Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten shares writing advice for aspiring bloggers here. He is very much worth listening to on this- he earns more from Substack subscriptions than he does as a doctor, and even that undersells his influence. He distinguishes two types of writers worth reading:
If you write brilliantly, the world will read your review of watching paint dry. If you’re a normal person, you have to content yourself with reaching the limited subset of people who are interested in your topic.
There’s one new brilliant person per year, maybe less. But dozens of bloggers – dozens! – reach the lower bar of providing value to the people who care about the same things they do. That could be you!
Here we just aim to be the second sort of writers. For me Scott is the first sort, and if that’s true for you too, you should just go read his whole 6000 word post. But many people find his writing overly long, so for you I offer a summary with highlights:
TLDR: Honesty is key. Write what you know and care about. What what you really think. Write original by being, doing, and thinking original:
The problem with bloggers is that they read blogs. So when they want to write about their exciting new opinion, it’s probably an opinion they got from a blog.
The problem with blog readers is that they also read blogs. So when they read your opinion that you got from a blog, they’ll think “Oh yeah, I read that on that other guy’s blog last week.”
The end result is that everyone talks about the same thing over and over, hoping they can be the one to educate the last person on Substack who hasn’t heard that social priming studies don’t replicate, or that stairwell restrictions are bad housing policy….
If everything good in writing comes from contact with the world, then your goodness is proportional to how direct your contact is. Best-case scenario, you live with a Southeast Asian tribe yourself and report your results. Second-best case, you at least read the book by the guy who did that and form your own opinion. Third-best case, now you’re reading a blog post by someone who read the book, three levels distant from the world. But even that’s getting rarer. Now people are reading tweets by someone who read the review of the book by the person who met the tribe, and forming opinions based on those. At that point, almost all the work is being done by the prejudices of your sources, rather than brute facts about Southeast Asians.
You contribute to the blogosphere by injecting first-level facts about the world, or second-level primary sources by experts who have gotten the first-level facts. You draw down those contributions by playing too many games of telephone with popular topics that you got from the blogosphere itself.
Read Matt Levine:
You can write brilliantly about anything. Consider Matt Levine. I have no interest in finance. Even though I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars by understanding finance better, every time I consider doing this I bounce off the fact that all the relevant books include terms like “credit default swap” and “ergodicity”. But the first time I read Matt Levine’s finance newsletter, I thought “I am going to read this approximately every day for the rest of my life”, and I was right – even though I will never trade credit default swaps or do anything else that would make reading Matt Levine directly valuable to me.
Likewise, many discussions of Freddie deBoer start “I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.” Then in what sense are you a fan? “Well, I read all of his posts.” Good work if you can get it.
I don’t think anyone wants to read our reviews of watching paint dry, but I do think we are sometimes the first to get to the bottom of something important, and I hope that’s part of what keeps you coming back:
There’s almost no topic so overdone that you can’t be the first person to do a good job writing about it…. When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day.… Some of the posts I’m proudest of involved taking a topic everyone was talking about, then being (as far as I can tell) the first blogger to put in significant effort to see which side was right.
(Not the first person; often the answers are hidden in old scientific papers. But ordinary people won’t know about those papers unless someone blogs about them.)
Economist Writing Every Day 