writing

My relationship with writing is a funny thing; I've never been a 'writer', per-se, but I do love writing things from time to time. I probably write about as much prose as the average active blogger, but a lot of my writing never sees the light of day, nor is it focused in one particular area.

I blog about Drupal development and technology over on my Midwestern Mac blog, about the Church and technology on my Open Source Catholic blog, about life in general here, and about a variety of other things on various other blogs and fora.

But I think it's really important for someone who is serious about writing—and writing well—to do two things:

1. Stay inspired
2. Throw out the garbage

These two actions support and help each other; discarding mediocre writing projects and posts will allow you to take a fresh look at what you're writing, while staying inspired can help you more easily discern what's garbage, and what can be engaging and/or informative.

I've been slowly reading through "Coders at Work," an excellent book in which Peter Siebel interviews many different programmers on their work and craft, and I hit a great little snippet of advice from Peter Norvig:

"The overall design of what's going to do what, that's really important to lay out first. It's got to be something that everybody understands and it's also got to be the right choice."

Basically, before you start doing some huge project, have a bit of a meta discussion about what you're trying to do. Document the process / steps, make sure it makes sense, and code to that process. You don't need to necessarily comment on every little tidbit of code you write—code should be somewhat self-explanatory if written well—but you should at least document what your functions do, and what kind of idea you're trying to implement.

Plus, if you document beforehand, you'll be able to conform code to documentation, and at the end you'll have a framework of your docs already complete!