1. Think Interesting Thoughts
Step one is to have interesting thoughts. If you already have them you can skip to step two. If you don’t, here’s what you do. Think of the smartest people you know (or know of), then talk to them or read their work. Through that you’ll probably learn about more smart people, and then you can talk to those people or read their work too. Repeat until you have interesting thoughts. You’ll know when that happens because you’ll have fun thinking them.
Even if you are boring or not very smart, you can still write. Being boring doesn’t mean you don’t find anything interesting. That’s depression. Being boring means you have bad taste in what’s interesting. But that’s okay because you’ll still find some thoughts interesting, and then you can write about them, and other boring people will also find them interesting because they share your bad taste.
The same goes if you’re not as smart as you’d like. If there were a race of enlightened 300-IQ geniuses they would write books for each other and regular people wouldn’t read them, because we wouldn’t be able to understand them. There’d still be lots of demand for regular books written by regular people. The same goes for dimwitted people compared to smart people, or for smart people compared to extremely smart people. You just write the smartest thoughts you can think and other people who are the same amount of smart as you are will be the audience.
If you’re still not sure where to start, try reading about finance and economics. Read the Wall Street Journal, for instance, or Matt Levine. Knowing some basic micro- and macroeconomics will give you access to a whole trove of interesting thought that most people never learn about. Tons of people are wrong, like objectively wrong, about economics, and you could stop being one of them. And it applies to everything. The other thing you could do is read some good travel writers – if you don’t know who’s good, read prestige or literary travel writing, not the airline magazines or vacation-planning content. Or read about comparative government. Other countries are different from yours in lots of interesting ways, more than you could fill a lifetime reading about.
If you’re young, like nineteen or so, you might also find that you spontaneously start thinking interesting thoughts in a couple of years. For me it happened at twenty-four. I think if this is going to happen then it will happen around that age for most people, but it could vary.
2. Open Your Computer
Once your thoughts are as interesting as they can be, open your computer. If you have a bunch of browser windows open, ignore all that. Don’t even touch it. Put your blinders on and immediately open the most minimal fastest text editor you have. It’s better if it’s in dark mode, but if it isn’t already and you’d have to go look up how to change it, then just leave it for now. Use something that’s not connected to the Internet, ideally – you can always back up your work later. And if you lose it, not great but you still have the thoughts and now you’re interesting enough that you can think new thoughts to replace the old ones if you don’t feel like writing them all down again.
If you have notifications on, turn them off, or better yet turn off your wifi. You don’t want to be interrupted: you should stop only when you want to stop.
3. Write Some Words Down
Start writing. This might feel weird or hard. You might worry that all the thoughts that have been swirling around in your head aren’t going to translate well to paper, or you’re going to butcher them by serializing them. But all you’re going to be doing here is writing down your thoughts, which is almost the same as telling them to someone out loud, and you don’t get writer’s block from having a conversation or sending somebody a long text. You can hold a conversation for hours, so you can write for hours too. Don’t worry, and just start typing.
It doesn’t matter what you start with. You want some of the stuff you write down to be good, but there’s no reason for the first thing you write down to be good. It’s like kindling a conversation with small talk. It will be boring, of course, because you need a few minutes to dig for something for the conversation to be about. Same with writing. Just write down the biggest thought you remember having in the past hour, or the past day. If you can’t think of anything, think of a feeling you had recently, and explain what that feeling is like, or explain what made you feel that way. Or think of a decision you made and justify why you did what you did. Then the interesting thoughts that are in your head will probably start flowing out. If you can’t remember any of them, write about another topic until something jogs your memory. If that still doesn’t work, go back to step one.
Don’t worry about putting anything in a coherent order or making it complete or polished. If the story you’re telling hits a dead end or you don’t know where to put in all the relevant details, skip around, or drop the thread entirely and abruptly start writing about something else. If you’re writing about horses and you feel like you’d rather be writing about zebras even though you’re only a paragraph into the history of thoroughbred racing, start writing about zebras. You can always come back to horses later.
Don’t worry about the reader being able to make sense of what you’ve written. You can add in the little clarifying details later, or move parts around so the reader gets the right information at the right time. That’s step four.
