A quick piece on writing

I’ve added a new category called Words to my website. The main reason behind this addition is that I’ve been trying to blog for years, but I always hesitate to share my work when it’s not 100% ready. This hesitation often leads me to stop writing altogether, because why should I write something new when I already have 3 blog posts in draft.

I’m planning to use Words to add some random texts like this, maybe a poem, maybe just what’s on the top of my mind. My main goal with this is to overcome my concerns about writing and sharing. Also, I think it’ll help me with improving my writing skills. I once heard someone say, “Write, even if no one is going to read”. That was in a different context, more about writing stuff down helps you learn and remember in the future, it’s still not a bad advice and I think applies in this context as well.

but why?

One might say, “Okay, I get it. You want to improve your writing skills. Maybe it’ll help with your job, career progression, etc., but why share it on your website?”

Honestly, no idea. I guess I want to create a long list of texts that would serve as a historical blueprint for my future self. Probably not even remotely close in terms of quality, but something akin to Paul Graham’s Essays.

I also have plans to write a book in the future, or at least I want to, and I feel like I should start somewhere. I’ve been holding back on improving myself and just thinking about what I can write for a while. So, this could actually work out if I keep up with updating Words often.

Another thing to add here might be that I used to write a lot, mostly poems or short stories, but in Turkish. Then I stopped writing. After that, I tried to write more in English; I published a blog post but didn’t write anything well-structured for a long while. Even though I enjoy writing, there was always a reason not to. Sometimes I was too shy to share, sometimes I had more important things to do, sometimes I wanted to write a deep technical piece but didn’t have enough time or motivation to do proper research, sometimes I didn’t want to write a blog post that doesn’t add anything to the cumulative knowledge on the internet, i.e., just gathering information and paraphrasing them, and so on. I can list tens of reasons that kept me away from writing more often, and I found tens of reasons to come back to writing. You should see my Apple Notes and untitled docs in my Google Docs. I write stuff but not in a structured way and not as often as I want to.

what am i going to write?

I think two main reasons, other than not feeling comfortable sharing my half-baked texts, I wasn’t consistent with my blog posts were: 1- I needed to do some research, read stuff, etc., to create well-structured and factually accurate pieces of content, and 2- I often felt like I’m just gathering information from multiple resources and putting them into a slightly different frame. Here, I’m planning to just write, like this text. I opened VS Code, created a new file named 2023-11-12-writing.md, and started typing. It’s been 25 minutes since I created this file. I checked localhost:4000/writing/ to make sure it looks okay, asked ChatGPT if a sentence looks okay grammatically, and then kept going.

I also added a poem I wrote 5 months ago under Words. It was my first attempt to write a poem in English, so I thought Words would be a good place to put it online instead of losing it between my random notes. I can try writing more in the future.

Maybe I can try writing a short story in the future.

Or I can share my experience with anything when I don’t want to work too hard on the structure of the text, add images to make it look nicer, etc. This type of content can be thought of as a Twitter thread before they were heavily used for cheesy marketing tricks.

…

I feel like I’ve reached a point where I continue writing for the sake of writing. Let me be honest; this feels good, kind of like therapy. For now, I think it’s time for me to sign off.