My Writing Process

Every day, from 2pm-2:30pm PT, me (and sometimes a few friends), will hop on a call, and write, uninterrupted, for 30 minutes about anything in the world. It's 2pm because it's that time after lunch where my food would otherwise be digesting, and it's a time that works for the Brits.

There are no real rules to the writing, but I tend to keep to the following principles:

I want to produce something complete, though I don't beat myself up when I don't. Half an hour is not that much time, and the brevity means that I have to practice writing quickly. I'd like to eventually get to a point where, Marginal Revolution style, that's a sufficient amount of time to fully capture a complete thought.

I spend about 5-10 minutes brain dumping in semi-organized bullet points, and then turn the brain dumps into posts.

I don't use AI during this one half an hour blogging. There is something about the act of writing one's thoughts out, thinking about the words as they are crafted, that helps me think. (Don't fret: I do use AI for basically all the other parts of my life)

I don't do any external research. I think it breaks the flow. The best days are the ones where the ideas and the words are just flowing out, and no editing is going on.

I don't let other people disturb me as I'm writing.

I try to have it not be "work writing." As I work in AI policy, I'll often have to produce "things to be published", with a particular audience and tone in mind

Before I put it on the blog, I'll give it a second pass to add links / images / facts. No editing is done during the main writing.

I strive to "write simply." I often don't.

I do believe in order to write anything great, you'll need to draft, and draft again. I'll only do that when there's something special though.

I'll bold liberally. Particularly the main ideas.

How to come up with ideas?

At a minimum, I strive to have one thought-provoking conversation a day. If nothing else, I write about that. It also gives me a chance to reflect back, and make sure the ideas that I joshed around with a friend maybe see the light of day.

I notice that one mental move that I make now is I'll have a thought or idea, and I can say to myself, "there will be time for me to write up that thought / idea, because of the daily writing calls!"

all lowercase means the idea shouldn't be taken too seriously. i use it for the more risky ones. they might be more true.

Sometimes there's a thing that has been stewing for a while. One heuristic: if you notice that you're giving the same cached spiel in different conversations, you should probably write it up.

The difficult question, as always, is that nagging feeling whether the thing that you've produced is original. My response is to try and read enough from people that I admire, in forums that I expect those reading my work will be exposed to. Therefore, I can at least say that that idea was not present in this marketplace of ideas, and offer it up anyway. It helps if you're close to the frontier of the field you're writing about. Don't worry though. True originality is a high bar. Sometimes you might just hit it by accident.