Ask HN: Why don't people write more (from their expertise)?
Top ten reasons why I haven&#x27;t yet published any blog posts. Number #4 will shock and worry you:<p>1) It takes time to write and time is hard to manage. I have many priorities in life which I have to juggle and do not know how to manufacture time.<p>2) When I start writing, multiple competing and mutually exclusive descriptions of reality try to press themselves out of my head at once. My instinct is to try to resolve the confusion of ideas <i>before</i> getting the ideas out on paper, and that doesn&#x27;t work.<p>3) When I start writing something and questions pop up as I am writing, I still hear an internal self-narrative &quot;bullshit! just write the damned essay.&quot; This makes it hard for me to actually get those questions explicitly stated, determine which ones are important, and find the answers to them. It turns out that getting answers to questions like &quot;Why should this be written?&quot;, &quot;Whom are we writing this for?&quot;, or &quot;How do I know I&#x27;m not making an error of judgement here?&quot; are pretty important.<p>4) When I look at a blank text document or piece of paper, I sometimes feel a feeling of dread which makes me want to take a roofing nail and scrape it across my forearm until I draw blood. I&#x27;ve never done this, and I&#x27;ve been getting a lot better at managing the feeling.<p>5) When I try to get around the challenge of drafting by dictating my ideas into my phone, all of the dictation software I try ends up stopping after 2 minutes. This makes it really hard for me to just free-ramble 3 pages which I then edit later. If you know of an app which will let you ramble for 20 minutes into your phone and will poorly transcribe it into a text file, for you to edit please let me know. [EDIT: I just checked a thread where I had asked about this and someone recommended Otter. Will report back]<p>6) Because I&#x27;m not very experienced at successfully drafting things except when I used to write college papers up against the deadline, I am really not practised at editing my work to be more coherent. Therefore, it takes longer.<p>7) I am not very practiced at writing for an audience, actually taking into account how they would interpret what I&#x27;m saying, and then getting feedback as to how well I&#x27;ve done. Therefore this takes longer.<p>8) I would like to express concepts and relationships with diagrams, but I&#x27;m shite at drawing.<p>9) I don&#x27;t knot that I have a group of people with whom I can check my drafts and who will spend the time&#x2F;effort to give me feedback and help me organize my ideas better.<p>10) I can, in general, find it difficult to organise my thoughts. Beyond a certain length of ramble, writing requires structure so that you can look back on what you wrote and think of what needs to be said next. Coming up with that structure is hard and I have very little practice in it. That is why I wrote this response in BuzzFeed listicle style: to give myself a structure.<p>So yea, despite &quot;publish three blog posts&quot; being on my new years resolutions and me having done reasonably well at sticking to the others, I still haven&#x27;t.