When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece. The logic was this: the outcome for blog posts is a heavy-tailed statistical distribution—most pieces will be read by barely anyone, but a small subset of outliers will do hundreds if not thousands of times better than average. Ben Kuhn has
Maybe it has to do with if your audience reads everything you put out or not. For tweets the advice publish a lot is probably right. Low-performing tweets are not seen by anyone anyway. But few people would give that advice to an author. One really bad book and you have perhaps lost half your audience. Substack is not as extreme as writing books, but in todays overcrowded content space I really only start reading articles I have reason to believe will be very good.
Thank you so much for putting this out in the world.
I speak for myself when I say that I am slower to fully grasp an idea or concept. It's wonderful to move slower and mull something, to understand its true nature, and there is an immense amount of complexity and nuance you can find spending time with superficially simple looking ideas. Naval Ravikant speaks about this... his favorite books being the kind you can read a page of and then spend a few hours thinking about. When you post, I know that there is no way I will not read it and spend time with it. I appreciate that the content is thoughtful and nuanced, and that's what makes it special. For other authors I subscribe to, I will scan the headline and see if it pulls my interest. I think this speaks to the results you are seeing in the way content is produced, with some posts going viral being a function of larger sample size. But as you point out I'm not sure that's the "best" approach. For an author with a core group of subscribers that they are very connected with, it seems more thoughtful content lands better. In the age of information it is easy to forget that less can be more.
I think it does come down to personality. I'd love to be able to sit down and focus on pieces, but the reality of living with the ADHD I have means that just won't happen without some kind of external incentive. The gears in my head get to grinding and I just need to move on. So for someone like me, I suspect the pathway is the Write Fast and Publish.
However, the /reason/ I suspect that works is Write Fast and Publish would force me to practice the writing equivalent of Speed Painting. I'm not going to turn out a Mona Lisa, but it means that every so often I'm going to hit on something new and novel and interesting, and the more I practice the better I will be at doing that on a more consistent basis.
On the other hand, your writing feels thoughtful, deliberative, and intentional. You have a question, and you seek to thoroughly research and answer it - something I wish I could do, but I don't have the patience to go gather all that together, organize, and polish.
But when I see someone /else/ doing it (Aka you) I find that extremely valuable. I continually think of your piece on historical prodigies - it informs a lot of how I think about education of top talent, now, which is where a lot of my internal headspace is focused on.
So yea, I think you are onto something - but I think you are onto it because you are discovering the right fit for you.
And well, there's a reason the only truly consistent writing advice I see is 'Write, write more, write every day if you can' - because to get good at anything requires intentional practice. But past that, learning styles, personality, and more enter into the fray, and finding one's own rhythm becomes the next challenge.
So kudos on tuning in on that in an ever better way
This also likely speaks to WHAT you are writing. For your pieces - which are incredibly well thought out, diligent, and poetic - I agree that your meticulous writing, cutting, and re-writing is appreciated. For a food blog/day blog with snippets of unrequited philosophy, volume is likely a bit more important. Love your notes on writing fast either way, though, especially "if that is the only way you CAN write..."
On that note... I have things to send you.... but I just... keep... procrastinating...
Fully agree with you Henrik! There are some writers on substack who publish quite rarely (e.g. N.S.Lyons or L.M.Sacasas) and their pieces are well worth the wait and reflect careful, well-researched thought. I find that publishing every two weeks is a good pace for me (each pieces takes me about 20 hours including research reading, taking notes, draft, editing...). My readership has grown consistently since the spring and creating worthwhile posts (that also have a very pragmatic touch) has been a fruitful experience. If I were concerned with the specific statistics of my posts or growing paid subscribers, it would distract me from the work I am hoping to share. I trust that growth and paying support will grow naturally without any particular manipulation on my part.
Finally, I also note that if certain writers have not published in a while, I wonder about their next piece and wait in anticipation - so happy to have received another essay from you today :)
Yes! I've been silent for a bit, and this isn't even the thing I've worked on! There will be 1 or 2 bigger pieces soon.
