The Best Kind of Writing

Most people today don’t think about what makes for good writing. Instead, they’re motivated by what they think will get the biggest reaction on social media.

Said differently, they’re focused on what they think they know about other people, rather than what they know about themselves.

My high school English teacher used to always tell me to write about what I know. I’m not sure I grasped the importance or value of this advice as a teenager, but the first (and only) post I ever wrote on Medium made it abundantly clear.

The post is titled, “How to escape tutorial purgatory as a new developer — or at any time in your career.” By all accounts, this is a pretty dull title for a blog post. It’s not catchy or click bait-y, it includes a phrase I made up out of thin air, and when I wrote it, I had no idea if the post would appeal to one person or a thousand people. And I didn’t care. I wrote it because it described an experience I knew very well.

I remember getting in my car after hitting the “publish” button on that post. I had no audience and no followers, and I didn’t share the post with anyone, but my phone started buzzing almost immediately. Today, my lone post on Medium has over 131,000 views and 50,000 claps. The entirety of the 1,000 word essay has been highlighted and hundreds of other developers have gone on to write about their own experience in “tutorial purgatory.” (The article would have even more engagement if it wasn’t promptly placed behind a paywall, but that’s another story.)

This didn’t happen because I tried to be clever or start a debate or piss people off or make anyone react in any specific way.

It happened because I wrote about an experience I had, that (it turned out) a lot of other people also had, and that nobody had written about before.

The best kind of writing doesn’t come from trying to think about other people. The best kind of writing comes from thinking about yourself and writing about what you know.