Publish-first writing

yatharth
Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:35:39 GMT

Note to reader: This post was written with Publish-first writing, where I publish the post first, then write it. It’s current status is Work in progress (4/16) Done (4/17).

I struggle with long-form writing. I’ve had it as my goal for months to publish things here. My published count is still zero.

In that same length of time, I have tweeted 5,788 times, totalling some 150,000 words (5,000 plus a day), with multiple threads more than 1,500 words long.

A LessWrong post is generally 1500 words.[1]

This madness stops today.

“What makes long form difficult?”

I could belabour the question for 1,500 words, but luckily there is a more interesting one.

“What makes tweeting so easy, so effortless, I practically have to beg myself to not do it?”

Because from my experience, tweeting doesn’t come so naturally to everyone.

It mystifies me! the hangups people have about tweeting.

They worry about whether their ideas are good, if they couldn’t have improved them more, to which without any insincerity I exclaim “Who cares!!!” The algorithm will take care of it. It will sort the chaff from the grain. Your job is volume, not distribution. Those people chose to follow you, they can choose to unfollow you. The far more important project is the personal tower of ideas you build. Write the idea to whatever quality you have time for. You will get to the good articulation of the idea after articulating it the first four times and tightening it up each time. I had any number of reasons you should just tweet it.

I don’t know where this zest came from, but it has deposited me friends, relationships, jobs, and this innate sense that if I have done one thing of public significance in my life, it is this public corpus.

Oh, Twitter algorithm of 2020! How kindly you smiled on the tweets that were good and funny and blessed, and how you looked and turned the other way on those that were malformed, cursed, pained, without once punishing the poster.

There is one place on the internet you can find long-form writing from yours truly . . .

It’s on a website my internet friend made called brick.do. The conceit is that is it like a personal wiki/blog, except there is no “publish” step—as soon as you type something, it is live. Just like a shared Google Doc.

Apparently I tried my hand at short fiction stories? And wrote this nice post about mistrusting all people and Dating as a NiceGuy™.

My unfinished essays and short stories were right there, alongside my finished essays and short stories, just as public.

So here is my experiment:

Bring back the feeling of posting into the kind void, that will sort the grain to where it needs to go and route the chaff to where it belongs.

Publish blog posts in the first session of writing of them, finish the rest as I have time. Edit them someday.

By the fact you are reading this, the score must sit at 1-0.

4/17 Update: As of an hour later, the score is 2-0. The map is part of the territory. Wheeee! Writing is fun!

Related ideas

Showtime, from my friend @MalcolmOcean.

Brutalist prose, on LessWrong.

1. ^

Median word count among n=15 posts on LessWrong front page on April 17, 2026 at 12:15 am PT.

Discuss