Why I Want to Write More

July 4, 2025

About three years ago, I decided I wanted to learn German.

It wasn't the first time I'd failed to learn a language. I've been a linguistics hobbyist for a decade, and getting fluent in another language was always a dream. As such, I'd tried to learn Russian, French, and other languages to limited success. I expected the same thing to happen with German.

I didn't know what I'd do different this time, but I started with two things:

Get my motivations on paper. I filled a notebook page with the things I wanted to accomplish by learning German. Looking back at it now, I don't resonate with most of what I wrote, but having the page kept me going. Its existence reminded me that I wasn't doing it for novelty.
Just do something. In the past, I'd fallen into the optimization trap. I spent so much time finding the perfect process that I'd forget to follow it. I made a rule: at most twenty minutes per week on optimization. I'd spend the rest of the time working with what I had.

Those ideas worked. I found an immersion methodology that resonated with me, and I stuck to it. I spent about a hundred hours per month on the language for two years. I went through milestones of being able to watch shows, then read novels, then have conversations, then make friends, and then think in the language. About a year ago I started comfortably calling myself bilingual.

Over the past year, I've been wanting to write more. It's been inconsistent: since my earliest posts here, I haven't done a lot. The home page of this site says "this isn't updated very actively." But I do want to write more.

So, let's fill a notebook page.

1. Writing is Thinking

I heard this first from the likes of Andrew Bosworth and Paul Graham. It's meant literally: the act of taking that jumble in your head and putting it to words is the act of thinking. Conversely, if you haven't expressed an idea, you haven't thought it yet.

I wrote before that I've been highly inspired by passionate authors, and it tends to bleed into my mannerisms. That said, it's been difficult to be persuasive like that. I often share an idea and find it doesn't gain any traction. Writing it down tends to make it clear why.

I want to write more so I can reason through problems I care about.

2. I Envy Cool Writers

I love reading, and over the years I've collected texts that left impacts on me. I'm fascinated by how these writings are made: how the authors reached their ideas and how they put them to words. It's not uncommon to see something like that and go, "wow, I could never."

The antidote, crudely put, is "get good." Following the pottery class analogy, this means practice. If I want to be anything like those I admire, the only way out is through.

3. I Have Cool Ideas

For a while, I didn't actually have anything I wanted to do. I wrote a couple posts, then ran out of ideas. The story I developed was that I'm not creative: I'm good at absorbing information, not at generating it.

Over some more years, I started to change my idea of what "creativity" means. I got better at making connections, finding gaps. One day it clicked, and the ideas started coming.

At the time of writing, my to-write list is about sixty entries long. Many are things that I would love to read some day. I want to write them.

4. Writing Motivates Projects

From that to-write list: for many topics, I already have a good idea of what I want to write. Stories of things I've already gone through. But there's a lot that I can't write yet. They'll need me to do projects, learn new subjects, or do independent research. Frankly, they're overwhelming.

I want to write them. That means doing the Cool Projects that my Cool Ideas will need in order to live.

5. Writing is Hard

Learning German was hard. Learning to code was hard. So was learning to be comfortable talking to people, or to consistently get work done. But I've gotten decent at all of those things, and I'm glad I did. I like learning difficult skills, even if it takes work.

If writing were easy, I'd have done a lot more of it by now. Instead, I spend a lot of time staring at unfinished sentences, wondering what I want to say. It's a skill I don't have yet. Extrapolating from the other four points, that means I'm still bad at: thinking, setting envy aside, expressing myself, and getting projects done.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."