Four Writing Lessons I Learned After Binge-Reading Hertbert Lui's Blog

16 Sep 2024 #writing

A Sunday evening free of dopamine ended up being a lesson on writing and blogging.

I started googling about note-taking and landed on Herbert Lui’s blog after finding his lessons after 800 Zettelkasten notes.

In case you don’t know Herbert Lui’s work, he’s a writer, editorial director, and book author. He wrote Creative Doing, a book with exercises and prompts for writers and creatives.

After binge-reading his blog, I learned these lessons from him.

1. Don’t Start From Scratch

Be a DJ producer of ideas instead.

Instead of trying to come up with original ideas every time, mix and build on your past and maybe forgotten ideas.

Don’t start from scratch again. Go back to one of your old ideas or writings and give it a fresh lick of paint.

2. Prefer Quantity Over Quality

If you want to improve at something, go for quantity.

That’s the key finding of the story of the pottery class: A teacher divided his pottery class into two halves. The first half was graded on the quantity of pottery produced and the other half on the quality instead. At the end of the class, the half graded on quantity did best. Their effort was to produce something and quickly move on to the next piece, taking the feedback from past repetitions.

If you need ideas to go for quantity, do a 100-day challenge: finish something every day for 100 days. Herbert wrote for 100 days and shared his lessons.

Quality comes after quantity.

3. You Don’t Run Out of Ideas if You Know Where To Look

When you think you’re running out of ideas, go through your favorite blogs, YouTube channels, and your social feeds and write a reaction post for a piece you liked.

That’s only one of the ideas I use to never run of writing ideas.

4. Don’t Write Masterpieces, Plant Seeds Instead

A post doesn’t have to be a 2,000-word masterpiece.

To remove the pressure of writing masterpieces every time, consider a blog like a garden of ideas instead of a finished and polished product. You can always expand a past idea on a new piece.

Most of Herbert’s posts only have a headline and one main idea. You’re free to break the rule of writing introductions and conclusions. That’s something I also noticed by reading Seth Godin’s blog. They write the main idea naturally after the headline without an introduction.

Finding Herbert’s blog inspired me to continue writing. Herbert doesn’t seem to have a “niche.” Maybe everything he writes falls under the umbrella of writing and creativity.

Don’t have a niche and go for quantity. You don’t need to write masterpieces, only to document you journey.