How to Learn to Write Articles (for Tech Blogs and Beyond)

After reading a forum post from some site moderators, I was horrified to discover that there are a huge number of people out there who “don’t know how to write an article properly.”

What could be simpler! You take paper and a pen, or a typewriter, or whatever’s trendy these days, and you write an article.

Be that as it may, for a large number of people this is still considered some kind of Mount Everest. Some say that to write, you need a gift from God, and others sit around waiting for the muse to descend and start playing her harp.

That’s all nonsense. We’re tech people — we need real instructions on how to actually do things. Let me tell you how to learn to write. And not just write, but write well and engagingly. After all, this profession is ancient and well known. It can’t possibly be the case that nobody knows anything about how to write.

In fact, people do know, but for some reason they turn this knowledge into a pile of esoteric trivia about the lives of fairies in the Garden of Eden. Why? I don’t know. Possibly because these people themselves don’t know anything about how to write something. And yet — it’s fairly straightforward. So, please read on. I’ll give you real, actionable advice on how to learn to write good, interesting articles.

Element One: Tell Stories

Have you watched Game of Thrones? Remember why Tyrion Lannister decided that Bran would make the best king? Go refresh your memory.

Storytelling is a skill that has always been valued by people. In the old days, we had bards and minstrels. Later they were replaced by poets and novelists. These days, some of them are called by the trendy word “influencers.” The ability to tell someone something in an engaging way has always been prized. Look at the top videos on any platform, and you’ll find someone who’s telling a story about something.

In ancient times, these people served an extraordinarily important function — they were your communication medium. They were your ethernet in the tenth century. All of it ran on UDP with horrific packet loss. And the lost data was reconstructed by guesswork at the receiving end.

So — this is the first thing you need in order to start writing. You need to be able to tell a story.

Oh, get out of here! I’ve never told stories, I can’t do it, and I won’t.

That’s a shame. I’d have been interested to listen. Let’s fix this.

To fix your storytelling ability, you don’t need to take some course for obscene amounts of money and drink yourself into oblivion. To tell stories in an engaging way, you simply need to practice telling stories.

Start with jokes. People listen to them. They’re short enough stories that you can practice on them as easily as practicing on lab rats. Take a joke and tell it to your friends.

And here we encounter the first three important elements of your storytelling ability:

1. A sense of tact: By Wikipedia’s definition, tact is the ability to conduct oneself in accordance with the moral and ethical norms of society. And in order to conduct yourself appropriately, you need to know those norms. You know whether you can drop a dirty Little Johnny joke into a conversation with your parents. But that doesn’t mean the norms on whatever platform you’re posting to are the same. So first, study the moral norms of the community you’ll be telling your story to.

2. The ability to tell a story engagingly: Adding just enough detail to make the story interesting. Knowing when not to drag things out.

3. The most important thing — just do it: We live in a world where your ability to communicate has been reduced to the following:

You: link-to-news.com
Them: 👍

With that kind of approach, your storytelling ability will be reduced to zero. You won’t be able to do it, because you’ve never practiced telling stories.

Why do I recommend starting with jokes? Because you can practice as much as your heart desires. And you’ll get feedback from your audience quickly.

“I’m not the life of the party,” “I’m not really a great storyteller” — all of this is simply because you haven’t practiced telling stories. Go and practice. Read an interesting piece of news? Turn around and say to your wife (mom, girlfriend, kid, even the cat, if you’re really scared): “Hey honey, did you know that carrot prices just dropped by half?”

Saw a story that would interest your colleagues? Don’t just dump a link in Slack. During a break in the smoking area, say: “By the way, did you guys know that Intel started making new processors for turtles?”

Start with jokes, then move on to short news items, and before you know it, you’re in a situation where you can entertain a crowd of colleagues with an interesting five-minute spiel.

Keep practicing. Through this, you’ll develop the most important skill of a good storyteller — the ability to hold your audience’s attention. Because from all your useless jokes and news stories that nobody listens to, you’ll develop a sense of what a live audience reaction feels like.

If you’re going in the right direction, next time at the break someone will say: “Hey Pete, so what’s new with Nvidia?” If you’re going in the wrong direction, then, as expected, you’ll hear: “Dude, enough with your news already, shut up!”

Shut up. But don’t stay silent for the rest of your life. Roll back to the previous level of joke-telling and keep practicing.

