How I Write a Lot

I write a lot. There are many good approaches to writing. My method is not the one right answer, but it has advantages.

I started primarily by writing argumentative discussion emails and internet forum posts. I averaged over 10 per day for my first 10 years. Most posts were short (under 200 words). Longer posts were usually a series of short, fairly independent sections (each section being a reply to a different quotation of what someone else said). Short posts or independent sections require less planning and organization, and can be finished quickly. They keep complexity low. I didn't edit much. My focus was mainly on the topics being discussed (e.g. philosophy, politics, science, education), not on writing, but it was still writing practice.

Two common obstacles to writing are perfectionism and procrastination. If you participate in informal discussions on a regular basis, and you enjoy them, maybe you too can avoid procrastination. People often don't procrastinate things they find fun or exciting. And informality, conversational style and rapid pace can help with perfectionism.

I do think writing can be too informal or short. In internet chatrooms, people often write one sentence at a time (sometimes less!), and quality tends to be lower. It's OK if that's the starting point that works for you, but I do think it's valuable to practice paragraph writing with no time pressure (in chatrooms, unlike with emails, someone is waiting while you type). Many sections of my old writing were just one paragraph, but I also got practice writing a few paragraphs in a row.

Discussion writing often focuses on point by point commentary instead of on organized thoughts about the big picture. I commonly wrote about mistakes or good points in individual claims. While this has downsides like local optima concerns (more explanation), it enabled me to write a lot.

Discussions provide feedback. Although responses usually aren't intended as writing feedback, you often find out when your writing confuses or impresses someone, or when you didn't anticipate a question or objection. I also received frequent private feedback from physicist, author and philosopher David Deutsch.

I try to identify errors in my thinking and fix them so that I don't repeat them in my next discussion or draft. I don't want to fix the same errors repeatedly in editing. It may take multiple attempts to find and fix the root cause, but over time it results in better discussions, better first drafts and better quality thinking.

Below, this article will discuss transitioning to writing longer material (mainly essays), how writing more can lead to higher quality, writing more first drafts, and tips on doing this yourself.

Essays

I eventually transitioned gradually to writing more essays and fewer discussion posts.

I did write some informal essays early on which weren't strongly differentiated from my discussion posts in style and quality. Essays are a step up in terms of length and organization, and they're more self-directed than replying to what other people said. Essays that critique other essays or books, or which answer a question someone else asked, can be a good place to start transitioning because of their similarities to discussion posts.

I started studying grammar approximately 15 years after I started writing regularly. I think I could have benefitted from grammar sooner, but maybe not in the first few years. Grammar study can be a distraction from the topics you're interested in (e.g. philosophy) and can lead to perfectionism or getting stuck trying to get details right.

I think people should study grammar before debating advanced topics and being confident. If you're debating for fun, learning and practice, while not being very confident you're right, that's fine. But if you actually think you have all the right answers, and you haven't studied grammar, that's often a problem. In my experience, confident people talking about hard topics often actually make a lot of reading and writing errors and that studying grammar and logic could help with. They also usually haven't read nearly enough about the topics they're confident about (they usually haven't read enough of the literature on their own side, let alone read much literature that disagrees with them).

Perfectionism, or editing a lot, aren't realistic options when writing multiple posts daily. I wrote conversationally. To improve, you can think of something you want to change and then pay attention to it while writing. Once your habits change, you can come up with something else to work on. After some successes, you may be able to work on a few things at once.

Doing a careful editing pass on something every 1-5 weeks might be a good idea but I didn't do that. I now edit a lot more than I used to, but I still spend more time writing than editing. I think some people spend more time editing than writing. I like to write about the a topic repeatedly until I create an essay I'm pretty happy with so it doesn't require heavy editing to finish it. I write versions that I never edit or publish.

I think it makes sense to gradually work up from informal discussion writing (or solo freewriting) to essay writing to long essay writing (approximately equivalent to one book chapter) to non-fiction book writing (basically multiple long essays that reference each other some and share some themes). In theory, you can go step by step without it ever being really hard or slow.

Writing many short things is easier than writing long things. You can write more total words, more quickly and easily, if you divide them into small chunks. Standalone chunks don't need much organization or structure, are easier to finish quickly and move on from, and keep complexity low.