I'm glad to hear you feel good about your writing! And I agree about the statistic being distracting - I wish there was a way to hide it from the UI. I don't want to know day to day.
Súper interesting. Obviously, more time equals higher quality work (for most people), but I wouldn’t have thought that it leads to more subscribers.
I’m still not sure that I agree with the premise in terms of big names and big numbers. There are some people who make a great living writing sparsely but produce excellent stuff. Those people are a tiny minority of the blogging crowd - overwhelmingly, the people who are big have a schtick that they hit constantly day in and day out. (Or at least biweekly)
Outside of very successful published novelists, it seems like the best way to make a living as a writer is to write consistently. People pay money for a regular emotional payoff, and it’s just really fucking hard to deliver outstanding value quickly and on a regular basis. Even the best people I’ve seen tend to hit some really original stuff early on, then exhaust the vein and just play the greatest hits. Same appears to be true for music, standup comedy, etc....
Not saying your wrong, and I really appreciate the pushback against the consensus. I find it encouraging, and I’m glad that your incentives are aligned with what you find personally rewarding. My only point is that from all appearances, across all domains - social media, writing, music, movies, comedy - a consistent B plus or A minus experience appears to generate more eyeballs (and therefore more financial success) than sporadic A plus endeavors. Again, there are plenty of exceptions, but I’m pretty sure what I describe is the norm and the most reliable method.
I agree with you concerning bloggers. The dominant strategy there seems to be more personality-as-a-service than writing per se. You want to know what happens in this persons life, or what they make of the latest news, etc. There are exceptions, though. Razib Khan does quite a few low effort podcasts etc but what drives almost all of his subscriptions are his effort pieces which he does like once a month. It seems Scott Alexander has somewhat stalled in his growth and influence after switching to Substack and increasing his cadance. Wait but why basically only does/did effort pieces.
And I can well imagine that a more consistent approach converts better to financial success, people preferring to pay for a predictable thing rather than support an unpredictable but more fascinating on average creator. I have no strong position here.
And influencers are surely best served by a consistent pattern.
But I'd push back against music and movies being in that category - a hit single takes several thousand hours to write and produce and package (spread across teams), and even the most frantic musicians rarely deliver more than 1 a month. And film is definitely dominated by extremely concentrated bets that costs absurd amounts of money and effort.
An important dimension is whether the writing is ephemeral or will stand up to being read years later. If you are Joan Didion most of your readers are going to be reading decades-old pieces in books, and maybe most will actually be reading after you have died. The fast advice makes a lot of sense for a newspaper that is read on paper, less so for an article that is likely to be shared anew each time an audience discovers it. Keep doing what motivates you!
Super interesting - thank you for sharing this Henrik!
This resonates: "The reason I wrote like this wasn’t because of the intuition outlined in this essay. I did it because I couldn’t help myself. I like everything around me to be well-crafted and beautiful, and I don’t mind feeling frustrated at times to make that happen".
I think this is especially true in the age of AI. I’m noticing more content with real words in a logical order but you know, missing what you described … a person trying to carefully craft something nice. For me, good writing is starting to “pop” more than ever.
Interestingly, my pieces that do best tend to be written quickly and slowly: first drafts come out in a burst of energy, and then I get obsessed with the little details and fuss over them for a week or two while trying not to disturb the original impetus/flow/energy.
I don't always get into that flow because some pieces seem inherently kind of low-stakes, like my recent productivity post, and sometimes I'm just in a hurry to say something.
I have a few of those, too, where there is a lot of energy in the first draft and the editing is just combing out errors without losing the energy. Definitely, "a blog post is a search query" and partly, Alice. But most of the time the muses don't play like that with me, they're more like, if you write 100 senteces we'll hide 7 good one's in there but in the wrong order!
