Why do I write?
Over the last week, 4-5 folks have asked me why I write or why do I maintain this blog? This post attempts to answer the question and helps not having to repeat – a nice bonus!.
It’s very important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated. [1] I publish it online because an audience makes you write more and therefore generate more ideas.
- The best post on this site according to me is “Bundling <> Gaming?”. The idea behind that post was brewing in my head for a couple months but it took serious sitting down at a keyboard to put them into words. Even after pondering over it for a while, 80% of the ideas in that post happened after I started writing it.
- While talking about your ideas is a good way to develop them, you will almost always discover new things when you sit down to write. Putting ideas into words is a severe test [2]
A lot of my posts are just personal notes slightly face lifted with some diagrams for publication. It doesn’t cost me a lot of time and maintaining this blog is a way to ensure I don’t lose them when I inevitably switch computers or note taking apps. I really regret not writing as much back in 2015-2020 and I genuinely wish I wrote more when I was learning about computer security.
- Sometimes, I write about my experiences which are unique and could be certainly useful to people who are in a similar situation in their life. My most popular blog post “Being a poker pro in India” which got about 180k views was written entirely on a whim while waiting for my flight on a late Sunday night. I got a bunch of inbound saying that the post was insightful.
- Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn’t already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible. Any insight I may have will probably have already been had by at least one of the world’s 7.5 billion people. But it’s sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot of readers.
Sometimes, I write because I want to voice my opinion on a particular topic. My post on online privacy and tornado cash sparked a ton of new discussion on a lot of forums. I unquestionably care about those topics and this blog is a way for me to speak up and add my two cents.
You do a lot of research when you write a post. Writing in a way forces structure into my research and I learn a lot more about a topic when I write about it than just reading couple articles and papers. For example, I have been teaching myself LLM security for the last 6 months. However, when I decided to start writing about them, it forced me to do a ton of new research and I learnt a lot of new stuff along the way.
- And finally, here is one of my comment on HN about 7 months ago on writing. Its a thread about the British art critic David Sylvester
