Writing About Writing | Mike's words

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing for a while. And by a while, I in truth mean a week or two. If you think that isn’t a long time, that’s because you’re right - but I ask which is better, to do everything on a whim the moment I want to, or to wait and ensure the current thing isn’t an impulsive lurch of motivation that will vanish as abruptly as it appeared? I digress. I decided today to get to it. Translation? I spent all morning today getting GitHub pages to play nicely with Jekyll. But the end result of this is that I can just write nice, simple Markdown. Indeed, I’m writing Markdown right now in VS Code and when I commit and push this, the webpage you are currently looking at will be generated. Lovely.

I’m writing this post because I want to explore and formalise my thoughts about why I want to write. The intention of this page is different to others; it serves as a journey, one which at the destination I hope to be closer to knowing why I am doing this.

There’s no best place to begin, so why not start with inspiration. Ed Zitron is currently my favourite writer, with his Where’s Your Ed At blog brimming with cutting insights into the world of tech. His work helps me feel like I’m informed about an industry I care about, told from a perspective of healthy scepticism. Other personal favourites include Peter Welch of Still Drinking and Ethan Dalool of voussoir.net. I admire how these people possess the skill and confidence to put quality writing out into the world, about whatever they wish to. I hope to one day add value into the world in the way these people do, even if my audience ends up relegated to small group of programmers on their lunch breaks, who are putting off getting up and making a sandwich. I see you.

I realise now that I’m doing this for me. I like writing¹. It’s good exercise for the brain, and it serves as a constructive way for me to hurl words at the world. It’s always nice to be able to point at something and say “I made that.” As a career software engineer, there are a good few projects I can say I contributed to, and many more that I would never admit to. But these are transient. They’re products that come and go, websites that are never deployed, and data-flow architectures that nobody will ever give a shit about. Words are real, made for people and not compilers. Years from now, I can look back on this and appreciate what I made, without having to worry about an outdated toolchain or missing imports.

I want to be a better writer. I want to train my mind to produce colourful imagery, to wield the keyboard as a paintbrush, putting not words into a document, but ideas into a reader’s mind.

I’m not doing this for money. I have a job for that. There are no adverts on this site. It doesn’t give you annoying pop-ups about cookies. Nor does it collect any data about you (besides whatever GitHub Pages does itself). There’s no SEO, logo, nor art bar a favicon I generated in 30 seconds. I do not and will never know the readership numbers of this site, because I don’t want to know. No comments, likes or share buttons. Creating this cost me nothing but my time, and I expect nothing in return.

So, what can you as a reader expect from this blog? Unreliable post frequency, dubious quality and a smattering of subject matters of which probability dictates you will care about a minority at best. But, against all odds, there remains the small possibility of someone enjoying my work.

And that chance alone makes this all worth it.

I haven’t always liked writing. In fact, I hated it as a child. I could never write enough, and this had my English teachers hounding me for lazily not reaching word counts. The gods themselves tremble before the blunt concision of a story written by seven-year-old Mike. But the truth is I wasn’t lazy, I just said all I felt needed to be said in fewer words than most, perhaps at the expense of the occasional metaphor or adjectival phrase. This changed when I reached university, and I went from writing stories to writing reports. Equally, the person reviewing my work went from the school’s Head of English to one of a few researchers who clearly considered it beneath them to pore over paragraph after paragraph of their students’ work. Suddenly, saying exactly what needed to be said and not a word more was a virtue, and I thrived for exactly the same behaviours that earned me detentions a decade prior. ↩