On writing

Categorising writing

I noticed that my writings fall on a gradient, whose two extremes are:

1. Writing purely for myself
2. Writing purely for someone else

On one end of the spectrum, I have things like journals and notes and todo lists and the like. On the other end, I have academic pieces and tutorials.

This blog falls squarely in the middle.

Writing as an emotional outlet

Journalling. It really makes me calm down and allows me to reflect on things properly.

Things almost always seem bigger than they are when you are dealing with them in your head in real time.

I discovered that if something is troubling me, I can just write it down and come back to it a few hours later. When I look at it again after a few hours, the problem will have magically become smaller and more solvable.

It keeps my sanity in check (to an extent, of course).

I don't use anything fancy for journalling either. Just Markdown files.

I did consider a paper journal but it's not easy to back those up, plus typing is faster anyway.

Writing a blog

Actually writing a proper blog is a new experience for me. Lately most of my work has been on the extremes of the categorising that I described at the beginning (Writing purely for myself or writing purely for someone else).

In the first case, I have complete freedom of expression without regards to any consequences, and I can write without having to think about style or consistency or whether I will offend someone. It is an open game and I am the only player. But because of obvious reasons, I cannot share or publish it.

In the second case, my writing invariably becomes drab and depersonalised and as painful to read as it is to write.

I wanted to see if I can strike a balance between the two. I want to improve the way I present my thought processes to others. I feel like this is a very essential skill, and I have a lot of room for improvement in this department.

I feel that one's ideas, no matter how great they might be, are ultimately useless if no one else can understand it.

How I write

I use one of those cheap LCD tablets for more short-term content, like diagrams for brainstorming. (And also for solving Physics problems :-P)

For anything more concrete, I use my computer.

I typically write in Markdown using Neovim. As I can type faster than I can write with a pen on paper, it happens to be by far the fastest and most efficient way I've found to get large amounts of text out of my brain and onto a more permanent storage medium.

Sometimes, when I'm working on something, I get ideas for topics that are not quite relevant to what I was working on. I usually throw these to a file called something like ~/ideas.md, and review them when I get time.

I've found this to be an excellent strategy to not lose good ideas, while also being able to focus on what I am doing instead of chasing the shiny new idea.

Speaking of which, I should also write a post on distraction. More specifically my concept of “return-on-distraction”.

$ echo "Write blog post about return-on-distraction" > ~/ideas.md

Added to the list!