The longer answer that you need to find a peer group or community that encourages practicing and gives meaningful feedback, because writing something you know no one will ever read is a stressful and exhausting chore.
To lay our my priors and sources, I've been an amateur writer for about ten years. I started with fanfiction back in college, and I've since been published in a few sci-fi periodicals. I'm told I'm pretty good, though I certainly didn't start that way.
I'm not really interested in writing quality fiction but in the kind of writing that expresses ideas effectively and makes the audience want to engage with them.
I have personally written 10000 comments on LessWrong. I don't have statistics about my average amount of words/comment but it wouldn't surprise me if I wrote 900,000 words on here.
While I don't think my writing skills are completely horrible, I don't think I'm in the top 10% within this community. It seems that writing the words alone isn't enough.
The short answer is: practice practice practice.
The longer answer that you need to find a peer group or community that encourages practicing and gives meaningful feedback, because writing something you know no one will ever read is a stressful and exhausting chore.
To lay our my priors and sources, I've been an amateur writer for about ten years. I started with fanfiction back in college, and I've since been published in a few sci-fi periodicals. I'm told I'm pretty good, though I certainly didn't start that way.
A lot of professiona... (read more)