[diehunde]

Writing was one of my goals for 2019. Couldn't write a single piece. A mix of impostor syndrome and lack of discipline I guess. Sometimes I get nice ideas about something to write and then when I start typing I think, 'this is just bad' or 'no one is going to like this'.

To the people who write: how do you decide what to write about? Do you play and research with tools and thoughts, and write about that? Or mostly about things you actually do at work?

[BlackCherry]

In order to be able to write, you need to have something you actually want to say on something you are actually interested in. Writing, is about expressing ideas, so you need some sort of idea, and then you need strong convictions and opinions surrounding that idea. What you DON'T need, is to be unique, smart or good at the technical aspects of writing. If you believe this to sound wrong, just read an Op-Ed in NYT.

You also have to face the idea, that maybe you actually don't want to write. HN is obsessed with writing for the sole reason that it ostensibly builds clout and ultimately makes you more money and validates you as "an important person".

If after all of this, you still want to write, but you really don't have a strong opinion or idea, choose a topic, research it, and share it.

Also, again maybe you need to expand your interests and try and pick an ideology so that you have opinions on things. Listen to a lot of people/podcasts/books with strong opinions, form friend groups with people with strong opinions, fight them on their ideas by researching counters to their opinions. Take stances and argue from a position that you don't believe, etc. This could be anything from gender in tech, to free markets vs regulated markets, to TDD is good vs TDD is bad, to Remote is good vs Remote is bad, etc, etc.

[Whirl]

Agree with this. I felt the same about writing, but eventually found that having strong feelings about my chosen topic helps a lot.

I’ve never been able to write for the sake of writing, so I only author posts when I feel strongly about the topic. There are days or weeks when I don’t care to write anything and that’s ok. Eventually you run across something interesting and BAM, you can barely type fast enough to keep up with your thoughts.

[kashyapc]

Not my own answer, but here's a fun story from the always-fascinating Robert Sapolsky (renowned neuroscientist, author, and a beloved teacher) telling us about how he got into writing[1]. (NB: it's a transcript of a verbal conversation, not a written response; hence the "Sos" and the slight meandering. I found the full transcript to be interesting.)

Interviewer: Where did that [ability to write] come from? I mean, did you begin writing for school – all of a sudden in third grade you got this delight?"

Sapolsky: Naaa...

Sapolsky: [...] I was OK with writing, and throughout college I didn't have a writer's block. So I had friends who would pull their hair out over it, and that was sort the central organizing emphasis of their life, and I never had a writer’s block. It was something that I was OK at, but nothing I took any great pleasure in. I never took a literature class in college, or any English course or anything.

And I was not particularly into writing, and it was not until after I finished college—right after, a week after graduation—I went off to Africa for a year and a half to begin to get my field work started, which I have been doing ever since for twenty-five years and it was fairly isolated site, where a lot of the time I was by myself. I would go 8 to 10 hours a day without speaking to anyone, I would get a mail drop about once every two weeks or so, there was no electricity, there was no radio, there was no anything, and I suddenly got unbelievably, frantically dependent on mail. So as a result you wind up sending letters to every human that you have known in your life in hopes that they would write back to you.

So what would happen is, all I could afford at the time were like these one-page aerogram things that you could sort of get in these big stacks, and something vaguely interesting would happen every couple of days or so. So you would write to somebody about it, and then you would write to the next person about it, and you would realize that before the end of the day, you had just written 25 versions of it, each of which was a page and a half long. [...]

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Sapolsky...

[hypertexthero]

Writing is Thinking — Learning to Write with Confidence: https://blog.stephsmith.io/learning-to-write-with-confidence...

[Jasper_]

Sounds like you wrote this comment just fine. Do that, but more!