Off Topic: What I learned writing over 1 million words in 3 years.
What I discovered after over 1000 hours at the keyboard.
Recently, I’ve been pondering my Substack, the first year or so has gone really well, and I have no plans to stop with my regular posts about public transport, but I also want to do more.
I like writing a lot, but I also like reading and sharing. I’ve learned a lot over the years both from formal education and from creating, and I think this informs a unique view of the world. That’s part of why I’ve rebranded my Substack to just… me.
Fun fact, my YouTube channel was originally also just my name, but people complained “You need to niche down!” “You should have transit in the channel name!”. And so the channel name turned into RMTransit. But truth be told I am a human whose interests do expand beyond transit to all kinds of things — Cities, infrastructure, engineering, technology, and more — so I hope this new name can better represent that.
While knees deep into a script on Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia recently, it occurred to me that a long-planned task — seeing just how much I had been writing — was probably coming due. I am self-aware enough about my workaholic lifestyle to know that I have written a lot of stuff over the past several years, and perhaps the quantitative side of me just had to know how much.
As you probably know if you’ve followed me (mostly on YouTube) for a long time, I make a lot of stuff. There was a period when I was consistently putting out ~10 minute videos four times a week — and videos that I am often still really proud of. While people have often advised me (unsolicited advice and I have a mixed past) that I should make less content that is more… artful? The truth is I have always made stuff on my YouTube channel to share knowledge, and while I think a more attractive vessel can certainly help with disseminating knowledge, all the time I spent in high school and university watching Khan Academy (sometimes for fun) kind of made me a believer that you don’t need to create something pretty to teach people something or get your point across.
Particularly in the early days of my channel, my priority was talking about so many things that I felt were not being discussed — planning, political battles around transit, the elements that distinguish different cities and systems, the generational investments cities around the world are making in transit system expansion, and a visual encyclopedia of rapid transit. For every person that was telling me to make less, 20 people were asking for a video about their city, how to fix a transit problem, or how to better advocate.
All to say, I wrote a lot and with this Substack, reports, and a book (progress is being made), I honestly found myself in front of a keyboard for most of the past several years, and so I did it. I figured out roughly how much I wrote, and I tried to see if I could distill the experience down into some lessons it’s taught me.
To figure out how much I wrote I created a spreadsheet and started pasting in videos and the word counts for their scripts. I could have created a script to do this (surely somebody already has), but I found the mechanical process soothing — there’s something nice about going over the things you have created slowly. Once I had the majority of the video scripts, Substack articles, and other substantial digital written works into the spreadsheet ,tallying things up was quick. While this should cover the vast majority of what I wrote there is a decent chance I undercounted, as I’ve also written a lot on social media and in other places in the last three years.
Over the last three years, I’ve made about 400 videos, written about 30 articles (for sites besides my personal Substack such as UrbanToronto.ca), and about 100 pieces on Substack. A lot of my videos were culled in 2022 when I was faced with a video issue (more of an issue of my own concern — some might say paranoia than an actual problem) and I committed to replacing basically all of them with newly written content, rather than reposts of the same old videos — that meant doing things like rewriting the rather gruelling script for my Tokyo urban railways explained video, which is over 5000 words and required a lot of re-familiarization with the system.
In total from around March 2020 until present, I’ve accumulated 1,011,761 words, with Substack articles averaging around 1500, and YouTube video scripts around 1800 — that’s a lot of writing. At one point I was writing around 5-8000 words every single week just for YouTube alone. In the next few sections, I’ll talk about my takeaways from this.
Typing Logistics
All this writing meant a lot of time spent on a keyboard. On which one to use, I certainly agree with commentary I have heard regarding how chiclet style (short separated keys such as on Macs) are better for short quick typing, but “old fashioned” mechanical keyboards are better for longer sustained typing sessions.
In university where I studied Computer Science, I spent a lot of time in computer labs, and frequently going back and forth between a keyboard at the lab and on my laptop quickly convinced me that a proper full-sized keyboard was just much better. These days I have a “das keyboard” with brown switches, and I’ll be honest I prefer it to the blue switch-equipped keyboards I like through university — the clickiness is fun until it’s not!
Now, surprising as it is (and remember I did complete a degree in Computer Science that involved a lot of programming and hanging around keyboard snobs), I do not touch type. I have tried oh so hard, especially after my very wise electrical engineering Ph.D don in first year told me it was crazy that I didn’t and that I just should. While I can touch type, for whatever reason I’ve just never found it natural — I know where the keys are and I’ve done more touch typing courses than I can count, but I always end up back in my rather unusual “hybrid” style. This is not pecking, rather my hands sort of float over the keyboard and I use my longest fingers on both hands to hit letters and my thumbs to hit the space adjusting my hands as I go. I am aware that this is not by any means the fastest way to type, but honestly it works really well for me because it matches my pace of writing (it might have something to do with how much my hands like playing piano, which is much less static than typical keyboard typing). I can hit around 70-80 words per minute when deep in thought and I’ve never found typing speed to be a huge barrier. For what it’s worth, I’ve also not ever had any kind of repetitive stress injury over the years, which is probably helped by all the hand movement and lack of…repetition!
Building Writing Skill and Endurance
Believe it or not, I used to hate writing. It was something I truly dreaded when I was young and even all the way into high school. And then my Grade 12 English teacher did something brutal — to prepare us for our English provincial exams (British Columbia has gotten rid of most if not all of these) we repeatedly had to write 1000+ word essays in just one hour, and they were meant to be pretty solid. We’d sit in class several times a week just writing as fast as we could for a given prompt, and honestly… it worked. Pressure creates diamonds, Parkinson’s law is very real, and all of that practice did indeed make me very comfortable with writing a lot.
