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Tags: writing
The conflict between writing to learn and writing to publish
Writing to learn has an express purpose: To find the holes in our thinking.
Writing to publish has incentives for what works, a neat little bow and package are quite recommended* for published writing.
It needs impact, clarity, readability and to capture interest. It is tied together with marketing.
Writing to learn is about thinking better, it needs critical scrutiny and rigor. Something which greatly expands the time horizon for finishing.
Certainty publishes well; but it doesn’t think well.
The compromise
If you begin writing an article to work through a problem you have, it will be editing and the format in the end which cleans it up. Researching while you’re writing it to reach some kind of a satisfying conclusion seems necessary, but also costly.
This, I’m deciding is an aspect of the clash of the business world and the creative-thinking world as they’ve been merging ever so closer, with the business world focused on practicality and production while the creative world focuses on invention. Some of their insights and modes of operating are clashing with each other like here in the social media space.
For me personally i feel a big difference between the kind of deep research writing of a henrik Klarksson and Andy matuschak, with the marketability and writing impact of a Dan Koe.
One type improves their writing because it’s improving their thinking, the other focuses on the marketability and persuasiveness of their writing for the feedback of social media.
Trying to do both is super straining, you lessen the rigor because of wanting to publish and you lesson the publishability and speed that social media (requires?) by adding more contemplation.
The skill encapsulates two separate interests of a writer. 1). If they are motivated intrinsically to the call of writing, then 2). wanting to turn it into a living.
Complications run amok here because hyper-focus on one isn’t aligned with the other. It seems to me you can separate them out, change the model of how you make a living from it. Turpentine writers I see as immoral, but if you combine it with other interests you can be a / artist.
Perhaps a better way to write for now to get publishings is practice with the micro essay topics, even if I feel fueled toward the deeper research ones, perhaps I can do those once a month while the others I can get out weekly?