Complexity can increase exponentially with length. If you write 2 paragraphs, you could arrange them in 2 different orders. 3 paragraphs could go in 6 orders. 10 paragraphs could go in 3,628,800 orders. Similarly, suppose you take every paragraph and consider its relationship to every other paragraph. 2 paragraphs have 1 relationship to analyze. 3 paragraphs have 3 relationships to analyze. 10 paragraphs have 45 different pairs of paragraphs. If you want to analyze groups of 3 paragraphs at once to make sure everything fits together well, then with a 3 paragraph post you have 1 triple to analyze, with 4 paragraphs it'd be 4 triples, and with 10 paragraphs it'd be 120 triples. These aren't very good models of real writing complexity, but I think it makes sense than managing 10 paragraphs (or 10 sections or 10 chapters) is more than twice as hard as 5.

Writing a Lot

My general view is that writing a lot – and never making changes to your approach that prevent you from writing a lot – is a good way to be a productive writer and thinker. I think trying to write well and focus on quality from the beginning, but writing far less in total, tends to lead to lower quality.

This view is reasonably common. Quantity leads to quality (the origin of a parable), a blog post by Austin Kleon:

One of my favorite parables about creative work comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

The true story was apparently about a photography class not a pottery class. The photography version is in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Basically, I think if you want to write great stuff, you should write a lot and make mistakes and work on making improvements. You should iterate and get a lot of practice. Trying for perfection or very high quality in the short term is a bad way to maximize your writing quality in the long term.

See also Brian Martin's High-output writing programme and my Do Primarily Easy Things – Increasing The Productivity Of Your Intellectual Labor Vs. Consumption.

Write More First Drafts

Another thing I do is I write many first drafts. For me, first drafts can be cheaper (less use of resources like time, energy, focus, and effort) and easier than editing. If something is pretty close to done, then editing is easier. But if it has major problems, then starting over is often easier than fixing the problems in editing (as long as writing more first drafts is pretty easy for you). If I want to change how I approach a topic, or how I organize my essay, or avoid some long tangent I went on, then just rewriting it can be easier than trying to make complex edits. Writing a new essay is also generally more fun and better writing practice in my opinion.

Writing a new first draft means you don't have to worry about getting everything right. It's just a draft. You just do the best you can quickly but don't get stuck on details which can be fixed later. It's OK to just write your thoughts down and go on tangents you'll never publish. It's OK to brainstorm as you go or write without a plan. I usually don't use an outline when writing. The libertarian psychiatry critic Thomas Szasz, who wrote a lot (over 30 books and around 700 papers and articles), told me that he only has an outline in his head, not on paper, when writing a book or article. Using an outline for essays or longer is fine too – whatever works for you – but if you use internet forums you'll want to be able to write short posts without an outline.

It's only when editing that I'm finalizing anything for publication and have to be more careful (I edit essays now, unlike many discussion posts). This makes editing, in some sense, the hard part where perfectionism is more of a danger, so I don't want to have to do a lot of editing or do difficult editing. I can edit some individual sentences or paragraphs and it's no big deal to improve the wording. But if I'm trying to fix a bigger issue in editing that involves a larger section of text that has to be kept in mind, that's harder. I might just rewrite the section from scratch instead of rewriting the whole essay – the more independent the section is from the rest of the essay, the easier it is to rewrite it alone instead of rewriting the full essay.

An advantage of this approach to writing is its also good for thinking and research. Each time I write a new draft about a topic, I might come up with a new idea, a new connection between existing ideas, or a new way of explaining part of the topic. Putting my thoughts into words repeatedly helps me think and learn and have ideas that are more worth writing down and sharing. When I abandon a draft and start another, I see the prior draft as part of my process of thinking the topic through and organizing my thoughts. I occasionally dislike a newer draft and go back to an edit an older draft, but not very often. If I think one or more newer drafts are getting off track and an older draft had value, instead of editing the older draft, I more often review it then write a new draft that takes more inspiration from the older one.

How much should you publish? For discussion posts, you can post multiple times per day. That's normal on many forums. For essays, there's nothing wrong with daily blogging.

It's hard to get a lot of audience members willing to read a daily essay. One option is to have two blogs, one that's more curated and one where you can publish as much as you want. Many YouTubers use a similar approach: they have one channel for their best or most popular videos and a second channel with stuff that fewer people watch. You might want to write hundreds of essays before you worry about creating a second blog where you have higher quality standards. Or you could just have one blog with a "my best posts" category or tag.

