Start writing. Just start. Right now. Or once you’ve finished this article.
Writing will deepen your knowledge and help the people around you. Writing will build your reputation.
But the best thing about writing is something else entirely. You can work your way into an incredible state of flow. You’ll enjoy the act of writing itself. And you’ll keep wanting to come back to it.
It’s possible that writing isn’t for you — I can’t rule that out. But it’s also possible that you’re just approaching the process the wrong way. That’s why this article exists. To help you.
You already have things to write about. Everyone does. The subject is you, your life, your friends, your family, your work. Something happens every day, and if you want it to, every day teaches you something. You can even get a story out of an ordinary trip across town.
It’ll surprise you how useful or interesting your knowledge, experience, comments, or anecdotes can be to others.
Only a handful of people write about any given field, any given topic. Finding a niche where nobody else is standing is easy.
Writing is thinking. It lets you formulate your ideas, communicate better, and get better at what you do.
Write concisely, cut the filler. When you don’t know how to start, start in the middle.
The difference between someone average and an expert is often simply that the expert writes.
I’ve been writing for almost 30 years. Did I have a talent for it? I don’t think so. My first texts were terrible. I just wrote about what I enjoyed. And kept thinking about how to do it better next time.
Let me try to sum up what I think about writing and how you could get started too.
Why write at all?
There are plenty of reasons to write. But the best one is to find your way into a state where you simply enjoy it.
Sharpening your knowledge
Writing sharpens your knowledge, because writing is thinking. Having to formulate your ideas forces you to actually think about the topic. Having to back up your claims with examples, data, or illustrations forces you to do research. That’s how you get better at the subject.
Yes, you do have to actually do the thing you’re writing about. If you want to write about web development, you can’t know nothing about it. But thanks to writing, within a few hours you’ll become noticeably better at it than most other people.
Sharing knowledge and building a reputation
When you want to help one person, you explain it to them. When you want to help more people, you write it down. It’s tempting once you realize you can help hundreds or thousands of people at once.
It’s addictive when people start writing to you with positive feedback.
We mostly write for free, but you can still get something out of it. A reputation, for instance. That always comes in handy, whether you eventually turn it into money or not. But that’s a topic for another time.
Flow like nothing else
This is actually the most important part, because you don’t have to write for the people out there — you can write mainly for yourself.
For me, flow is the main reason I write almost every day. With most pieces I drop into a state where the world disappears and the writing just pulls me in. It’s a drug.
Tomorrow I’ll want it again.
Can you write too?
By now you know I enjoy writing. I talk about writing with people, and I see that almost everyone would like to write something now and then — but they’ve got a pile of obstacles in the way. Let’s look at them. Maybe we can jump over them together.
”I have no talent”
Maybe so. We’re either born with talent or we’re not. Some people have writing in their blood; others have something else.
But people usually underestimate how far talent can be replaced by practice.
Somewhere in our heads we all have a muscle that produces great writing. And we either train that muscle or we don’t.
Maybe some of you know me through my writing. Maybe you think I have a talent for it. But no, I don’t think it was ever there. My high-school language teacher could explain that to you. My writing was pretty bad until I started training the writing muscle. Now it’s a decent bicep.
Does my younger son have talent? When he texts me, I suffer, and I usually can’t understand him at all. But in fourth grade he wanted to try writing a sci-fi novella. He started, dropped into flow, and finished it.
His work, “AI Destroys the World,” had an idea and a plot. But it was unreadable, because it was riddled with mistakes. One prompt in ChatGPT fixed that, cleaning up the errors and the text overall. Suddenly an eleven-year-old turned out to be a fairly talented young writer.
The novella ended with what I consider the greatest closing line of any book ever:
In the end, though, it all turned out fine. Relationships were mended, the machines were repaired, and the president’s grave was also restored. It was a tough seven years.
Does he have talent? I still don’t know. It doesn’t actually matter. Talent is overrated. We also have tools now. And then there’s training the muscle.
”I was bad at it in school”
Almost anyone can say this, myself included. School generally isn’t great at teaching practical skills. None of the writing habits I’ve built came from a classroom — and that’s true for most writers I know. So it’s no wonder teachers don’t really know how to teach writing.
Teachers are, at best, theorists of writing. They couldn’t write, and they couldn’t teach you to.
Writing in practice turns out to be something completely different from what we remember from school.
So you can forget the misery of writing in school, with one exception: the outline. Writing an outline before you write is genuinely useful. The teachers were right to push it on you. I’ll come back to the outline later.
”It won’t be good, people will criticize me”
Yes, your first attempts won’t be good. But iterate, and think about how to do it better the second time.
Or try rewriting the whole thing a week later. It’ll be better, you’ll see.
