Show HN: Write 500 Words a Day (fivehundredwordsaday.com)

I think I've been getting daily^W weekly email reminders to write my 750 words for 20 years now... I really ought to stop fooling myself that "I'll make this a part of my routine, soon!".

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It would be interesting to combine the daily routine concept, with an AI chat engine, so the goal is to have daily conversations of a certain length/depth, about random topics, between you and an AI, in your target language.

My New Year's resolution, to achieve positive text-writing valuation, is to join the HN 10Karma Club.

It doesn't pay the rent, but one can't deny the quantitative validation of imaginary Internet points.

What do you write about?

I would suggest you to take some time to edit your writing. So you can improve on that and find a theme if you don't have one.

About two years ago I did. It was mostly a fear of being a failure & the potential to be successful. After I got over that, I wrote two books in two years and sold over 100 copies each as a first time author. Much of my validation came from posting comments including my writing in places like HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. The internet voting machine would do its work of what people want to read while I would direct my energy towards something I wanted to read.

Writing for its own sake has its benefits. It forces you to flesh out your ideas, to consider how you actually feel, and to flex your writing skills.

I like having a record of my thinking. I read a travel journal I wrote some time ago, and it painted a much more faithful picture of my trip than dozens of photos. I had a good chuckle at some passages, and at my doodles in the margins.

I also write in public, mostly to share solutions, but occasionally to share my thoughts. I've shared a few posts here and loved the ensuing discussion. Some people have reached out because they somehow came across a post I wrote. It's cool to help a guy from Tennessee change his break pads, or to meet a guy from Berlin because he thinks we'd get along (we do).

In the end, I write for the sake of writing. It's like practicing guitar. I have no dream of being a rockstar; I just enjoy the process. However, doing things in public occasionally bears fruit in the most unexpected ways.

What do you notice people reading in your area of interest? You might try emulating that a few times and see what happens.

Also, you might try distributing your writing more widely - not to promote it, but to get feedback. Find alternate distribution channels.

You have two problems.

(1) It's a function of audience. I am writing on Medium with moderate success (~1.4K followers, prior top 5% of business writers worldwide), and I noticed that content discovery on the platform is just broken. The same applies to Twitter.

(2) In 2022, we are competing with content farms that drown out smaller "creators" ...start to hate that word.

It used to be true, that I would write an article about Apple's product launch and gathered 40K views. Not anymore.

But then, I am now mostly on Youtube for content consumption. So I guess, that makes me part of the problem.

> http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/antares.html

I am new to astro and enjoy reading Jim Kaler's writing which has a lasting effect on me.

Putting aside the need for an audience, I think the whole personal wiki or Zettelkasten thing helps with writing for yourself as the process becomes about building up your network of thoughts, then browsing it, writing back into it, … etc.

In my experience, having spent some years as a professional writer with a bunch of colleagues, every writer comes with their own distinctive flaws. In terms of output, for some people getting words out is like juicing a stone. For others, the words flow freely but the juice is bad.

In fact, the single most productive writer I worked with was also the absolute worst to read on a word-by-word basis. He was also one of the most successful in his career. The trick was combing through his masses of thought-assault to identify out the good bits and fix the mediocre bits (obviously, throwing away the bad bits). I always got a chuckle out of how the end readers had no idea how much of the original writing was schlock, but his success was fully deserved on many other levels.

So in short: recognize that what you're experiencing is totally normal and acceptable, and work to your strengths. Write your crappy stuff that nobody wants to read and then fix it. If you can't fix it -- then editing is what you need to work hard on improving (and editing ≠ writing).

That is 99.5-99.9% of writers. only a handful are ever successful at it. Obviously it ain't easy. Creative writing is among the hardest things in the world to be successful at, because there is no obvious market or audience for it.

My belief is that everyone has 6 or 7 substantial things to say when they meet someone new or have a deeper discussion with an acquaintance. These may be stories, anecdotes, or knowledge that people find interesting. It's likely you've honed them over years.

Write these down and sharpen them. Share them with friends and get their feedback.

This removes the problem of what to write, which can be daunting as a new writer. And you may end up discovering something new in these old conversation pieces!

Learn SEO and figure out how to find long tail, low competition keywords. Then write about those and you'll get organic traffic. I make around $20k/mo doing this. Surprised literally nobody mentioned this

Your question kinda took me by surprise. I write a ton (I take notes on literally everything that happens) and none of it is supposed to be read by anyone. I'm not even sure how much of it I'll read myself later, the point is I'll be able to, if I need. Otherwise, I just cannot remember anything of what I read, saw or heard a year later.

I'm just guessing here, but I imagine most writers would recommend you produce writing that you want to write.

Have you giving your writing to people to see if they want to read it?

Having just self-published a book that capped out at 10 sales, yes.

For me, the hardest problem is even getting the word out. I’ve used a few different platforms to get my book in front of people. And by and large, the ones who start it also finish it. But even giving away content, it is surprisingly hard to connect to an audience of any size.

Pick any kind of writing, and you’ll find the marketplace is incredibly crowded. There is so much content vying for a finite set of eyeballs. And it’s not just other writers; you’re competing with all other uses of leisure time: Netflix, Fortnite, Twitter, TikTok, hell, even Tinder

I think you have to enjoy writing because it scratches your own itch. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll attract a few like-minded followers. If you’re hoping for a more sizable audience, you’d better enjoy marketing.