Don’t try to write to any particular audience either, unless you really want to. The audience is whoever finds your thoughts interesting. If people are interested in reading about what you’re writing about, then they’ll seek it out. So don’t worry about who you’re writing to: it’s whoever would want to be written to in the way you’re writing. And similarly, the people you want to read your writing are the people with the same taste as you.
You might be tempted to write with brilliant clever erudite readers in mind, because you want those kinds of people to like your stuff. But there’s no reason brilliant clever erudite people deserve any better of a reading experience than boring or stupid people. If your writing is boring and stupid but interesting to you, then other people who are the same flavor of boring and stupid as you will enjoy reading it, and that’s your good deed for the day.
You might also want your friends to read your writing and think you’re smart. But your friends already pretty much know how smart you are. Plus, if strangers like what you wrote, then that’s a great way to make new friends. Boom, now you have friends who like your writing.
You don’t have to think a lot about the best way to say each thought. Just say it the first way that comes to mind. If you’re writing fast enough, you’ll get up enough momentum that an unusual way of expressing a thought will sometimes be the first way that comes to your mind, and that’s where artful writing comes from. You can polish up your phrasing later, keep the good stuff and reword the awkward stuff. Don’t worry at all about elegant variation. That’s for readers, not for you, which means it belongs in step five. Think of this stage like having a long free-flowing conversation that you’ll later edit into a podcast.
Write for as long as you want to. There’s no rule saying you can’t write for hours and hours. You can talk to somebody for hours, so why not write? The main difference is that it’s just you, not a separate person with separate thoughts to make you think new thoughts, so you don’t get that type of external input. But there are still lots of other kinds of external input. Writing is basically having a conversation with the whole world. I don’t mean that you’re talking to your readers, I mean that things are constantly happening all around you, so you can use that as the input to guide your output instead of using the thoughts of your conversational partner to generate more thoughts of your own.
You don’t have to write for hours, though. If you only have one hour, or twenty minutes, just write until you have to go take dinner out of the oven or walk the dog. Or if your time is unconstrained, write for at least fifteen minutes, but mainly just until you have a good reason to stop.
This has never happened to me, but I suppose you could exhaust all your thoughts, in which case you might have to spend a couple of days going out into the world so you can have more thoughts. Or you could read a book and then have opinions about it.
4. Cull and Arrange
When you stop writing, save the document and back it up. Then do steps one through three a few more times – maybe one session a day, or two a week, whatever works for you. Have a few of these sessions, one document per. Then wait a few days, so you can look at what you wrote with fresh eyes, and after that, open back up all your documents plus a new document. Go through everything you wrote and copy-paste all the interesting or promising parts into the new document.
Now rearrange the parts into an order that makes the most sense to you. It doesn’t have to all be one piece – there might be a few different pieces that come out of what you wrote. If something seems interesting but not related to anything else, or there are a few thoughts tied together but they don’t feel like a complete piece, take these bits and put them into a separate document which you keep as an ongoing orphanage for bits of writing. Eventually these tidbits will find friends, because if something is interesting to you, then it must be related to other thoughts you have.
If there’s some glue needed to transition between parts or explanation needed for the reader to understand your story, put those in now. If there’s a section you skipped writing earlier, write it now, or rearrange the piece so you don’t have to write it.
5. Polish
The last step is to polish. You want to be doing two things here: cutting stuff the piece would be better off without, and rephrasing sentences to make them elegant. Elegant doesn’t mean flowery, it means you say what you mean without the words getting in each other’s way. You want your sentences to be clear, and you also want them to convey the correct mood, so you might have to play around with word choice a bit. You might also find that you repeat the same word a lot in some places. This isn’t necessarily bad, so read the sentence to see if it actually sounds bad or if you just feel compelled to vary your word choice because you think you should. If it’s the former, then reword; if it’s the latter, then don’t.
You can keep polishing endlessly, but you probably shouldn’t, unless you feel compelled to, like if you can see a real masterpiece in there somewhere, or you’re trying to create high art. Otherwise, if for instance you’re writing a blog, just give the piece one or two last looks over, then publish. If the post is bad, whatever, you can write a better one next time.