thoroughly.
It is also greatly satisfying to share the lessons learned down the road.
So I don't think you shouldn't write for others. In the end, no one is Spolsky or Yegges except for themselves, but we shouldn't underestimate the benefit to the masses that may learn from you.
I am by no means an authority, but I get a few appreciative emails every so often and that brings me great joy.
Or just do both. You can have a main blog and a tumblr account, have a personal blog and do guest posts on other blogs, or even write both kind of posts on the same blog.
A couple years ago, getting RSS subscribers was the holy grail of blogging. But these days, people find your content via Twitter or HN anyways. So there's much less risk of losing your audience because you wrote a personal post that didn't connect with your readers.
One tip I would give developers/hackers who double as technical bloggers (whether regularly or infrequently) is:
Write what you want to read (but can't find elsewhere).
This simultaneously challenges you to learn the subject matter in depth, fills a needed gap in content that other like-minded devs are probably looking for, and may even yield a nice chunk of open-source or useful code snippets.
I use this strategy on my blog, albeit infrequently.
I tend to find writing (or explaining) for other people and doing it for yourself blend. A lot.
The old adage that you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to someone else holds particularly true with tech writing. When I'm writing to communicate something to someone else, I'm also helping myself understand the topic better. It's win-win.
At no point did I say "hide your writing". I think it's clear that the sentiment of the post was not to hide the stuff that you write, but instead to write for the right reasons. If you write for the purpose of pleasing others you'll struggle. If you write to please yourself you'll be surprised just how many others you please in the process.
What surprises me most about the whole exercise is how overwhelmingly bad I am at writing. More than 80% of the content I've written has been thrown away. If I wrote code like this I'd have been out of work long ago, but I just can't bring myself to go on permanent record with half-baked poorly thought out blog posts.
I hate to put this so bluntly, but many people out there lack this kind of restraint. As a consequence, there's just a universe of truly awful writing online. The Joel Spolskys and Steve Yegges are really few and far between.
So yeah, write for you, but if you don't mind, could you do the world a service and write for the rest of us too? We'll all be better for it.