Ask HN: How many of you are writers and what are you writing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13871369

by roryisok • 9 years ago

6 5 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Following the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 made me realise that, like me, a lot of you HNers are writers too. I'm an unpublished novelist writing fiction, speculative and otherwise, and I'm curious to know what the rest of you are writing.

Fiction or Non-Fiction? Poetry or Prose? Blog entries or Encyclopaedias? Have any of you been published?

Mz• 9 years ago

I do a lot of different writing. A lot of it could be called blogging, but that doesn't really capture it. This is a partial list of my sites:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/my-sites.html

I do freelance writing for pay.

I do resume work:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/resumes.html

limedaring• 9 years ago

I'm the author of Hello Web App (http://hellowebapp.com) and I'm currently in the middle of writing Hello Web Design (http://hellowebdesignbook.com), which I just finished a Kickstarter campaign for last month.

Non-fiction books, self-published (I do the design for them as well).

mattbgates• 9 years ago

I write all the time, but nothing that would publish me a novel nor have I been published anywhere professionally. When I was younger, I would write short stories and stuff like that. Again, nothing worth making into a novel.

When I was in college, I had developed a fascination with wanting to help college students establish their careers, or help people who were having a midlife crisis and were in a career already change careers if they so desired, or just to help make the workplace better.

Having gone to school for Psychology and after graduation, I was unable to get a job and pursue it. Of course, it would have helped to have gone back for a Masters Degree, but I had no money. So I did the next best thing: I was a programmer at heart (teaching myself when I was young), so I used that skillset to get a job.

However, my love and passion for wanting to understand and help people in the workplace never died. So I did the next best thing: I created a website that helped people with jobs, careers, and the workplace. I scoured the Internet searching for a website similar to my idea, but I could only find individual blog post articles related to the topics I was interested in writing about, nothing that really made the entire website about the topics of jobs, careers, and the workplace. Little did I know that there were many people who would actually be interested in learning more about what I was interested in.

After writing dozens of articles and publishing them, I opened the blog up for others to contribute. It has become like a full-time job but I love it. I am sure so many people reading the website are encouraged to write their own articles, and every experience at work helps me write yet another article. The topics are endless and the ideas are endless.

So I basically write about work to help people deal with work. Articles like: How do you ask for a raise? How do you impress your boss? How to deal with back-stabbing co-workers? How to get along with your boss. and so on and so forth. I'm hoping that one day if I ever do decide to go back for a Masters Degree, I can use this information in some way for research purposes, but my aim is to just make the place that we are at for nearly most of our lives, 40-50 hours a week + driving time a better place to be. The website has been up for several years now and we just hit a benchmark of 1,500 posts.

Every week, I check my inbox, and I've got a ton of new articles that people want to contribute! So this is not just my website, but it has turned into its own community of contributors, and those contributors share with their friends and following. Contributors include freelance writers, marketers, startups, individuals (doctors, lawyers, professors, plumbers, electricians, CEOs, board members, bosses, programmers, engineers, etc.), and even professional researchers at some well known universities. I even get people from Canada, Europe, Phillipines, India, Japan, and Australia who send in articles. I would have never talked to these people otherwise. The diversity teaches me about what work is like around the world. I don't do any marketing for it. I just write and others write, and we share it with the world, and those who get it love it.

http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com

kenshi• 9 years ago

I have a directory of unpublished blog posts on my hard drive.

I also am writing and publishing (and not publicising yet) a series of blog posts about developing software. When I have enough posts written I might cross-publish them onto Medium or whatever the blog publishing platform of the moment is.

I have notes and ideas of lots of (non-fiction) things I want to write about more fully at some point.

And I would like to try my hand at writing some fiction. Sci-fi or fantasy because it would be fun, I imagine.

jelliclesfarm• 9 years ago

I write little stories about my farm for kids but it seems to resonate with adults. I seem to get more reactions from adults than from children.One even held my hands and started sobbing. I didn't know what to make of it..making grown ups weep was certainly not my intent when I wrote them.

What I really like to write tho' is weird fiction. And I have..it feels too personal to share. I don't think I will ever share it. It seems like it comes from the darkest parts of me. I went through a lovecraft/m.r.james/algernon phase and even though I moved past it..to try other authors and genres..I never forgot how I felt when I first got started on weird fiction. It feels the same way again when I dig deep and write little snippet stories for myself.

Ask HN: How many of you are writers and what are you writing?

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