If you keep improving, your 50th percentile post a few years from now will hopefully be better than your 90th percentile post today. I think people should prioritize that sort of own progress over polishing essays today or stressing about them.

What about writing a lot that you don't share? It can work but publishing enables feedback. If you're a perfectionist for everything you put in public, and you use private writing to enable yourself to write more, that could definitely be a good step that helps, but I don't think it's the ideal approach in the long run.

Also, in general, I think you should try to fix writing errors primarily by changing how you think. Change your ideas that are the root cause of those errors. If you do this, you'll need less editing. If you keep fixing the same errors in editing, then it's more efficient to find and fix the root cause than keeping fixing them in editing. If you don't fix repetitive errors in editing, and you write a lot, then your editing should usually be pretty light. You shouldn't be making a lot of new and different errors every time you write something new (once you've been writing regularly for a few years).

Do you need to review your writing to fix errors and figure out how to get better? You can do that. Maybe doing that every 1-5 weeks is a good idea. But even if you don't, if you're reading this, I bet you're the kind of person who will pick up on some problems and make improvements even with no organized attempt to do so. If you think your writing is pretty much perfect, then reviewing for errors and getting more feedback from others would help. But most people reading this probably already see plenty of imperfections in their writing, and if they write a lot more they will gradually improve. I think doing some structured attempts to improve could be more efficient if it doesn't slow you down, but if it leads to procrastination or perfectionism then it could easily be less efficient.

Overall, I think writing time is more productive than editing time in terms of thinking and learning about your topic. So I think it's better to have an approach with more writing and less editing. You'll learn more and create better ideas that way.

I think a lot of people don't learn much while writing or editing. Both are kind of slow and tedious for them, but editing is easier for many people because it's less creative so it's harder to get stuck or get writer's block. And it's easier to edit step by step than to write step by step. The main way to do step by step writing is to create a detailed outline first, so then your writing is divided into many small chunks which you can do one by one, but it's hard to get that outline right upfront so that it doesn't need changes later, and it's also hard to make the chunks fit together well even if the outline makes sense.

I think if you can use writing as a sort of thinking out loud, it can make your thinking more effective and can let you write a lot. If writing is part of your learning and thinking process (you don't focus on creating polished, publication-ready output), then with a lot of practice your writing can become high quality while also helping you think. If you do this a lot, you may one day write first drafts that are better than what some people publish, or at least will be better after light editing.

Writing Guide

Does this sound awesome? How can you get started?

Unfortunately, online forums and email lists have lost a lot of popularity in the last 25 years. Many people moved to social media, but I don't recommend using social media (or blog comments) as a primary discussion place. It's fine to write on social media sometimes but it's difficult to get long enough discussions with enough back-and-forth there, so feedback is limited. And people often have a negative attitude to to quotations, citations and links (and the software often has poor support for those). It's valuable to talk to the same people repeatedly, and use quotes and reference sources, in order to go deeper on topics.

I have a philosophy discussion forum that is open to a broad variety of topics as long as you try to approach them thoughtfully and rationally. You can even ask for writing feedback. Using my forum would be similar to where I started.

For other forums, you can find some using Discourse software here. You can use Google search: url and title search, footer search (add topics like "cooking" or "physics" to those searches). You can also ask AI to find forums. Gemini found The Philosophy Forum and The Philosophical Society: Oxford Discussion Forum and I'm sure you could get some answers for other topics.

For email lists, Yahoo! Groups was shut down but Google Groups still exists. Although there are around 27,000 science-related groups, I wasn't able to quickly find one with over 5 posts per day. A lot of people left for social media and Google has neglected this service for over a decade.

Try to find at least one discussion place that you think will still be active a year from now. You can try a variety of places, even social media, but it'd be good to have a consistent place where you can write full paragraphs and have discussions that continue the next day. On forums, people generally see topics with recent posts, so if a topic keeps getting more posts then it will stay visible, unlike on e.g. Reddit.

Once you find somewhere to discuss, keep it brief and conversational. Here are the word counts of some of my first posts: 94, 290, 183, 133, 68, 76, 161, 54, 183, 152, 128, 147, 151, 60, 136, 309, 111 (average: 143). I excluded quotes, attributions and signatures from the counts. I've shared over 100,000 pages of posts from my forums, by me and others, but those aren't my early posts.

