Thinking In Blog Posts

Manton Reece sharing the flow behind his blog posts:

This flow:
1. Have a thought. 2. Start writing a short post about it. 3. . It’s not working. Expand into a full-length blog post. 4. . Still no good. Delete the draft and copy the text into a note. 5. . Months later, pull the draft into a better blog post about a larger topic. In other words, always write things down.

My process is, and probably always will be, the reverse. Have a thought, think about it for a bit, and write it down before it goes from my head. From there the note gets expanded on, added to, and linked to other thoughts, either by me or automatically by my notes app.

Sometimes it grows into something longer, or connects to posts I have written before, and at that point I draft a blog post from the note. The note is never the blog post, nor should it be. Some of these drafts go somewhere, some of them don't, and some get pulled together a long time down the line when a different thought or idea starts to bring things closer together. This can take weeks, often months, and I am happy for it to.

The core of the process is the same as Manton's: always write things down. Matt Birchler spoke to me about this on a podcast years ago, that social media makes you think in tweet-length thoughts, which is not a good thing for your brain. I don't think you should be thinking in blog posts either, as it is not that far removed from the performative action of wanting to tweet things constantly. You find yourself wanting to write about things before you’ve even enjoyed them, or thought them through fully.

It becomes an argument between writing for yourself, publishing ideas and stories because you want to share them, and publishing things because you want to publish things. I am not saying that’s what Manton is doing here, I don’t know the inner workings of his process, but I would soon suffer this fate if I began to think in publishable chunks, but that’s just me I guess.