Element Two: Learn to Listen and Read

And you’ll need to listen a lot. I can’t say I’ve listened to the entirety of “Model for Assembly” (MDS) — a legendary Russian sci-fi audiobook podcast — but at the very least, the lion’s share of all the stories. Starting from the year 2000, I was constantly walking around with earbuds in, listening to Vlad Kopp narrate. I still listen to MDS to this day. But MDS was far from the only thing. At one point I managed to get my hands on the complete collection from the Mir publishing house. And just recently I got hooked on librivox.org. When someone asked me how many books I’d read in my life, after some fairly lengthy calculations I said about 3,000. This included everything — from “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius (2nd century AD) to the “Off to Be the Wizard” series (the latest book came out recently).

I’ve been listening to lectures and reading everything in sight my whole life. It’s fine — your brain won’t suffer from it; it seems like the storage space up there doesn’t run out. But your writing style will only get better.

Listen to things that interest you and pay attention to how and what is interesting. You’ll need this. But please, form your own judgment about what’s interesting. Don’t read critics and reviews. To hell with them. Read the actual texts. And read different genres.

And I want to emphasize this one more time — form your own judgment about the books you read. It doesn’t have to align with your school curriculum or the opinion of society. I, for instance, think that Tolstoy was a dreadful bore. I can’t imagine anything more tedious than “War and Peace.” And Dostoevsky was simply an obsessive individual. I barely made it through “Crime and Punishment.”

But Orson Scott Card and Poul Anderson went down much better for me. Although, that same Apuleius wrote with great zest and flair. And after listening to Tom Sawyer in the original, I fell in love with Mark Twain. Although “The Old Man and the Sea” gave me mixed feelings. And the funniest book ever written on this planet is called “Good Omens” and belongs to the pens of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. These are my opinions. I’ve got a truckload of opinions like these.

Reading a monstrous amount of different literature will give you an idea of what different people’s styles looked like. In every age there were bores and good writers. Figuring out who is who — that’s a job for you. Based on this, you’ll get ideas about what you can do with text. (And what you shouldn’t.)

Movies, poetry, and music work too. The main thing is that you read stories that take more than five minutes to get through. Collect data and analyze it yourself. You’ll need to spend time on this.

Element Three: Write

Here we’re hit by that same plague of modern society. “But I’ve never written anything! I don’t know how to write!”

Lies. First of all, you’ve at minimum written dictations and essays in school. And on any given day you write heaps of comments, emails, messages, and posts.

But never in your life have you had the need to write something longer-form. And those school essays and dictations are something you’d rather forget about entirely. Nothing to be done about that — you need to practice.

It’s okay, you’ll enjoy it. It’s not all that terrifying. Sit down and write out those jokes and stories. Back in the good old days, there was LiveJournal. It was pretty cool up until a certain point. And then everyone abandoned it and migrated to Instagram and other social platforms. Too bad. On LiveJournal, you actually had to write more.

You need to practice writing text that contains a specific idea stretching beyond 2 paragraphs.

In our wonderful world, where your attention is managed by big guys from Google and Amazon, our ability to concentrate is being unintentionally murdered. Everywhere you look — everything is very fast and short, just so the customer can be properly monetized. TikTok and Twitter are not services where anyone encourages attentiveness and the ability to “stay on the same thought.”

To write an article, you’ll need the ability not to get distracted by other things. You should have an idea, and you should be articulating it. So when we sit down to write about how to properly scratch a cat’s belly, we keep writing about cats and bellies, and don’t wander off into a conversation about dogs.

After you’ve managed to write something, sit down and work on the style. You can try rewriting existing texts or coming up with new ones.

After roughly 750,000 characters, you’ll have a sense of what your own style is. You’ll choose it yourself. 750,000 characters is roughly 100,000 words or 500 pages of text.

A lot, you say? Looks like a lot, but it’s really not that much.

Practice in your emails. Instead of writing: “Please send invoice #21991” — have some fun and write something like:

Dear Anna,

I was horrified to discover that in the accounting statement for July 6th, invoice number 21991 is missing. Could you kindly provide it to us by uploading it to the FTP server at 127.0.0.12?

With regards, and so on.

Every time someone asks you a question, answer it in written form and publish it on your blog.

“Hey, you’re a programmer, right? What computer should I buy?”

