Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November.

And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so people are trying out different styles and topics – some posts are effort-rich, some are quick takes or stories or lists.

Some people have come up to me – one of their pieces has gotten some decent reception, but the feeling is mixed, because it’s not the piece they hoped would go big. Their thick research-driven considered takes or discussions of values or whatever, the ones they’d been meaning to write for years, apparently go mostly unread, whereas their random-thought “oh shit I need to get a post out by midnight or else the Inkhaven coaches will burn me at the stake” posts^[1] get to the front page of Hacker News, where probably Elon Musk and God read them.

It happens to me too – some of my own pieces that took me the most effort, or that I’m proudest of, have zero notable comments or responses. I’m not upset about it. I've been around the block. It happens.

But for those people, those new bloggers who are kind of upset about the internet's bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay written to other visual artists: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”

e.g.:

Excerpt from dimespin's essay. There's more, it's a great piece, go read it.

This piece is good and even if you’re not a visual artist, you can probably make your own analogies by reading it. That said, to spell out a few for the writerly crowd:

The quick post is short, the effortpost is long

Here is the most important thing I can tell you for writing things that people might choose to read on purpose: Make it short. Everyone has 10,000,000 other things they could be reading. Make it efficient. Make it count.

If you are Scott Alexander, you can get huge readership on your long articles. If you aren’t, try either writing short things or becoming Scott Alexander. Pro tip: One of these things is easier than the other.

The quick post is about something interesting, the topic of the effortpost bores most people

The random historical event you read half a sentence about on Wikipedia and it caught your eye? Maybe that means that i...

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