Daniel Wentsch
@klickreflex
Freelance designer and web dev from Freiburg, Germany.
Daniel Wentsch
@klickreflex
Freelance designer and web dev from Freiburg, Germany.
You don’t need interesting material. You’re not performing for an audience. You can write about why you chose the lunch you chose, or what you noticed on the walk to the store, or a single, unmarked moment in a conversation that stuck with you. The point isn’t to produce great content. The point is to practice putting thoughts into words.
My daily writing is usually mundane. I’ll work through why I’m annoyed about something in my work or home life, or try to figure out whether I actually need to move to a new note taking app or just want to want to move note taking apps for the sake of it. The topic matters less than the act of forcing vague feelings into specific words. Once
... See moreI’ve been writing 1000 words every day for about 10 years now, and I’m still not always sure what I’m doing. Arguably, most of that output is terrible. Some days I manage maybe two hundred words before I run out of things to say and end up describing what I had for breakfast.
But those three years have changed how my brain works more than any other
... See moreThird, and this is harder, you have to learn to metabolize feedback differently. When reality contradicts your model, it’s not a failure signal; it’s data. Neutral, immutable data. That's the whole point of making models in the first place, to test them against the world and update them. But you can only get that data by acting. The model serves
... See moreFirst, you have to get comfortable with the idea that your model will always be incomplete and partially wrong. Always. You could spend your entire life refining your understanding of how to write a novel, and you'd still learn more from writing one bad novel than from all that study. The territory is infinitely richer than any map can capture.
... See more