The argument from the long tail distribution is obviously incomplete. It assumes that everything you write and everyone who reads is homogenous. There are at least two random variables interacting: the quality of the piece, and the interest of the reader. Yes, both of these have significant random components, but that doesn’t mean you can’t influence them. It would be ridiculous to suggest that spending time optimizing a piece does *nothing*. The strong version of the “just publish more” argument makes exactly this assumption. The question is always going to be how much optimizing is best (and fun) for you as a writer. How much is best? Well, that depends on who is reading. If you’re putting out sludge for the masses, then yeah, “optimizing” is basically impossible, and all you can do is try to put out as much as possible so that you hit that arcane “moment” and go viral. But if you have thoughtful readers who are showing up to read something even slightly differentiated, then you can work to hit the nerve of that reader. How effectively you can optimize depends on how differentiated you are. If you are writing documentation for a software library then you can optimize to the max because you know exactly who is reading and what they need. With this type of writing, the best you can do is try to be interesting, try to investigate new things, try to be sincere, try to be novel and compelling. But if you don’t optimize at all, you will have done none of those things, you will have done nothing, and your long tail becomes a tall bar.
This gets at something that I perhaps should have pointed out in the essay: there is a big difference between kinds of engagement. Just trying to make the numbers go up is, I suspect, a terrible way to live. But making a piece spread selectively among people who are discerning and intelligent and can push your thinking on - that is wonderful. Because ultimately, the thing that makes this enterprise worth it, as far as I'm concerned, is the joy of transforming your thinking and building generative relationships.
This was incredibly heartening to read as a person who greatly admires the patronage model. Plus this is how I feel about my writing, though that's more mathematical proofs than blog posts. I really should get to writing here on substack, but I'm not sure if it would be better to just duve right in or whether I should build up a compendium of ideas in suggesting like Obsidian and then post once I think there's enough for a cohesive and compelling post.
For whatever it is worth, I spent about six months building up notes in Obsidian and talking about ideas every week before I started. It was a transformative period to put so much attention into maturing ideas. And I wrote very rarely the first 18 months after that.
Because I’m writing about events that happened to me over a thirty-year period, I find it takes me a long time to come up with a piece — I post three times a month.
Even though I’m writing about something, I know the outcome of; takes a long time to get it into an entertaining and readable story.
I’m looking for quality over quantity.
I feel this is something I should know, but what are “outliers” that you mention ?
Great bit. Thanks. It really made me think. I think I fall into the write faster camp. After maybe 1.5 million words, I'm still crappy at writing stories. I can't tell one out loud for crap either. I tend to get interrupted. I could give it another million words and give up, or I can ask, what should I read to learn how to tell a story?
If you're looking to learn how to tell a story. I'll suggest a asking a few questions. First what do you want to get? Are you trying to scare your audience? Make them laugh? Cheer as a starbase is blown up?
Then with that start use an already established template, read a thriller, watch a comedy like Airplane, or figure out why the "Kaaahn!" works so well for Star Trek.
Write that first draft. Give your story the bones, the skeleton to stand on. Once the skeleton is constructed, rest for a day.
Come back and bloat the hell out of that story. Add details that make your eyes water as you try and over-describe the characters and places that are in your story. Make your main character react to running out of cat food for a cat that he doesn't even like and he's only taking care of because his ex-girlfriend asked him to.
Then rest again. Rest is important.
Then come back and highlight the important parts of the story. The phrases that make you feel something. The parts where the struggling boxer stops to tell a girl to act right so that the world won't treat her like a whore. Try to trim the rest.
Then with all the important parts re-write them. Change the sentence "She ran" to "Anna Fled" try to feel how the story is impacted.
Take a break.
Give it to someone else who can comment without hurting your feelings
Listen to their suggestions but don't let them rule you. And edit with those suggestions in mind.
Congratulations you've written a story. The biggest thing for improvement is feedback. If you can join a writing group. When I was in art school the biggest improvers were able to listen to critiques, and try to use them to improve. Critiques will hurt and some will be wrong but feedback is essential. And if you're using yourself to get feedback you need space so you can be objective. Write, take a break ,and come back with new eyes.
You killed it for me(!) starting with this, "First what do you want to get?" This is flat out missing in my approach to free writing. I always know what I want to write about, but I've rarely considered what I want a piece to do.
I also accept the suggestions to make each piece an effort piece, use a more structured approach, and to leave down-time between stages. Very sensible.
Totally agree with this.