But, as you might quite reasonably say: writing a lot doesn’t mean writing something good! And that’s probably the biggest insecurity I have. When you write a lot you can fall into bad habits, and perhaps even more noticeable to me is things like repetitious sentence structures and the like. I was never all too amazing at grammar, and a few linguistics classes in university solidified my view that language really only matters insofar as you can communicate your ideas — damn you linguistic prescriptivists!
Fortunately, I got lot of practice on writing well in the same high school English class where my teacher would painstakingly edit and go through the stuff I had written, and I’d come by in the morning and evening for extra help. On top of that, a solid helping of social science classes on topics like urban geography and philosophy in university were lovely extra writing practice. I’d also like to think all of the time spent studying formal logic helped my reasoning skills!
Now, if you want to write a lot, it may be a bit late for a good high school English teacher, but fortunately I have a bunch of other suggestions that have proved helpful over the years.
One thing I often do is keep lots of scripts on the go, and lots of video ideas in a spreadsheet — this is a good tool for fighting the spectre of writer’s block, which I find is more often impactful as a fear that a reality. By keeping lots of ideas in your back pocket, the worry that you won’t be able to write about something is seriously reduced.
At the same time as having lots of potential topics to write on, I rarely stay with a project that I am struggling to write. If I can’t find the will to write something, or a story I want to tell, I move on to the next idea. Forcing yourself to write about something uninteresting or understimulating is a great way to drain your batteries and pump out something that doesn’t say much. Having lots of backup ideas gives you the freedom to abandon a project that you aren’t happy with and there are plenty of half written scripts floating around my computer.
The mirror of not forcing yourself to write is planning ahead so you don’t feel too much time pressure. I am not suggesting you work slowly, rather you should start early. The more you write the better sense you will have for how much more time you’ll need to complete a piece — and I find even now it’s easy to wildly under-predict how much work something will be from the outset. Planning ahead so that you have the skeleton of a script, or article written long in advance of needing something complete is a great way to keep things on track.
The most productive way to write in my experience is right when inspiration strikes. If I have an idea for a video that I like, I might sit down at my computer and write it on the spot, record it that night, and push it out as my next release. If an idea forms nicely in my head, I can write a full script in under an hour. Being able to write when moments like this come up is super important. Even if I am on the subway, or a walk, if a good idea comes up at the very least I will write the key bullet points into a document for completion when I can get access to a computer (or somewhere to comfortably sit with my phone).
What I’ve Learned
Beyond just how to write prolifically, writing so much has taught me a lot of other lessons, about writing and myself.
For one, it’s reminded me that I often have a “defensive” writing style that can be rather inelegant. To explain what this looks like, it’s almost as if everything I say comes with several disclaimers or qualifications. When you say something on YouTube, some person (an irritating internet pedant) is always going to comment on why because of some completely niche edge case that you are wrong, and so I find myself (and I know it affects other creators too) qualifying everything I say in an almost academic way. At best this creates cumbersome sentences and forces you to speak more while getting the same message across, and at worst this makes what you’re saying confusing and weakens your messaging. Now, obviously this writing style probably isn’t a problem for most people, but I think it is helpful to try and see the problems in the way you write or in the habits you have. While I sometimes worry that the defensive style has become habitual, I think because I have made myself very aware of it and how I manifests I can turn it off. This allows me to create smoother, better text that gets the message across in a clear, concise and effective manner.
I have also really found that the easiest time to procrastinate your writing is before you’ve even begun. Once you get an outline of your idea straight in your mind, and you’re around one hundred words in, I find things get a lot easier because you have a clear “next step” to make. If you have an outline you’re even better off because you know what things you still have to say, and you can more easily make macro-level adjustments to the piece if you want to add or remove some point of discussion. Ultimately though, the best way to get words down is to write when you are inspired. If a great idea appears when you are in bed get up and write it down, or if its a really exciting idea write up a whole draft! Most people don’t struggle with the act of writing, it’s what to write that creates the problems.
Something I used to do far more of when I was young that probably helped me disproportionately when I started doing a lot of writing was… reading! And when I say reading, I don’t just mean Substack’s and the odd blog post — I mean books. This year I committed to myself that I would read 24 books, and while not all of them have been very long or challenging reads, a couple have been, and when you read a book like that — where you need to Google definitions and reread sentences — I think it really helps you improve your capacity to write! It would seem crazy to make videos with no real experience regularly watching videos, and I think the same is true of writing. (I’m thinking of writing the odd book review here or there, if you like the idea let me know in the comments!)
Something that I want to close on, and which brings me back to the point I made at the beginning of this section about “defensive” writing is that over time I really have come to believe in the tenet that “simplicity is the ultimate complexity”, which I think I first heard from Jony Ive and which certainly applies to writing. It can be easy to say a lot if you are just listing, the best writing is writing where you don’t necessarily say something explicitly, but instead inspire it in the reader. Being able to pare a piece down to its essentials is the ultimate exercise in judgement about what is and isn’t important.
I type like you do. Tried learning conventional touch typing, but that was too slow.
An aside: Someone stole all the typewriters from my high school typing classroom. I wonder how they felt when they learned there were no letters on the keys?
Keep typing, Reece.
I used an early Apple II touch typing tutor to learn in high school, and it's served me well ever since. Nowadays however when I have a jumble of ideas forming, I use a free online voice to text transcription app, it's way faster. I find I have to speak slower so it doesn't mess up my words, but this helps me think about what I'm saying.
I'm amazed how you edit your own writing and scripts so well Reece, that's something I still find difficult.