Who’s Scott Alexander? He’s a blogger. He has real-life credentials but they’re not direct reasons for his success as a blogger.
Out of everyone in the world Scott Alexander is the best at getting a particular kind of adulation that I want. He’s phenomenal at getting a “you’ve convinced me” out of very powerful people. Some agreed already, some moved towards his viewpoints, but they say it. And they talk about him with the preeminence of a genius, as if the fact that he wrote something gives it some extra credibility.
(If he got stupider over time, it would take a while to notice.)
When I imagine what success feels like, that’s what I imagine. It’s the same thing that many stupid people and Thought Leaders imagine. I’ve hardcoded myself to feel very negative about people who want the exact same things I want. Like, make no mistake, the mental health effects I’m experiencing come from being ignored and treated like an idiot for thirty years. I do myself no favors by treating it as grift and narcissism, even though I share the fears and insecurities that motivate grifters and narcissists.
When I look at my prose I feel like the writer is flailing on the page. I see the teenage kid I was ten years ago, dying without being able to make his point. If I wrote exactly like I do now and got a Scott-sized response each time, I’d hate my writing less and myself less too.
That’s not an ideal solution to my problem, but to my starving ass it sure does seem like one.
Let me switch back from fantasy to reality. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren’t my point, interpret me in bizarre and frivolous ways, or outright ignore me. My expectation is that when you scroll down to the end of this post you will see an upvoted comment from someone who ignored everything else to go reply with a link to David Gerard’s Twitter thread about why Scott Alexander is a bigot.
(Such a comment will have ignored the obvious, which I’m footnoting now: I agonize over him because I don’t like him.)
So I guess I want to get better at writing. At this point I’ve put a lot of points into “being right” and it hasn’t gotten anywhere. How do I put points into “being more convincing?” Is there a place where I can go buy a cult following? Or are these unchangeable parts of being an autistic adult on the internet? I hope not.
There are people here who write well. Some of you are even professionals. You can read my post history here if you want to rip into what I’m doing wrong. The broad question: what the hell am I supposed to be doing?
This post is kind of invective, but I’m increasingly tempted to just open up my Google drafts folder so people can hint me in a better direction.
Hey, I find that pretty reassuring! I’ll keep dumping words on the internet, maybe a lot faster.
I write a lot more than I post. I don’t like my style, but I’ve developed two authorial voices. Sometimes I play the fake academic, who I hate. Sometimes I play the tech troll and rant freely, which I hate. I would kind of describe my current style as a conscious attempt to not write like Mike Masnick, which creates an odd set of tensions the same way as pointing your horse the way you don’t want it to go.
(I like Mike Masnick. We care about similar issues and have similarly declarative styles. That’s the reason I have to try not to imitate him.)
I’ve occasionally tried to write posts in the style of people who stand out as effective bloggers. (Xe Iaso, Dan Luu, Soatok, Paul Graham) I didn’t produce anything I thought was good, so those remain deep in the filing cabinet. I’ve occasionally posted throwaways on websites where people seem susceptible to rhetoric I hate, and they’ve mostly been ignored when I’ve done this, which suggests I’m not nailing it or I don’t have the existing clout, or probably both.
goddamn I hate Masnick’s rambling overly verbose style, even when I agree with him his stuff needs rewriting in 15% of the space
Ack, that makes me want to reappraise him. It’s likely there’s a version of him who exists in my head who writes a little better than the version who writes on the page. I’m definitely guilty of skimreading him a lot.
as a pixel stained technopeasant of long standing, I have read decades of Masnick and he seems to have zero awareness of style. I do appreciate that he’s got (a) post all the time (b) “And then THESE FUCKERS” down pat.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write without any intentional exercise of style! I think I’ve read far too much text generated by people on the psychotic spectrum to actually manage this.
I have long spent too much time trying to impress people with my snappy one liners, so any advice from me which is actually “be me” should be taken with great caution