The general principle here is “write what you know,” which helps explain why it’s hard to act on. I’m most curious about ideas I haven’t fully explored yet. By the time I’ve mastered something such that I could produce a full, interesting blog post on the topic in a few hours, it’s old hat for me and my attention is on to the next thing.
I was interested in blogging about my MS thesis topic, aptamers, when I was early on in the research. Now that I have a lot to say about aptamers, I am most interested in blogging about aging research, which I’m only just starting to learn about. The result has been that I write less and less, as I become more and more aware of how little I know on the topics I’m interested in and how much I can learn by focusing on absorbing new information rather than trying to engage an audience in my own expertise.
Start drafting your post once you feel like you have something interesting to say, even though you aren’t that informed on the topic yet. Then either:
Publish it, with appropriate caveats. If you later learn that part of it are mistaken, that’s a good topic for a follow-up post, and you can edit your original to link to the follow-up.
Wait to publish it for a few months until you have enough experience to be sure that it’s correct. If I did this, though, I would probably never actually get around to publishing it so I do the first one.
Put yourself in situations where you find yourself explaining something about what you know well: parties, forums, commenting on misconceptions. I find these interactions are relatively easy to turn into blog posts afterwards, requiring much less effort than just thinking “here is a broad topic I know about, what should I write about?”
The general principle here is “write what you know,” which helps explain why it’s hard to act on. I’m most curious about ideas I haven’t fully explored yet. By the time I’ve mastered something such that I could produce a full, interesting blog post on the topic in a few hours, it’s old hat for me and my attention is on to the next thing.
I was interested in blogging about my MS thesis topic, aptamers, when I was early on in the research. Now that I have a lot to say about aptamers, I am most interested in blogging about aging research, which I’m only just starting to learn about. The result has been that I write less and less, as I become more and more aware of how little I know on the topics I’m interested in and how much I can learn by focusing on absorbing new information rather than trying to engage an audience in my own expertise.
Here are two strategies that might work:
Start drafting your post once you feel like you have something interesting to say, even though you aren’t that informed on the topic yet. Then either:
Publish it, with appropriate caveats. If you later learn that part of it are mistaken, that’s a good topic for a follow-up post, and you can edit your original to link to the follow-up.
Wait to publish it for a few months until you have enough experience to be sure that it’s correct. If I did this, though, I would probably never actually get around to publishing it so I do the first one.
Put yourself in situations where you find yourself explaining something about what you know well: parties, forums, commenting on misconceptions. I find these interactions are relatively easy to turn into blog posts afterwards, requiring much less effort than just thinking “here is a broad topic I know about, what should I write about?”