Writing

The craft and business of writing: essays, books, blogging, newsletters, drafts, publishing

A topic in the tpot Community Archive, drawn from 16,387 posts.

Trusted voices in Writing

Ordered by the trust Writing's own network concentrates on each poster, most first.

  1. visakanv — trusted by 211 posters here
  2. QiaochuYuan — trusted by 171 posters here
  3. DefenderOfBasic — trusted by 155 posters here
  4. the_wilderless — trusted by 155 posters here
  5. tasshinfogleman — trusted by 151 posters here
  6. nosilverv — trusted by 164 posters here
  7. TylerAlterman — trusted by 148 posters here
  8. m_ashcroft — trusted by 142 posters here
  9. patio11 — trusted by 122 posters here
  10. Malcolm_Ocean — trusted by 129 posters here
  11. eigenrobot — trusted by 115 posters here
  12. RichDecibels — trusted by 126 posters here

Top posts in Writing

Ordered by the recorded like count from the source corpus; a like is not an endorsement.

  1. from time to time I think about this post, which I think remains in the top 0.01% of everything I have ever read https://t.co/TTSEBlL16T (visakanv) — 42 likes
  2. I will be shipping my book in 6 hours, whatever fucken state it’s in. I do want to state for the record that my criticisms of the book, my comprehensive rant about my dissatisfaction with the book,… (visakanv) — 39 likes
  3. Have you ever noticed that ideologies are always formed around writers who love to write a lot of words? They often cover the same few ideas, over and over, in different ways. But mostly it's a LOT… (eshear) — 39 likes
  4. So after 5yrs of work, I finally launched my novel today as a weekly serial! And now…there are 191 https://t.co/V1uidDMFsb subscribers holy smokes 🫨Psychofauna is a crazy blend of sci-fi &… (TylerAlterman) — 39 likes
  5. people asking why @slatestarcodex fell off have it completely backwards. in 2014 he wrote what no one else was writing, it blew people's minds, and everyone started thinking like him and writing… (myhandle) — 34 likes
  6. getting very tired of anything that smells like insight porn. i don’t wanna read it and i don’t wanna write it. it’s time for insight fucking (QiaochuYuan) — 33 likes
  7. acquaintance: I wanna write but I don’t wanna write mediocre stuff me: first write it mediocre. then write an explainer articulating precisely how and why it is mediocre. this explainer will… (visakanv) — 33 likes
  8. oh my god for years now i've been stressing about updating/rewriting FAN (I do want to do it, but it's hard) and it just hit me that I could simply release free DLC that goes *with* it the… (visakanv) — 33 likes
  9. mf just tweeted a major theme of my unpublished novel https://t.co/kMvzvsOpDa (visakanv) — 33 likes
  10. eg: you might think you need an evening to write an essay, but then the evening comes and you fail to write it and then a friend asks you to explain it to them and you write it in 5-10 minutes what… (visakanv) — 32 likes
  11. here's a 10-minute attempt to summarize my 300 page book @introspectVV into ~500 words. didn't precisely meet the brief of "in one breath" but i'll try again multiple times https://t.co/vdOSJt2DHf (visakanv) — 31 likes
  12. one page first draft summary of my book about dating other people https://t.co/OLuUg1dMoM https://t.co/1OPNTG238c (myhandle) — 30 likes
  13. fyi: If I’m following you, I almost definitely think you could write a book worth reading! https://t.co/yzbDdIhyBc (visakanv) — 29 likes
  14. For as long as I can remember, I have always despaired at the ugliness and cruelty of the world. It’s a big part of why I do what I do. I chose to spend years of my life writing books like “Friendly… (visakanv) — 29 likes
  15. someone wrote an incredible fiction/nonfiction book about what happens in the year 2025 and it was such a beautiful inspiring vision with step by step instructions that people just started making it… (DefenderOfBasic) — 29 likes
  16. we can increase scene wealth by telling mutuals, honestly, when we truly believe it, that “this thread should be a blogpost” (visakanv) — 28 likes
  17. The best Christmas gift I got this year was getting fact-checked by @slatestarcodex, one of my favorite writers of all time. (I don’t know Scott personally, so his attention is really thrilling.) In… (vividvoid) — 28 likes
  18. Gonna finally write my own account of Leverage Research, since I still feel like the full story has yet to be told. What do you want to know? (TylerAlterman) — 28 likes
  19. this is the best part of TPOT the fuck do I care that someone 200 years ago had the same realization and wrote it down somewhere? fucking good for them! what does it matter if I read it in a thread… (myhandle) — 27 likes
  20. hello i wrote whatever the opposite of a date me page is (link in next tweet for algorithm reasons as usual) https://t.co/0wpuv9qCts https://t.co/jjGgSRlOmQ (QiaochuYuan) — 27 likes
  21. to attract peers and mentors you need to be writing stuff that is at your personal edge, half-baked stuff you barely understand, conspiracy theories, howls in the night. writing "down" is for stuff… (QiaochuYuan) — 27 likes
  22. ah. i've been relating to grad school as "that time i failed to write a thesis" but it would be more accurate to say that my mathoverflow / stackexchange answers + my math blog posts *are* my… (QiaochuYuan) — 27 likes
  23. a gift of constraint my son has given me: i no longer pretend like i'm going to write beautiful, elaborate, ornate masterpiece-tier essays anytime in the next 2 years. realistically it was always… (visakanv) — 27 likes
