A Field Guide to Writing in Public
Publishing before you feel ready is a skill, and like any skill it has technique. Here is the method I use.
Kristina Schadek
January 28, 2026
Everyone says write in public, as if the hard part were pressing publish. It is not. The hard part is surviving the gap between the sentence you imagined and the sentence that appears, and doing it again the next day anyway.
My method is unglamorous. Keep a capture file of half-thoughts. Once a week, promote one of them to a draft. Set a timer for forty-five minutes and write the worst possible version, start to finish. Only then edit — and only forward, never back.
The public part is the final and easiest step, but it matters more than people admit. A draft in a drawer asks nothing of you. A published paragraph asks to be continued. The audience does not need to be large; it needs to exist at all. Three readers who expect the next piece will do more for your consistency than any app ever will.
Start smaller than feels serious. A note counts. A paragraph counts. What counts is the cadence, not the length.