Maybe it has to do with if your audience reads everything you put out or not. For tweets the advice publish a lot is probably right. Low-performing tweets are not seen by anyone anyway. But few people would give that advice to an author. One really bad book and you have perhaps lost half your audience. Substack is not as extreme as writing books, but in todays overcrowded content space I really only start reading articles I have reason to believe will be very good.
Thank you so much for putting this out in the world.
I speak for myself when I say that I am slower to fully grasp an idea or concept. It's wonderful to move slower and mull something, to understand its true nature, and there is an immense amount of complexity and nuance you can find spending time with superficially simple looking ideas. Naval Ravikant speaks about this... his favorite books being the kind you can read a page of and then spend a few hours thinking about. When you post, I know that there is no way I will not read it and spend time with it. I appreciate that the content is thoughtful and nuanced, and that's what makes it special. For other authors I subscribe to, I will scan the headline and see if it pulls my interest. I think this speaks to the results you are seeing in the way content is produced, with some posts going viral being a function of larger sample size. But as you point out I'm not sure that's the "best" approach. For an author with a core group of subscribers that they are very connected with, it seems more thoughtful content lands better. In the age of information it is easy to forget that less can be more.
I think it does come down to personality. I'd love to be able to sit down and focus on pieces, but the reality of living with the ADHD I have means that just won't happen without some kind of external incentive. The gears in my head get to grinding and I just need to move on. So for someone like me, I suspect the pathway is the Write Fast and Publish.
However, the /reason/ I suspect that works is Write Fast and Publish would force me to practice the writing equivalent of Speed Painting. I'm not going to turn out a Mona Lisa, but it means that every so often I'm going to hit on something new and novel and interesting, and the more I practice the better I will be at doing that on a more consistent basis.
On the other hand, your writing feels thoughtful, deliberative, and intentional. You have a question, and you seek to thoroughly research and answer it - something I wish I could do, but I don't have the patience to go gather all that together, organize, and polish.
But when I see someone /else/ doing it (Aka you) I find that extremely valuable. I continually think of your piece on historical prodigies - it informs a lot of how I think about education of top talent, now, which is where a lot of my internal headspace is focused on.
So yea, I think you are onto something - but I think you are onto it because you are discovering the right fit for you.
And well, there's a reason the only truly consistent writing advice I see is 'Write, write more, write every day if you can' - because to get good at anything requires intentional practice. But past that, learning styles, personality, and more enter into the fray, and finding one's own rhythm becomes the next challenge.
So kudos on tuning in on that in an ever better way
This also likely speaks to WHAT you are writing. For your pieces - which are incredibly well thought out, diligent, and poetic - I agree that your meticulous writing, cutting, and re-writing is appreciated. For a food blog/day blog with snippets of unrequited philosophy, volume is likely a bit more important. Love your notes on writing fast either way, though, especially "if that is the only way you CAN write..."
On that note... I have things to send you.... but I just... keep... procrastinating...
Fully agree with you Henrik! There are some writers on substack who publish quite rarely (e.g. N.S.Lyons or L.M.Sacasas) and their pieces are well worth the wait and reflect careful, well-researched thought. I find that publishing every two weeks is a good pace for me (each pieces takes me about 20 hours including research reading, taking notes, draft, editing...). My readership has grown consistently since the spring and creating worthwhile posts (that also have a very pragmatic touch) has been a fruitful experience. If I were concerned with the specific statistics of my posts or growing paid subscribers, it would distract me from the work I am hoping to share. I trust that growth and paying support will grow naturally without any particular manipulation on my part.
Finally, I also note that if certain writers have not published in a while, I wonder about their next piece and wait in anticipation - so happy to have received another essay from you today :)
Yes! I've been silent for a bit, and this isn't even the thing I've worked on! There will be 1 or 2 bigger pieces soon.
I'm glad to hear you feel good about your writing! And I agree about the statistic being distracting - I wish there was a way to hide it from the UI. I don't want to know day to day.
Súper interesting. Obviously, more time equals higher quality work (for most people), but I wouldn’t have thought that it leads to more subscribers.
