Why I Struggle to Start Writing: Escaping the Long-Form Trap and Writing from Real Problems

When I was a kid, I solemnly set a dream for myself: when I grew up, I was going to be a writer. Time passed, and the memory grew fuzzy, but it stayed rooted deep in the back of my mind like a thorn. Every year as an adult, whenever I sat down to make my annual plans, the exact same goal made the list: write more articles. And every year, I broke that promise.

For years, my working assumption about writing was that “only long posts count as real writing.” The rough idea was that unless you have the chops to hand-roll comprehensive, long-form pieces from scratch, you aren’t truly “writing.” I tested this theory down two paths, and both failed miserably: book reviews and history.

• Book reviews completely clashed with how I actually read. I much prefer jotting down highlights and capturing quick, fleeting thoughts. Forcing those fragments into a structured essay just meant talking when I had nothing left to say—dry, lifeless, and flavorless.
• With history, I love doing thematic reading on unfamiliar eras—classical Greece, ancient Xinjiang, that sort of thing. But in practice, my curiosity took over, pulling me so deep down the rabbit hole that I couldn’t climb back out. When it came to actually sitting down and writing an article, I had no idea where to even begin.

After hitting dead ends on both fronts, I was at a complete loss. Why couldn’t I produce a single complete article? Why couldn’t I write consistently?

I spent a long time turning this question over in my head. Recently, things have finally started coming into focus, so I wanted to lay out what I’ve figured out.

Writing Is for the Reader

I keep a journal, but whenever I tried polishing my random brain-dumps into articles and publishing them, something always felt awkward. When I switched perspectives and looked at it as a reader, the reality hit me: readers couldn’t care less about the specifics of your personal mood swings, sorrow, joy, or self-pity.

Writing is for the reader. Even if you aren’t completely sure what it should look like, you at least know what it shouldn’t be: don’t dump private ramblings, and don’t blather when you have nothing to say. Readers simply won’t read it.

Write something of value to other people. Help solve their problems, and make sure what you write actually has substance.

Looking at it through that lens, padding a book review out to 3,000 words just to produce a “long post” is completely pointless. Keeping it short is fine; just sharing raw excerpts is fine too. Anything is better than stretching it into an endless, tedious slog—the Chinese equivalent of “an old woman’s foot-binding: long and foul-smelling.”

Write About Problems Readers Face

Who is your potential reader? What problems do they run into? The following common types of questions should all be on the table when brainstorming topics:

1. What / Why (comprehension questions): “What is a polis?” “Why did democracy emerge in ancient Greece?”
2. How to (actionable/practical questions): “How do you build a temple?”
3. Should I / Which is better (value-judgment questions): “Should Socrates have been executed?” “Is the iPhone 16 any good?”

The reader perspective is a useful tool, but writing purely through that lens can feel a bit draining and utilitarian. You also need to pay attention to your own questions.

Follow Your Curiosity and Write About Your Own Problems

The essays on blogging in Liu Weipeng’s Dark Time (a Chinese classic on learning and psychology for programmers) were a massive revelation for me. On how to run a value-driven blog over the long haul, he wrote:

How do you run a value-driven blog over the long haul? People might offer plenty of fun, clever tricks for motivation and incentive—tactics for SEO, ways to encourage reader comments, and so on. But I don’t care to talk about any of that. I only want to say the single most important thing: Turn yourself into someone who is constantly learning and thinking, and write only about the products of your genuine thought and synthesis. Everything else will follow.

Keep learning, keep thinking, and write down the process and results of that thinking. That’s the secret. What to write about ultimately comes down to: what sparked your curiosity, and what question did you ask?

Starting from a question is, from the writer’s perspective, a much smoother way to generate topics. Questions come in all shapes and sizes—broad or narrow, surface-level or profound, learned from someone else or realized on your own. If it was once a problem you wrestled with, it’s bound to be a problem readers face too.

In my view, two categories are both immediately feasible and hold long-term value:

1. Keep learning and thinking, and write down both your thought process and conclusions. Putting fuzzy thoughts into writing does far more to clarify your thinking than merely trying to broadcast ideas. If you can’t write it out clearly, you haven’t thought it through yet.
2. Document your firsthand life experiences. Once I realized this, running out of things to write became impossible. Books, movies, coding, travel, gadgets you tested, side projects you tinkered with—the pool of topics is endless.

When your topic backlog genuinely runs dry, here are a few prompt triggers to try:

1. What problem did I recently solve?
2. What question was I recently asked?
3. What question (or concept) did I recently learn about?
4. What have I recently developed strong opinions about?

Don’t Write Unless It’s a Question (Break Topics Down Smaller)

Now to tackle the other scenario: what do you do when you’re curious about a massive subject and have no idea where to even begin?

Filter one: Is this an entire domain, or an actual question? Take Greek history: that’s just raw, innate curiosity wanting to clear away the historical fog. It doesn’t constitute a question—so don’t write.

Is there still hope? Yes.

Before that raw curiosity surfaced, there was usually a crude, naive question lurking underneath—one you might easily lose track of if you aren’t paying attention. Why was I curious about Greek history in the first place? It was simple: I was genuinely puzzled by why so many Westerners constantly idolize ancient Greece and put it on such an untouchable pedestal. What makes it so special?

That’s actually a great question. If you dig into it, you’ll definitely have something worth writing about. But what I usually do is lose sight of the original question while drowning in mountains of material, consuming endless Greece-adjacent stuff that has nothing to do with what I originally wanted to know.

Another tactic that may work is letting your curiosity wander until new, interesting questions emerge. For instance, I jotted down two:

1. Why did Thucydides write History of the Peloponnesian War? Did he really have nothing better to do than spend his entire life writing this thing?
2. How did the early Olympic Games actually work? Which city-states were allowed to compete, and which were excluded?

Filter two: Determine whether a question is actually a good one. Exploring a good question should feel like a rolling boil, not a glass of lukewarm water.

In Writing Is a Craft, the author introduces a three-step questioning method to help you zoom in on a small topic that actually boils:

Step 1: I want to study [insert a broad topic here]. Step 2: Specifically, I want to focus on the following questions: (1) Why do some […], while others […]? (Highlighting real-world contrasts and anomalies); (2) What factors influenced this outcome? (3) What is the mechanism linking these factors to the outcome? Step 3: Answering these questions helps […] resolve the following practical dilemma or theoretical puzzle […].

My Takeaways

By this point, my confusion around finding topics has mostly cleared up. I walked away with four takeaways:

1. Don’t ramble, and don’t blather when you have nothing to say.
2. Write about your own life and firsthand experiences—they’re endless.
3. Keep learning and thinking, and write down the products of that thinking.
4. If it doesn’t form a question, don’t write.

Deep understanding matters. Through trial and error, I’ve become convinced of this truth:

When something feels overwhelmingly difficult to pull off, it’s usually not because the thing itself is too complicated, but because you don’t understand it deeply enough.

I couldn’t write because I didn’t understand writing at all.

Related Reading

• Writing Is a Craft (写作是门手艺)
• Dark Time (暗时间)
• sspai Writing Guide (少数派写作指南)