  24. tbh as a creative I feel like an NPC 99.5% of the time it’s that last 0.5% of the time where I made creative decisions that really “pay” for everything else as a professional I probably oughta try… (visakanv) — 27 likes
  25. Finally posted a critique of effective altruism that took me 6 months to write, “Effective altruism in the garden of ends”: https://t.co/Ot52uIqZpb (TylerAlterman) — 26 likes
  26. Scott is right, writing is easy. It's your fear of writing cringe that stops you https://t.co/jx79DaFCHa (vividvoid) — 26 likes
  27. God help me I think I'm gonna write something https://t.co/uATMWsmA3A (vividvoid) — 26 likes
  28. Best email bounce-back I've ever gotten? "I am currently on a long-overdue Writing Attack (it’s like a Retreat but I don’t like the defeatist framing of that term)." (eshear) — 26 likes
  29. we can remake the republic of letters. we have the technology. one of the most important things to do is to unlearn the fixation on “average reader”. you want to reach 0.1% of exceptional readers… (visakanv) — 26 likes
  30. im gonna cross 100k lifetime ebook sales sometime this year and i am very excited about it. not even for the $, which i could make faster via consulting, but just “$100k of books sold” feels so… (visakanv) — 26 likes
  31. I wrote a manifesto! it's about the way I live my lifeit's also about refactoring multiscale human coordination by making woo compatible with modern ontologies and injecting it into society in ~5… (exgenesis) — 26 likes
  32. anyone who makes stuff knows that no one cares most of the time (christineist) — 26 likes
  33. insofar as i have ever successfully persuaded anyone of anything through writing, my secret is that i deeply do not believe anyone is meaningfully persuaded of anything via “reasons” or “arguments”… (QiaochuYuan) — 26 likes
  34. if you say you're ambitious, but you don't have a body of work you can point at, you should STFU and build the body of work first. even if it's a bunch of notes and drafts and crappy prototypes or… (visakanv) — 25 likes
  35. I MUST SAY, MY STRANGEST WRITING ADVICE IS TO EXPERIMENT WITH WRITING IN ALL CAPS. WHY ARE WE SCREAMING?? I DONT KNOW!!! BUT IT WORKS FOR SOME REASON!!! I THINK IT HAS A WAY OF CUTTING THRU FLUFFY… (visakanv) — 25 likes
  36. twitter slightly encourages you to write "down" to an audience less sophisticated than yourself. for bell curve reasons this is the best way to maximize size of audience but it misses out on the… (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  37. whenever I try to put together some kind of “master resource” it almost always ends up being overwrought and tedious when I write something like a personal recommendation doc for a friend, it almost… (visakanv) — 25 likes
  38. some of yall should reduce your twitter usage by ~98% and instead read 100 good books and write 500,000 words of introspective journalling and then you can return with real textual finesse (visakanv) — 25 likes
  39. well-arranged words rearrange reality. (visakanv) — 25 likes
  40. it’s actually possible to live like this but it takes about a decade of plotting and scheming and solving for distribution and knocking over small dominos what you’ll have to do is do 100 quests for… (visakanv) — 25 likes
  41. A lesson on how people get value from things: I kept a FREE imaginal exercise online for a year. I posted it several times, talked about it often. No one did it. I repackaged the same exercise, put… (the_wilderless) — 25 likes
  42. i get the most amazing comments on my 'stack posts this made me laugh out loud and i am very grateful https://t.co/ChfV12wMBi (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  43. When I have a problem, and it’s proving difficult to solve, I’ll often go on a walk about it, go talk to a friend about it, go try to solve it again. But when it’s proving intransigent, I’ll go… (eshear) — 25 likes
  44. a lovely milestone: on launch day, selling a book I wrote with all my heart about a topic deeply meaningful to me, I made more money than I used to make in a month at work as a salaried employee… (visakanv) — 24 likes
  45. I am running a contest for the best informational blog posts with awards totaling $1,500. The contest will run until November 1, 2022.Find details here - and please share with anyone who might like… (tasshinfogleman) — 24 likes
  46. Finished the 1st draft of my 1st novel today 🎉 🎉 🎉 Huge thanks to: • Editors and co-ideators @AnneSelke @collegraphy @Vrazumikhin @__drewface & Miya Perry • @medleyberlin residency • My “Do… (TylerAlterman) — 24 likes
  47. good writing is clear, persuasive, entertaining great writing is disturbing, ambiguous, disorienting (RichDecibels) — 24 likes
  48. creating these days: let's tap into tasshin courage and inhabit mage presence to write a nibras prayer of a river manifesto with anansi aliveness guided by silvia spirit and ivan bravery totems… (_brentbaum) — 24 likes
  49. reading a tweet of myself 7 years ago feeling a lot of love for his younger self and feeling a lot of love for them both https://t.co/XOtb6aNUoV (visakanv) — 24 likes
  50. I wrote an article about how I learned to think for myself Or as Geoffrey Hinton would call it: "developing my own framework for understanding reality" https://t.co/UtVvRZAxyo (DefenderOfBasic) — 24 likes

Most active posters

By posts in this topic: a volume measure, not trust.