Day 50: Reflections on writing

Note: This post is currently being written! Like right now!

Today is day 50 of writing Road to Ramen, and since it’s a nice, round number, I figured it’d be nice to reflect on the process of writing a daily, public journal. I’ll do this in a Q&A format, with some questions being ones I’ve actually been asked:

Do you write for yourself or for others?

Both. I try to write as if I’m writing for myself so that I stay as authentic and as transparent as possible. It’s important to me that I keep this as real as possible instead of making it a highlight reel, and I’m happy with how it’s gone so far. I do filter myself at times due to the public nature of these posts — for example, I won’t write unflattering things about other people — but I’m okay with that.

I’m also writing for myself in the sense that I’m excited to have a record of my journey that I can look back on for years to come. At the same time, I hope this will be a helpful and entertaining resource for other people who are interested in going down a similar path. I love reading about other people’s journeys and wanted to share mine as well.

What’s been your favorite part about writing Road to Ramen?

I’ll occasionally get messages from friends saying that they enjoy reading Road to Ramen, and sometimes go on to discuss a certain topic I wrote about. I love that this has helped me reconnect with people and quickly have deep and interesting conversations.

What do you want to change about Road to Ramen?

I’m not entirely sure about this, but I want to make the writing a bit more colorful. When I write these posts, I do it in a pretty dry, analytical, matter-of-fact way. I’m actually not like that all the time in real life — I like joking around a lot and being silly, but I haven’t done much of that in Road to Ramen. I’d like to make R2R more fun to read by interjecting more humor and personality. There will likely be a period where I’m doing it poorly and things are Not Funny until they are Acceptable, so bear with me if my posts suck for a while.

Another thing I’m considering changing is spending more time editing the posts. By editing, I don’t mean spending hours polishing them and agonizing over every sentence to make it perfect for public consumption; I mean pretty basic stuff like getting rid of fluff words and rephrasing sentences to make them more understandable. It might be tricky to not go down the slippery slope of editing more and more, though.

I also want to make it easier for people who are visiting Road to Ramen for the first time to be able to quickly catch up on the history without reading every single post. I’m going to start doing monthly retrospectives and other highlighted posts to make it easier to get a summary.

I was going to write more, but all my time is being taken up by this 2-day hackathon at Hacker Fellowship (I’m actually writing this bit on Day 51 because I never got to finish the post yesterday) so I’ll reflect more some other time.