I’m still not sure that I agree with the premise in terms of big names and big numbers. There are some people who make a great living writing sparsely but produce excellent stuff. Those people are a tiny minority of the blogging crowd - overwhelmingly, the people who are big have a schtick that they hit constantly day in and day out. (Or at least biweekly)
Outside of very successful published novelists, it seems like the best way to make a living as a writer is to write consistently. People pay money for a regular emotional payoff, and it’s just really fucking hard to deliver outstanding value quickly and on a regular basis. Even the best people I’ve seen tend to hit some really original stuff early on, then exhaust the vein and just play the greatest hits. Same appears to be true for music, standup comedy, etc....
Not saying your wrong, and I really appreciate the pushback against the consensus. I find it encouraging, and I’m glad that your incentives are aligned with what you find personally rewarding. My only point is that from all appearances, across all domains - social media, writing, music, movies, comedy - a consistent B plus or A minus experience appears to generate more eyeballs (and therefore more financial success) than sporadic A plus endeavors. Again, there are plenty of exceptions, but I’m pretty sure what I describe is the norm and the most reliable method.
I agree with you concerning bloggers. The dominant strategy there seems to be more personality-as-a-service than writing per se. You want to know what happens in this persons life, or what they make of the latest news, etc. There are exceptions, though. Razib Khan does quite a few low effort podcasts etc but what drives almost all of his subscriptions are his effort pieces which he does like once a month. It seems Scott Alexander has somewhat stalled in his growth and influence after switching to Substack and increasing his cadance. Wait but why basically only does/did effort pieces.
And I can well imagine that a more consistent approach converts better to financial success, people preferring to pay for a predictable thing rather than support an unpredictable but more fascinating on average creator. I have no strong position here.
And influencers are surely best served by a consistent pattern.
But I'd push back against music and movies being in that category - a hit single takes several thousand hours to write and produce and package (spread across teams), and even the most frantic musicians rarely deliver more than 1 a month. And film is definitely dominated by extremely concentrated bets that costs absurd amounts of money and effort.
An important dimension is whether the writing is ephemeral or will stand up to being read years later. If you are Joan Didion most of your readers are going to be reading decades-old pieces in books, and maybe most will actually be reading after you have died. The fast advice makes a lot of sense for a newspaper that is read on paper, less so for an article that is likely to be shared anew each time an audience discovers it. Keep doing what motivates you!
Super interesting - thank you for sharing this Henrik!
This resonates: "The reason I wrote like this wasn’t because of the intuition outlined in this essay. I did it because I couldn’t help myself. I like everything around me to be well-crafted and beautiful, and I don’t mind feeling frustrated at times to make that happen".
I think this is especially true in the age of AI. I’m noticing more content with real words in a logical order but you know, missing what you described … a person trying to carefully craft something nice. For me, good writing is starting to “pop” more than ever.
Interestingly, my pieces that do best tend to be written quickly and slowly: first drafts come out in a burst of energy, and then I get obsessed with the little details and fuss over them for a week or two while trying not to disturb the original impetus/flow/energy.
I don't always get into that flow because some pieces seem inherently kind of low-stakes, like my recent productivity post, and sometimes I'm just in a hurry to say something.
I have a few of those, too, where there is a lot of energy in the first draft and the editing is just combing out errors without losing the energy. Definitely, "a blog post is a search query" and partly, Alice. But most of the time the muses don't play like that with me, they're more like, if you write 100 senteces we'll hide 7 good one's in there but in the wrong order!
The argument from the long tail distribution is obviously incomplete. It assumes that everything you write and everyone who reads is homogenous. There are at least two random variables interacting: the quality of the piece, and the interest of the reader. Yes, both of these have significant random components, but that doesn’t mean you can’t influence them. It would be ridiculous to suggest that spending time optimizing a piece does *nothing*. The strong version of the “just publish more” argument makes exactly this assumption. The question is always going to be how much optimizing is best (and fun) for you as a writer. How much is best? Well, that depends on who is reading. If you’re putting out sludge for the masses, then yeah, “optimizing” is basically impossible, and all you can do is try to put out as much as possible so that you hit that arcane “moment” and go viral. But if you have thoughtful readers who are showing up to read something even slightly differentiated, then you can work to hit the nerve of that reader. How effectively you can optimize depends on how differentiated you are. If you are writing documentation for a software library then you can optimize to the max because you know exactly who is reading and what they need. With this type of writing, the best you can do is try to be interesting, try to investigate new things, try to be sincere, try to be novel and compelling. But if you don’t optimize at all, you will have done none of those things, you will have done nothing, and your long tail becomes a tall bar.