First: writing has other tangible benefits! Journaling can get difficult thoughts / stressors out of your head and on paper, helping you process and move past them. Taking notes improves comprehension, and is also (often) of higher value in a professional context than most people realise.

Things I've heard writers / bloggers / etc. in my life say about writing:

- There is no magic bullet; you just have to practice, practice, practice and be willing to throw away large sections or even entire drafts. Most people, including famous authors, write large volumes of crap. - If you're explicitly looking for an audience, you have to test with that audience! Get feedback early and often, and use that feedback to improve what (and how) you write. (If you have any product / design / UX training, you'll notice how similar this advice is to best practices in those fields!)

(On the second point: using Notion, Google Docs, or any other tool that gives you an easily shared link and allows inline commenting is a great way to get useful feedback!)

There are two biggest tragedies of all time. The thoughts that were never written, and the scribbles that no one would read. For some reason, only people who don't frequently write think that the latter is real.

Do you write a blog? Could you share any links to ‘How can I get better at technical writing’?

One of my favorite videos is when George RR Martin asks Stephen King on stage, "How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR7XMkjDGw0

Stephen King answers basically with the same advice he's always given, as you said, he tries to write 6 pages a day.

In the video, he says he tries to get 3-4 hours of work a day, and get to that 6 pages. He breaks it down, "if the manuscript is x length, it will take y months to finish." George RR Martin goes on to ask essentially, "but what if writer's block? What if internet distraction? What if something comes up?"

He goes on to tell a story about Rowling that basically resolves with "nobody really understands what writers do," but based on King's own "On Writing," I think he does claim to understand, and his tips are not really any different from how you generate content in any other medium, methods that those of us terminally online HN types are at this point experts via headlines alone, we see so many posts on the subject.

The method is demonstrated in the "6 pages" quote that gets thrown around: define the objective (write a book), break the objective into estimable and achievable goals (write 6 pages a day: this allows for book length x to be finished in y months), and set dedicated, distraction-free time to achieve the day's goal (as I recall from "On Writing," King has a dedicated writing office and doesn't bring his phone into it, and doesn't have internet access in there. I may be remembering incorrectly or mixing up my absurd breadth of reading I've done on the general topic of staying focused).

Meanwhile GRRM, for all his undeniable success, talent, and skill, talks about the act of writing in kinda the same way an amateur might, or maybe just the way an artist might, a sort of mystical "waiting for the muse" type style. "What if I just don't wanna write?"

King's answer, and the answer of many prolific artists, programmers, etc, that I've read, would be "why are you whether you want to write or not? You have today's goal already, so, achieve it." The wanting is irrelevant, the muse is unneeded, you've broken down the task, go do today's TODO list. Are you going to re-justify for yourself every single day the overall objective? Well, tbh, I do like that as a mindfulness self-affirmation exercise sometimes, but the point is you can't just sit around waiting to want to do the small part of the larger objective, you gotta just put the hours in day after day.

I think a lot of us across all disciplines are missing that key skill in production: project management, I think I'd call it. The most prolific artists are the ones who grabbed that skill and added it to the toolset as a discipline-agnostic ability. Hence why when King talks about his method it sounds the same to me as what I've read here from programmers, what I've seen on youtube from animators, and what I've heard on podcasts from musicians.

Ian Fleming wrote 2000 words per day and was able to produce a v1 of a novel in 6 weeks. This appeared on HN a couple of weeks ago:

https://lithub.com/ian-fleming-explains-how-to-write-a-thril...

I read Casino Royale (the first Bond installment) for the first time last week; it's quite good and fast-paced. The chapters follow the 2000 words rule quite closely, and it's working.

I've measured this recently... sort of. I do fiction writing sprints. Writing down as many words as I can in 15 minutes. Word counts range between 400-ish and 600-ish. This is just brain dump writing basically, which will need to be edited after (though more often than not it turns out to be more usable than I expected).

depends on quality, i suppose

Just the thought of an interesting twist on the topic: a daily writing tool with a “spaced repetition” twist. You seed the tool with a list of writing prompts, e.g. “Write a list of ten things you think would improve your life.” Then, a few days later, the tool randomly selects one of the prompts and asks you to write 500 words on it. A month later the same prompt is re-introduced without showing you the previous writing. Prompts can be interleaved with one another so you are writing about a different thing every day. It happens again and again until at some point you are presented with all the snippets you have written about the topic and are asked to choose whether you would like to keep the writing in the pool or not. If you do then you are only given that text every day to edit until you decide to finish. If you choose to not keep it then all texts associated with that topic are archived and you keep getting differs prompts.

Good idea or bad idea?

This looks really well done! I've thought about writing an app like this and you've got every feature I envisioned and then some.

I've been looking for something just like Indelible!

I just tried it out but got the error when I tried to save a draft: "Argument schedule for data.prompt.create.schedule must not be null. Please use undefined instead." — this is from starting off of the tutorial, and trying to hit save.

Sure! The writings, tags, and prompts are encrypted at the application level (using Rail 7’s ActiveRecord encryption, which is pretty cool).

I think that this is about as secure as it could be beyond letting users generate and store their own encryption keys.

Related, I've found stopping episodes of television in the middle makes it much easier to stop bingeing. If I finish an episode there's always* a revelation that I want to go on to the next episode to resolve. But in the nadir of the middle I'm usually more satisfied and I can just turn it off.