That perfectionist inside us, forbidding us from publishing an “imperfect” piece… Or is it more like fear? Fear that someone will tell you your writing is bad? Fear of embarrassing yourself?
Let me tell you something. I’ve written a lot. Every week I write something for social media, and almost every week a longer piece. I’ve written four books. I’ve had a lot of reactions, and sometimes they genuinely thrill me.
But one thing has never happened — nobody has ever come up to me and said one of my pieces was truly awful.
The worst thing that’s ever happened with my writing is that an article didn’t get as many readers as I expected. It didn’t spark interest. Or a post of mine got no likes. Really. Nothing worse is waiting for you, either.
I think people are generally good at separating the text from the author. They’ll read your piece, maybe they won’t like it, but that’s no reason to connect it to you.
People only remember the good pieces. Can you actually recall some truly terrible thing you read recently? Probably not. You didn’t finish it. And you forgot the author long ago.
”I don’t know what to write about”
You don’t — but you can. That’s a skill you can learn, like any other.
Take the skill of driving home. Did you always know how to get home by car from somewhere new? No, you had to learn it. Or you had to learn to use a tool, like Google Maps.
In the same way, you can learn how to figure out what to write about.
Let’s try it in practice. What did you learn at work today? That’s generally a good topic. People usually overestimate how much everyone else knows. Unless you’re a complete beginner in your field, if you learned something at work, it’s probably interesting to the rest of us too. Write about it.
But you can write an interesting article even when you’re just starting out in a field — as long as you can explain something in a way nobody else has yet.
The vast majority of people never write anything, precisely because they assume the result will be pointless. Maybe it’s pointless to you, because you already know it. You just learned it. But it’ll surprise you how many people out there will be grateful for what you know.
I sometimes don’t know what to write about either, but I have tools. I keep a notes database (I use Evernote) where I log topics I’d like to write about someday. I keep adding to those notes as I read new articles or pick up new information from client work.
When I’m stuck for a topic, I check my notes. And I always discover I actually have an enormous backlog of things I want to write.
But you don’t have to write only about your work. Something happens to you every day, your opinions surface every day, something funny pops into your head every day. Something interesting happens every day, even when you’re not traveling anywhere.
You just have to look at the world the right way.
Every time something interesting happens, a piece I could write about it is already popping into my head. That, too, is a skill you can learn.
”Writing is torture for me”
I once wrote on X:
To remind myself how painful writing an article is for some people, I decided to fix my bike myself. “I’ll have it done in half an hour.” Most of Sunday gone. The bike is more broken than before. Now I’m looking for a repair shop.
Yes, I can imagine that for someone, fixing a bike is just fun work they do every day. Not for me. But I believe it isn’t fun for me only because I’ve spent very little of my life fixing bikes.
I believe I could get the same pleasure from fixing a bike as I get from writing this article. I’d just have to train the muscle.
Writing is torture for a lot of people. It’s possible they’ll simply never get the hang of it. But it’s also possible they just don’t practice much and are going about it the wrong way.
”Isn’t writing obsolete by now?”
This is something I often debate with younger people. “Why write books when nobody reads them anymore?” “Why agonize over an article when you could film it and turn it into a reel?” they tell me.
Yes, to some extent that’s true, and to some extent people read less online these days. It’s partly a generational thing.
On the other hand — text is not a dead format. Really, it isn’t.
The book market may have its best years behind it, but online, people still read a lot.
What’s changed are the expectations. Generic rambling on a topic that’s been written about a million times, in the format of a dissertation like twenty years ago, no longer flies.
Shorter pieces work today. Pieces enriched with photos, examples, interactive demos, quotes, tables… work.
The best pieces are the ones with little text and a lot of everything else.
But if people care about the topic and you give it good form, they’ll read even a really long piece — and one without images, like this one. If you’re still reading, you’re proof.
Text has a huge advantage. You can consume it at your own pace. Some people scan the headings, some the images, some slow down on a particular point and focus on it. Video and audio don’t offer that — there you’re almost entirely at the mercy of the author’s pace and style.
Text is still the most searchable and scannable format there is.
And besides… even if you want to film a reel, you’ll probably need to organize your thoughts first. You’ll do the research, draft a structure, maybe even a script. Then you film it. You’ve actually done a big chunk of the writing process.
Writing is thinking. And the result of writing doesn’t have to be text.
”…but ChatGPT…”
With the arrival of AI (or rather, language models), a lot of people started to panic. Supposedly AI will replace writers.
AI won’t replace writers, but it will make some parts of the creative process easier.
I use ChatGPT for research. I simply ask it what the piece should be about and ask about things I don’t know. Of course, I then verify everything with a search engine.
