The Great 300-Word Experiment
Entry question: What can do use to make sure you write about important stuff regularly? Something that is not dependent on your whims and mood and how tired you’re feeling and whether your team won today’s IPL match.
Ain’t happening the normal way
So we should all be writing posts about ideas that we think are clear in our mind, ideas that we think aren’t clear, and ideas that we don’t even think about.
But we aren’t.
Why not?
Is it because there is no real strong process to make sure that you get the writing done?
When you’re back home after college or work and are fully tired and have just had dinner, the last thing you want to do is sit down at your computer and write, of all things.
Unless…
Requirements
What might such a process look like?
We want to build momentum with every piece we write
Writing once a week won’t cut it.
By the time we sit down next, all the enthusiasm and creative juices would have evaporated.
We don’t want to set expectations too high
Writing a thousand words everyday is just not realistic. You may do it today. Maybe tomorrow. And somehow force yourself the day after. But there will inevitably come a day when you f*ck up.
It takes me at least 45 minutes to write a thousand words of blog posts. For complex ideas I’m just figuring out in my mind, it takes more than an hour. Finding an hour everyday is not sustainable when you’re trying out the unknown and aren’t even sure if you will get any benefits out of it.
We want to learn and discover in the process of writing
These will be essays in the true sense of the word - “essay”
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
– Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay (emphasis mine)
We want to write in such volume that we become better at writing
You don’t become a good guitar player by taking out your guitar once a week and strumming some tunes for an hour.
We want to write so much that at the end of a couple of months, we will have enough experience to write stuff better than almost anybody we know personally.
We want to have lots of opportunities to tweak our process and improve on it
You’re not going to hit upon the perfect writing plan on your first attempt. It’s not gonna happen.
You will make mistakes. You will try out things that don’t quite work.
You will also find some small things that work unexpectedly well. You will want to modify your process to include more of the good stuff.
You won’t have the opportunity to discover such bugs and gold mines and do something about them when you write once a week.
It’s hard to find patterns when the data is spread out over months and years.
We want something fun and social
Writing stuff that gets seen only by your two eyes is for boring old philosophers. We want something new and exciting to share with collaborators as a perk for the hard work we put in.
Cooking up a solution
Sustained momentum. High volume. Lots of opportunities for change.
These suggest a writing frequency of at least one essay every two to three days.
We build up momentum and keep it going. We write lots of stuff and become better at writing. We get to see patterns and fix the bugs in our process.
Learn and discover - write to try to figure something out.
Hmmm… that suggests that we don’t write about some narrow topic where we think we know it all. We want to write about a variety of topics that matter to us.
Low expectations. This is the most important one.
We want something that we can do even if all we have is 15-20 minutes at the end of the day.
Plus, we don’t want to impose crap restrictions like “write a complete post”, or “write 4-5 paragraphs”, or anything that adds extra pressure.
Quantity over Quality. And still, low pressure over beating yourself up.
Okay. So, not 1000 words a day. And not hundred words a day (too short, little or no momentum, not much volume).
Not 500 words in three days, either. We are just budding writers, not experts who need time to produce refined words in gold.
Cool.
The Great 300-Word Experiment is born
That’s all there is to it.
300 words.
Published.
Everyday.
Not in a notes file on your computer. Not a bunch of words scribbled on a piece of paper.
Actual sentences visible to the entire world on an actual website.
Why publish it?
You want momentum, hey, you got it!
You get lots of opportunities to try out different things and improve.
Lots of volume. In the span of just one month, you will have written 30 posts. As opposed to 4 posts in your normal process (if you even write every week). That’s 9000 words, minimum.
Write about a lot of topics. Bring out ideas from a new corner of your mind with every day’s post.
Low expectations? Ain’t no lower expectations than writing 300 stinking words. You can write down what you had for dinner and you would be done before you even get to the desserts.
Professional secrets
And there’s another secret to the 300-Word Experiment.
It is difficult to start writing, just like it is difficult to start anything. It takes quite a push to get us going.
Do you think you will write only 300 words once your engine is started and you’re starting to cruise?
Low expectations => No pressure to write anything more than 300 words.
Human tendency => Hey! I’m in the zone… let me keep kicking ass.
All the best!
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