This gets at something that I perhaps should have pointed out in the essay: there is a big difference between kinds of engagement. Just trying to make the numbers go up is, I suspect, a terrible way to live. But making a piece spread selectively among people who are discerning and intelligent and can push your thinking on - that is wonderful. Because ultimately, the thing that makes this enterprise worth it, as far as I'm concerned, is the joy of transforming your thinking and building generative relationships.
Yes! Well said
Seinfield and an author of the simpsons said to live for the rewrite. Good software also is reworked multiple times. Polish thoroughly
This was incredibly heartening to read as a person who greatly admires the patronage model. Plus this is how I feel about my writing, though that's more mathematical proofs than blog posts. I really should get to writing here on substack, but I'm not sure if it would be better to just duve right in or whether I should build up a compendium of ideas in suggesting like Obsidian and then post once I think there's enough for a cohesive and compelling post.
For whatever it is worth, I spent about six months building up notes in Obsidian and talking about ideas every week before I started. It was a transformative period to put so much attention into maturing ideas. And I wrote very rarely the first 18 months after that.
Because I’m writing about events that happened to me over a thirty-year period, I find it takes me a long time to come up with a piece — I post three times a month.
Even though I’m writing about something, I know the outcome of; takes a long time to get it into an entertaining and readable story.
I’m looking for quality over quantity.
I feel this is something I should know, but what are “outliers” that you mention ?
Thanks
Wow, this is timely! Thank you for these thoughts.
Found this because of Cal Newport's last post. Keep up the good work.
https://calnewport.com/on-slow-writing/
Great bit. Thanks. It really made me think. I think I fall into the write faster camp. After maybe 1.5 million words, I'm still crappy at writing stories. I can't tell one out loud for crap either. I tend to get interrupted. I could give it another million words and give up, or I can ask, what should I read to learn how to tell a story?
If you're looking to learn how to tell a story. I'll suggest a asking a few questions. First what do you want to get? Are you trying to scare your audience? Make them laugh? Cheer as a starbase is blown up?
Then with that start use an already established template, read a thriller, watch a comedy like Airplane, or figure out why the "Kaaahn!" works so well for Star Trek.
Write that first draft. Give your story the bones, the skeleton to stand on. Once the skeleton is constructed, rest for a day.
Come back and bloat the hell out of that story. Add details that make your eyes water as you try and over-describe the characters and places that are in your story. Make your main character react to running out of cat food for a cat that he doesn't even like and he's only taking care of because his ex-girlfriend asked him to.
Then rest again. Rest is important.
Then come back and highlight the important parts of the story. The phrases that make you feel something. The parts where the struggling boxer stops to tell a girl to act right so that the world won't treat her like a whore. Try to trim the rest.
Then with all the important parts re-write them. Change the sentence "She ran" to "Anna Fled" try to feel how the story is impacted.
Take a break.
Give it to someone else who can comment without hurting your feelings
Listen to their suggestions but don't let them rule you. And edit with those suggestions in mind.
Congratulations you've written a story. The biggest thing for improvement is feedback. If you can join a writing group. When I was in art school the biggest improvers were able to listen to critiques, and try to use them to improve. Critiques will hurt and some will be wrong but feedback is essential. And if you're using yourself to get feedback you need space so you can be objective. Write, take a break ,and come back with new eyes.
You killed it for me(!) starting with this, "First what do you want to get?" This is flat out missing in my approach to free writing. I always know what I want to write about, but I've rarely considered what I want a piece to do.
I also accept the suggestions to make each piece an effort piece, use a more structured approach, and to leave down-time between stages. Very sensible.
This feels huge. Thank you!