I enjoyed the article. Many comments here on HN seem to be missing the point.
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.
IMHO, churning is clearly profitable if you pay off your card every month, will hit the spend requirements organically and are organized enough to cancel to avoid annual fees in the second year. Some people dive into manufactured spending to hit the required spending, but then you really need to consider the time invested.
The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a bit of churning to get exposure to different banks and figure out which one you like... might as well get paid for that. But after a certain point, I value stability and routine more than $300 to jump through hoops... and I'm not going back to Chase no matter what they want to pay me.
Bonkers fraud checks that flagged my ISP charges every month for several months in a row. And some other stuff I don't remember, but I'll continue to hold the grudge anyway because there's 9 other top 10 national banks. Or at least 8, cause I'm not using Wells Fargo either (they dinged me a phone teller fee when I called in to let them know I was fixing an overdraft) ... Wells Fargo doesn't do a lot of attractive credit card offers though, so that's less of a hardship than ignoring Chase.
I've recently (last 3 years) begun writing fantasy novels and I'm now working on my sixth. What inspired me wasn't a beautifully written novel but a terrible one. The author had written many works and published them, all of which were trash. I thought, if this shmuck can do it then surely I can too. Turns out it was true. I now make it a habit of occasionally reading terrible writing. It's a great motivator!
I don't have to be the best writer in the world. I just want to be better than THAT guy.
I had a very similar experience that gave me permission to pursue hobby-level writing. I read a very long series of books (Defiance of the Fall) that starts with frankly terrible writing (sorry Jeff if you somehow read this) but also contained some genuinely good concepts.
Not only is this a pretty successful series but it’s 16 books long! The writing gets progressively better and the strong concepts (heavily borrowed or otherwise) carry it through. The latest books are not legendary or anything like that but I really do enjoy them and the writing no longer gets in the way of that.
This sort of progression is way more inspirational to me than reading Hemingway’s best or listening to a Ted Talk. It’s objective clear evidence that you can just start writing, even releasing the weak stuff, and both succeed and improve simultaneously.
Mind giving some examples of works you've experienced as 'bad'? I've been looking into hobby writing myself and I know my beginning work is going to be atrocious but it would be helpful to have some examples of what not to do too to hasten the improvement process.
Bad writing examples here in separate comment, lots of recency bias with them, they’re almost all litrpgs, but they’re cheap! And bad is a strong word. It’s probably more fair to say they have notable faults to me.
——
Bad prose with good ideas and flow:
-defiance of the fall 1
-the primal hunter 1
Bad structural flow and immersion breaking:
-bibliomancer 1
Polarizing characterization with strong Voice:
-he who fights with monsters 1
Most improved book to book:
-The cradle series. First book is intentionally stilted, but just difficult to read. Author quickly adjusts away from this.
This was my process. The outline is very long but fairly simple and hopefully it will at least give you some ideas. It also presumes you will not have an editor or friend that will give real critical feedback for at least 6 months.
——
Write your first complete story, ideally one that is under 2000 words. Something basic, short, and familiar without being a ripoff of anything in particular.
Then keep writing stories that way until you’ve forgotten most of the details of the first story. read it now from an outsider perspective and note the things that don’t work.
The most common offenders early on will almost certainly be phrases or modifiers that are repeated too often(“to be quite honest”, “suddenly, x happened”) as well as sentence structures that do not flow well or require re-reading to parse. This is all easy to fix; simplify the complex sentences and substitute common phrases to expand your prose.
After quick and dirty adjustments, keep writing new short stories. Then reread again and adjust, again. Eventually you’ll have a “library” of like 10-20 stories that you’ll either know way too well to acquire the easy outsider perspective, or have hammered into an acceptable quality.
At this point writing ~specific~ short stories is a good idea. For me, I focused on methods. So it looked like this:
-Start with a strong visual and go
-Start with an ending and go
-Start with a strong emotional event and go
-Start with one well defined character and go
-Start with a writing style/intention, mimic a real author
-Start with an intended audience reaction
generally the later attempts should be more difficult and more specific. For example, write the same story twice from radically different perspectives. Force out a story in iambic pentameter. Things like that.
Batch 2 does 2 things fairly organically. One, it implicitly teaches you what KIND of writing you enjoy while helping you hone your own voice. Secondly, it forces you to examine the actual structure and components of a story and how configurable they are without diving into anything formal or educational. That last part was important to me because it’s VERY easy to absorb too much of an authors style by listening to them talk about writing, and formal education takes all the fun out of writing.
Worth noting; this second batch of stories will probably suck. hard. Worse than the first. They are handicapped and probably very difficult to complete well. That’s okay. Examine them the same way you did with the first batch.
Offenders you might start to notice now: -pacing. It’s one of the more complex problems because it’s really hard to examine and there’s no real rules. But you’ll see it with that outsiders perspective; sometimes you just spend way too long on some things and way too little on others.
-description. This is super personal, some authors rarely describe more than the literal events of the story, and occasionally mannerism. Some authors go super super hard on describing environments, what characters look like, how things make characters feel. What’s more important here is feeling out a ceiling and floor. Fall below the floor and you can’t imagine the scene or setting at all. Rise over the ceiling and the pacing and flow will tank, the audience will be bored to death.
-consistency and flow. Inconsistencies between sections of the story and sudden jumps that don’t feel precipitated will immediately yank the audience out of the story, and they can be tricky to avoid because ~you~ know where the story is going but the audience won’t.
At this stage, the trick you’ll probably want to learn is to summon the outsider perspective on demand. regularly. At different stages of writing. Honestly this worked out best for me by literally inventing a character in my head named Joe Averageguy. He has a dopey voice. And I “ask” him what he thinks frequently while I’m writing. This has many downsides that you can probably guess but it does solve the problem I had with summoning that audience perspective.
After this? Well, you’ve probably been writing for like a year, hopefully with some consistency. Push yourself out of the nest however you see fit. Pursue a significantly longer story, have someone you know read some of your stuff, shut you could realistically publish something with how open that process is now.
Also: consider having an LLM critically examine a story or two (if you can get it in the context window) KNOWING FIRST that your story now belongs to OpenAI or whoever. This approach still has real value; it’s one of the only things those LLMs are consistently good at and it is nearly immediate reasonable feedback. And that is going to be HARD to find. Don’t just say “critically examine this”, process, and bail. Probe it with many questions like similar authors or target audience information. When possible, modify the LLM to not be a sycophantic worm. Just never let it feed you direct phrases or sentences. All LLMs have a firstly distinct voice, and that voice sucks. Don’t let it inject your writing or your brain with its bland corporate filth.
Im self taught of many things and this sounds like real proper way of a good start for writing. Saving this golden advice for right time. Did you consider sharing this to more people?
"When one of them [played by George Clooney] inherits a derelict amusement park, which turns out to include an active marijuana field, hilarity ensues."
This entire article reads like a cleverly-camouflaged ad. I keep trying to find the product they're pushing. UIzard/UX Pilot maybe? I guess there IS no ad, but the whole thing is just ... weird.
I would go a step further. People kid themselves all the time. Even being brutally honest, I might say I would pay for something and bail at the last step, changing my mind. It's kinda like if you write a book and ask your friend to read it and they say "sure, I will!" and they never do.
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.