How I Write

Advice for others

I have been asked by multiple people what my writing process is like. I do not think my prose is anything exceptional, but I do write a lot on many different topics. I hope that my words may be of some assistance to those who wish to write more themselves.

The first, and hardest, step in writing something is having anything to write about. You do have to know something about something in order to say anything of importance. That doesn’t mean you have to know anything at the time you start writing, though. I begin many articles without knowing all that much about the topic, and write about my process of discovery. I will soften my comments by noting that what seems trivial and not even worth writing to you may not be so to others. You are not writing the things that you want to read, but the things which others want to read. Things which you know inside and out make the best articles, in fact. Clarity of thought leads to clarity in writing.

I get ideas from reading, and writing about what I’ve read. You really do need to be constantly learning. If I am kept from reading, my well dries up. Whatever your field of specialization, read widely. A typical article might spring from seeing a new paper which illustrates clearly something which I have thought about for a while, or one which provides new and important evidence about a topic I care about.

When I get an idea, I open up a new google doc, and title it. I will then generally throw down a few sentences on what the idea is, and let it sit. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say ahead of time, but in general it takes some time to germinate. I often abandon articles entirely, although some of these I will come back to when I discover a new paper which really clarifies some things.

By implication, I have many ideas being worked on in parallel – as I write this, my attention flits to other projects (what have we learned from HANK?; why de Loecker et al is bad; Matt Bruenig is wrong) which I have open at the same time. I have google docs on all of my devices, but prefer to type on my laptop. I have written substantial parts of articles on my phone and ipad, but this is now more rare. I find that the laptop is absolutely essential for the style of skipping ahead by paragraphs.

The great advantage of writing on a laptop is that I can have papers on one side, and the document on the other. Sometimes I’ll have pdfs open on both sides, and go back and forth between them. This is probably ill-advised.

Writing is now extremely intuitive. I hear what I want to say before I write it down. The rhythm and sound of the sentences are very important to me, so I workshop the sentences in my head. I go for very, very long walks, and I will often write articles in my head while I do so. I do not, however, write in one unbroken string from beginning to end. Rather, I see at once the structure of the whole piece, and leap ahead from unfinished paragraphs to start the next one. At perhaps halfway through the piece, I expect many people would be able to fill in what I was going to say, and finish the article that way.

I can remember what writing was like when I started. It was far more painful. The only way past this is simple practice. The more you write, the easier it will become. In hindsight, I don’t think I wrote anything decent until at least November of last year. I hope that, in hindsight, I will say that I didn’t write anything decent until a few months ago.