Don’t immediately get huffy about how you’re a programmer and questions like this are beneath you. Just write a two-page article. Tell them about the different types of computers out there and which ones are worth buying.

And answer the person with a link.

Here, for example, is Scott Hanselman’s blog. He’s been running it since April 2002. He carefully preserves all his old articles and constantly links to them in conversations with programmers and regular people alike. Tens of millions of characters. Ten books.

Element Four: The Subject of Your Narrative

This element needs to be addressed after you’ve sorted out all the previous points. What you’re going to write about.

I don’t write about things I haven’t touched with my own hands. I don’t like “second-hand data.” When I was writing about PowerShell, ASP.NET, Rust, WinAPI, TV studios, and networks — everything I wrote was based on my experience. I know where to begin, how to tell the story, and how to end the narrative.

And this skill is often lacking in some writers. An article (book, novella) starts about one thing and ends up being about something completely different.

Be that as it may, keep this in mind. A story has a beginning and an end. If you start writing and you have an idea for the beginning and the end, everything will be great. If you don’t yet know how it ends — well… I’d call those things second-rate at best.

Well, look at the stories we consider great or brilliant. Everyone’s read Harry Potter. Do you like the book? No? Doesn’t matter. The book sold like crazy. But, as we know, the early books described characters and events that only became significant in the middle of the series. Rowling had an idea about what would happen in the future with certain rats. Just as Tolkien didn’t sit around agonizing over whether Frodo should destroy the ring. The beginning and end were there.

Another example — Futurama. We were all shocked when we rewatched the first episode and actually spotted the shadow of Nibbler pushing Fry into the cryogenic chamber. The beginning and end were there. Between that beginning and end were tons of episodes, but we had one giant story about a guy from the year 2000 who fell in love with a mutant girl from the year 3000. And it ended with them finally kissing.

A good middle only exists if there’s a beginning and an end:

• How to learn to work with PowerShell? Beginning: we know nothing about PowerShell. End: the programmer knows the basics of PowerShell and can study it independently. Result: +180 karma and 300k+ views.
• What does the terrifying number eight really hide? Beginning: you know nothing about Windows 8. End: you understand what Windows 8 is and what it brings us. Result: +291 karma.
• A Fairy Tale — Is a Lie. Beginning: sci-fi in the style of medieval Rus. End: some jumbled thoughts about current internet regulation. Result: negative karma.

Element Five: Don’t Believe the Critics

The simplest thing about writing any article/post/email or book is that the result is self-evident. You either have an article or you don’t.

I don’t have a strict writing schedule. For instance, I work best when someone needs materials “right now.” I usually write five pages of text in 1-2 hours. I don’t like writing in chunks. But that’s me. You are a completely different story.

Don’t get into all sorts of superstitions about how the muse is supposed to come to you and how you need to be showered with manna from heaven before you can write. If you have an idea about how something will begin and how it will end, then sit down and write. If you don’t have an idea — go and collect data. If you want to write a tech post, go poke around in the guts of some system, and an idea might come to you. If an idea suddenly strikes at an inconvenient moment, grab it and write it down. Write about it later.

No matter how many upvotes you get for an article, there will inevitably be someone who shows up to say “meh” about how terrible your article is and how you should stop writing immediately.

There’s only one solution to this problem — just ignore it. When someone comes at you with criticism, make sure they’re critiquing something substantive and offering something in return. A good critic will always tell you what’s wrong with your text and help you fix it.

And criticism in the style of “you’re a pathetic turd” can be flushed to /dev/null by the gigabyte.

Conclusion

Writing is fun. You can write a lot, and it costs you nothing. What’s more, you can start writing right now.

1. Learn to tell stories. To narrate. To speak engagingly. This comes with the practice of retelling stories. A simple step, but in the modern world you’re rarely given the chance to train this skill.
2. Read a lot of literature. Doesn’t matter what — the important thing is a lot and varied. This will give you a sense of how people wrote in different eras and how they write now.
3. Sit down and write. Simply writing anything and everything, from emails to blog articles, will let you develop your own style.
4. Pay attention to the idea. An idea starts with something specific and ends with something specific. Make sure you have that beginning and end, and then you’ll have something to articulate.
5. Don’t sweat it if people criticize you. The opinions of zealous critics telling you to go crawl in a hole aren’t worth anything. A good critic will always tell you what’s wrong with your text and help you fix it.

Sit down and practice. I’d be very interested to read your articles!