I use ChatGPT to check my drafts. What’s missing? What’s redundant? What might be hard to understand for a specific audience?
I love ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine it writing an article for me. AI doesn’t have your context. It doesn’t have your knowledge, your style, your imagination, your personality.
Yes, an enormous volume of model-generated text is being produced, and will keep being produced. In some fields that’ll be enough — generic news, for instance. But in specialized fields, or in creative writing? There’ll be a lot of generated text, it’ll be extremely similar, and therefore uninteresting to readers.
So what can your added value be? Your knowledge and experience, your style, your personality. Just like now.
I write more about working with AI on both code and text in Vibe Coding: I’ve built websites for 25 years, but the last two months were completely different.
So much for motivation and breaking through blocks. Now let’s try actually writing something.
How to write
Pick a topic, build a structure. Trim that structure so the first draft takes you no more than an hour. Try to find the core message and write that first. Concisely, please.
Time to write
Put writing in your calendar, turn it into a habit, and don’t write for too long in one sitting.
Writing has to be repeated until it becomes a habit, otherwise you’ll never write anything. I write every Monday through Wednesday, always in the first hour of the morning. Sometimes, when I’m enjoying it, Thursday and Friday too. I have quiet, a clear head, and a topic prepared in advance. In those three hours I often write a whole article.
I think writing for three hours or more in one stretch is nonsense. Fatigue catches up with you and it stops flowing. You burn out, or, losing perspective, you overcomplicate the article. Some people struggle to stay at the level the text actually needs. The longer they write, the deeper into the topic they go. You don’t want that.
That’s why for years I’ve split my work time into one-hour blocks followed by a break. Roughly like at school.
I think it’s very important to let the topic gradually form and settle in your head.
I finish shorter articles in those three hours. On day one I do the research, prepare the structure, prepare the examples, and try the topic out in practice if I can. On day two, in the second hour, I write the whole thing. On day three, in the third hour, I just do proofreading, images, and publish the finished piece.
Some articles, like this one, need more of those one-hour blocks — ten, maybe. But when an article is good, when I’m enjoying it and drop into flow, I have no trouble finding another hour anytime. Then it isn’t work, it’s a joy.
But it all starts with the time to write. One hour every morning. Or just some days of the week. Put it on your to-do list or in your calendar. If you don’t create the time, your writing will be pushed aside by other obligations and will never happen.
The curse of the blank page
Everyone knows it, even experienced writers. You have a topic, you’ve done the research, and now there’s a blank page in front of you. How on earth do you begin?!
My recipe for this is simple. First, I always copy the outline I prepared earlier into the document. So when I start, the page isn’t blank anymore.
And now the main trick of experienced writers — you don’t have to write from the beginning. The beginning is hard. Write something about the main load-bearing idea first. Try to develop it, answer the likely questions, add examples, and so on.
Only then write the conclusion. And then you might realize the conclusion is actually a good beginning for the article, because it contains the summary.
Structure: put the important stuff up top, ask “why?”
People do read online, but you have to win the battle for their attention. They’re more patient with topics that interest them, or with authors they like. To boost your chances, make it easy for people to decide whether the text is for them or not.
First, write down the main idea — or at least what the article is about, or some surprising thing you discovered. That has to be in the headline or the first paragraph. It’s called the inverted pyramid.
When I write about technology, I always try to answer three basic questions:
- “What?” — what I’m writing about right now.
- “Why?” — why it’s interesting, important, useful, funny, or surprising to the reader.
- “How?” — how to try the topic out in practice.
The “how” is important, don’t forget it. People want to try out new knowledge as fast as possible, so I often add demos and practical applications to every article.
There’s nothing complicated about it. These three questions have been my main checklist the whole time I’ve been writing.
I used these three questions to write this very piece.
Short, punchy, with verbs, the way you speak
Everyone can write, because everyone can talk.
In school they taught you to write so your language teacher would like it. But you can write differently — you can write the way you speak. The advantage is that nobody has to teach you this anymore.
The second advantage is that it’ll be far easier for readers to read.
And then there’s dictation. Dictation on a phone has come a long way, so a certain portion of my texts came about by dictating them into my phone. I then spent a long time editing, trimming, cleaning them up, sure. But dictation might be exactly the technology that helps you become a writer.
Write so it reads well. People online don’t like long sentences. People don’t like long paragraphs. Every sentence can be shortened. I’m doing it right now, and I assume that as a reader you don’t mind at all.
When you do write longer sentences, you can suddenly change the pace or highlight information by using one thing. A short sentence.
When you want to emphasize a sentence, put it in its own paragraph.
If information is important, it should be in a heading inside the article. I’m not a fan of bolding text — to me it’s a waste of attention. We have so many ways to highlight what matters: headings, sentences in their own paragraphs, bullet points, quotes, images, tables.
