Publish the Crap, Then Publish Again

He messaged me asking how to improve his writing. I give that advice a lot, and I tailor it to the person. For him I offered something broader, a habit that helps more writers than the usual tips about voice or structure.

I did not invent the idea. I learned it from Smillew Rahcuef. The core is simple. Publish everything you write, even the pieces you think are bad.

Here is why it works.

Writers are often wrong about what will land. The post you polish for hours can die quietly. Something you threw together on a bus can find an audience. Algorithms and attention are unpredictable. They are not polite. They do not reward your effort. They reward what people click on, share, and react to.

If your story is poor, it will probably get no traction. Your most loyal friends might scroll past. That is not a failure. You learn what the platform and the audience actually want when you publish. If you hide everything you think is imperfect, you leave the market nothing to test. The market cannot teach you. It cannot surprise you.

I learned this the hard way. I believed one piece would go viral. It was about Jair Bolsonaro, titled “Jair Bolsonaro — The Fall of the ‘Trump of the Tropics’.” After I finished it, I went on a walk. When I came back, I reread the draft, and felt certain it was among the best things I had written all year. Three days later it had about fifty likes.

Meanwhile, a short post I wrote about Musk’s compensation, while I waited for a bus, gathered over 4000 likes. A quick note on Airtel’s rebrand is on its way to 40k views. Your best work and the market’s favourites will rarely line up. That mismatch is not a sign that you are a poor judge of your own work. It is a reminder that attention has its own logic.

When you publish regularly, you give yourself several advantages. First, you build a habit. The muscle of showing up improves your writing more than intermittent bursts of perfectionism. Second, you create volume. Volume increases the chance that one of your pieces will find traction. Think of it as a shotgun strategy. You throw many word-salads at the wall and wait to see what sticks. Third, you create a record. When you publish, you make visible the evolution of your ideas. Readers can follow the arc. Editors and opportunity makers can too.

There is a psychological side to this. When you refuse to post because a draft is imperfect, you begin to postpone more and more. Every unpublished piece becomes an argument for not publishing the next one. After a while you stop altogether. That is the real danger. Silence harms you and your audience. Subscribers will drift when you go quiet. Your confidence will erode.

People worry that publishing lower-quality pieces will send subscribers away. That fear overlooks two realities. You have been publishing imperfect pieces already, or you would not be here reading this. If your subscribers value you, they will tolerate uneven posts. They will accept rough drafts in exchange for honesty and the occasional insight that changes their thinking. Also, silence will drive readers away faster than a few weak posts will.

You cannot reliably judge your work in isolation. The value of a sentence often appears only when seen by others. Somewhere in a five-hundred-word draft there may be a single line that resonates, a phrase that a reader bookmarks and shares. That line will never exist for the world if you keep the whole draft hidden.

Publishing feeds your next piece. The act of sending something out clears the pressure to perfect every sentence. It lowers the bar for the next attempt. That is where improvement happens. You learn. You get feedback. You see patterns in what your audience values. Over time you get better at producing the pieces that matter.

Yes, there is a trade-off. You should not publish without some basic standards. A post that is unreadable or offensive will harm your credibility. But the threshold for publishing is lower than the threshold for perfection. Edit enough to be clear and honest, then send it. The aim is progress, not perfection.

I talk to myself when I say this. I publish daily because that is my method. I throw a lot of things at the wall, hoping one of them will stick. Sometimes the pieces are clumsy. Sometimes they are alive and sharp. The practice keeps me in motion and it gives the crowd material to judge.

If you want a practical start, post one draft every day for two weeks. Keep each piece under 700 words. Use a clear headline, a readable opening, and one idea you try to develop. Track what gets engagement. Note which topics get conversation and which sit in the dark. After two weeks you will know more than you do now.

Finally, there is an odd bonus. The volume of published work helps train the machines. If you care about how AI reads, how recommendation systems learn, or how search indexes value content, the more data you provide the better the systems will understand your voice. That is a strange argument for publishing more, but it is true.

Write many bad pieces. Publish them. Learn. Write better pieces. Publish those too. The algorithm will sort it out. The market will show you what it wants. The only way to find the gold is to throw enough dirt at the wall.