I have records of most of my old posts because I don't delete emails. I also have records of posts on my own forum and on my blog (I added some forum-like features to my blog comments section, and it had over 20,000 posts before I switched to the Critical Fallibilism forum, which has around 15,000 posts since it started in 2021). I don't have records of all my posts everywhere on the internet, but I do tend to save anything important or mirror it on my own website. E.g., when I discussed at the paywalled The Harry Binswanger Letter, I copied my posts to my own site. I generally don't trust sites I don't control to still exist in 10 years, not break links, not move stuff behind a paywall or login requirement, and not delete or edit posts.

What do you need to get started? You need to have something to say about a topic. What I did, which you can do too, is read a book that has a lot interesting ideas to talk about. Then find somewhere to discuss where those ideas will be on-topic so you can explain ideas from the book or make arguments about topics discussed in the book. The book I got started with was The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, which had an email discussion group, and there were related groups like Taking Children Seriously (about applying Karl Popper's philosophy, which was a major topic I'd read about, to education). I read essays and more books to learn more about the topics, and I learned from discussion posts. Sometimes I'd learn something from Deutsch, then later explain it to others. You could read my essays then discuss them on my forum.

You don't need connections or friends in high places to get started. Skill at critical thinking, logic and reading comprehension is a huge help though. If you don't have that, you'll have to work on learning those skills in addition to learning to write. Discussions can help you improve at these skills, but if you aren't already decent at them, it can be hard to have productive discussions.

You'll also need some confidence, boldness, and willingness to receive criticism and be argued with. You can use a pseudonym though; there's no need to use your real name. If this won't work for you, you could try writing privately and to increase your skill and confidence, but if you can I recommend lowering your standards and getting started with conversational writing instead of trying to learn a lot on your own first. If you can hold a conversation verbally with a friend and say reasonable things out loud, then you can probably also write down pretty much the same things you would have said out loud and still say reasonable things. If you really want to practice alone first, you could try joining a forum and writing responses to forum posts but not posting what you write.

Before posting on a forum, you may want to read it for a month and get used to the style and content that other people post. I didn't post during my first month after joining a discussion forum. After I started posting, my posting quantity and consistency increased a lot during my first year rather than being high immediately.

You'll want to be highly interested in the topics you write about. If you don't have a topic that interests you, look for a non-fiction book that catches your interest. You can also look for blog posts or educational YouTube videos. A topic a lot of people like is politics: there's always news to discuss and a lot of people are willing to argue about it. You could also discuss philosophy, science, history, any school subject, or something more specific or niche. Weightlifting, cooking, dieting, knitting, sewing, chess or a specific video game are much narrower topics than science but still have plenty of interested people having plenty of discussions, writing tips and guides, and arguing about the best approaches.

What can go wrong? Perfectionism. Not writing regularly. Not knowing what to say. When people claim they don't know what to say in response to essays or posts they read, I think most of them could chat about what they read with a friend and say something. So I think the real issue is wanting to say something important, impressive, interesting, etc. – filtering their own writing output based on some kind of quality standards that are too high for their current writing ability. They may think the standards are fine because they write some, but I think their standards are too high because they're blocked from writing a lot (which slows down their progress and ability to meet even higher standards in the future).

You could get upset if people are mean to you. On many forums, people are mean about disagreements. Finding some better quality discussion can be important, but you could also get a lot of practice talking with mean people if you didn't care about them being mean. You will definitely want to find people who aren't just mean: if they're mean and also make reasonable points, then it could still work, but if being mean is all they do then look elsewhere. You could also get upset if other people are wrong. Many people find it triggering if people are wrong in some ways (that's one of the reasons they're mean about disagreements). People think lots of ideas they disagree with are absurd, unreasonable or evil, even ideas believed by millions of people, so these attitudes in yourself or others can hinder productive discussion. You don't need perfectly rational discussion to make progress, not even close, but it can't be fully terrible. Similarly, it's OK if you get triggered some and that motivates some of your writing, as long as it's under control, isn't harming your life, isn't your only motivation, and the majority of what you write is an attempt at reasonable discussion, not mean comments.

Conclusion

Focusing on writing a lot, not on high quality writing, can lead to better quantity and quality. Plenty of practice, not quality standards or perfectionism, is the main path to being a good writer. Online discussion forums allow for high volume writing. You can get a lot of practice online if you like engaging with people: debating, answering questions, asking questions, critiquing ideas, explaining ideas, etc. Consider trying my forum.