Better than bolding text is putting the information in a heading or another form of media.
When I do emphasize something inline, the way I’d emphasize it in speech, I use italics. Italics have the advantage of not pulling at the eyes, letting people read the text they chose smoothly.
Use verbs. A sentence without a verb is harder to read and harder to grasp. You can use such a sentence differently. As an exclamation, an accent. Otherwise, don’t write much like this, without verbs.
Cut the filler. Nobody likes filler. When you reread your article, ask of every sentence whether it can be said more concisely and whether it even needs to be there at all.
You won’t get far without feedback
Don’t write for the drawer. A text comes alive only in another person’s head, through their feedback.
If you’re afraid of the failure of public publishing, shrink your audience.
Show your text to someone close to you. Ask them for their opinion or feedback.
My friend Ondřej Ilinčev, who has written for a long time and writes brilliantly, got started by emailing his articles to just a few clients at a time.
Another partner of mine, Robin Pokorný, writes among other places on his employer’s internal blog.
Blogs used to have comments everywhere. Those were the golden days, because most people focused on the actual problems in the text. Today blog comments mostly don’t work anymore. They’ve been replaced by comments on social media — but there are usually too few of them, which doesn’t work for quality feedback. Or there are too many, and you don’t want that either, because then they turn partly toxic and focus on the author themselves, or on something completely unrelated. Like the commenters’ worldview.
Build yourself a safe environment of first readers. People who are kind to you, but who can also be honest.
If you dare to venture a bit further out, try social media. On Facebook and LinkedIn, for instance, you can write longer pieces. Pieces of just a few paragraphs work great.
Mastery in honing the core of an idea is offered by X and its post-length limit.
Check whether someone already writes about your topic. Send them your text — maybe they’ll publish it. Don’t worry, the media really aren’t flooded with outside submissions. Very few people actually write.
I told you to definitely show your text to someone. Another person. But that “other person” can also be you. Just look at your text again a few days later. After a week it’ll be even better. I’ve been my own editor this way for a long time. Texts and ideas ripen in the head.
I often surprise myself a week later at how badly I wrote something. But I can fix it.
Read your text out loud, or at least in a whisper. Does the read-aloud text make sense? Does it have good pace? Does it sound the way you speak? Reading your own text aloud really helps. You suddenly hear what you didn’t see before.
Tools and skills: above all, learn to touch-type
Tools are overrated. But if you want, I’ll mention the ones I use:
- In Evernote (a notes database) I log ideas for pieces. I gradually flesh them out and add to them. When I learn something interesting about a topic, I add a link to that topic’s page in Evernote. Then when I finally write it up, it’s prepared and I don’t have to do as detailed a research pass. I also often write the first drafts of my texts in Evernote.
- I move texts from Evernote into Google Docs when I need feedback from other people. The collaboration features in Google Docs are indispensable.
- I use ChatGPT as a writing assistant. It helps me do research and build structures. It gives me content feedback on my texts. It already does a lot of things brilliantly, though it doesn’t yet catch all my language mistakes.
- I store texts in Markdown. It’s a format that’s excellent for searching back through and editing. All my articles are in Markdown, all the chapters of all my books too. I can search back through Markdown when I want to add a link to a topic or edit something retroactively. Like deleting Internet Explorer from every text. That’s a joy.
- To make sure I’m writing well, I use grammar checkers and occasionally just a search engine. It’s a shame to kill a piece with visible mistakes in it. A certain portion of readers is sensitive to that. I also watch out for correct typographic characters. Readers will forgive the odd mistake, but there can’t be too many of them.
But choose your tools to suit yourself. Or don’t. Tools won’t make you a better writer.
There is, however, one skill I consider essential. It’s something I hated in high school, only to discover a few years later that it’s one of the most important skills school ever taught me.
Having all your fingers in play when typing is a superpower.
People sometimes tell me they don’t understand my writing productivity. This is one of the answers. Between someone who touch-types and someone who types some other way, there’s a huge difference in speed. That much I know for sure.
Writing is glorious
Writing can be one of the best things you ever do. It can help the world learn about you, just as you can help other people.
Writing can be so enjoyable that you choose it over the shows on Netflix.
You can write too. Carve out time for it, write from the core, write concisely, and improve through feedback from others or from yourself.
Start writing. Just start. Right now.
Here are some other resources on writing that I know well:
- Ondřej Ilinčev wrote a nice piece on how to write an article in 3 hours. Ondřej is a master of writing efficiency.
- I once enjoyed an article from a content agency that takes a more business-minded approach to writing. That’ll come in handy if you want to squeeze some money out of writing.
What did I forget? What helps you with writing? Write to me by email or on social media.