Publication is how you end your writing. And it’s hard to tell if the timing is right because you never know whether an extra amount of time will be worthy or not.
To this conundrum, I suggest: publish a piece when you can’t see a better version of it.1
It seems too simple to be the answer, so let’s break it down into two parts: the rational one and the sensational one.
For the rational one, here’s my argument: if a thing can be thought of by you, it should have been so within the first few sessions; it doesn’t add much if you just plainly spend more time on it.2 Logically, that’s the same as saying: if you’ve worked on a piece for a while now and you haven’t thought of a certain thing, you probably won’t.
So now you probably still feel reluctant to publish. But why? That has something to do with a sensational cause: fear of rejection. Rejection—even an imaginary one—seems so terrible an idea that one can almost immediately decide not to take risk of.
The irony is that people usually forget it’s the lack of rejections that leads to the fear of it. What I am saying is, in order to get used to rejection, you need to get a few of them knowing they’ll hurt.
But why hurt yourself? What’s the point if you’ll get hurt at the end of it? The reason is that you want to expose your ideas to get the excitement which you wouldn’t get otherwise. It’s when you feel that excitement that you know you are on the right track, because that feeling indicates the whole writing is something you care about. And you benefit the most when you work on something you care about.3
So let’s summarize:
- You should publish a piece when you can’t see a better version of it, because you probably won’t.
- You may fear upcoming rejections, but that’s when you know if you’re on the right track.
- You will get used to rejections as you go along.
Thanks to Cheng-Yi Lu, Ying-Hua Wen and Cheng-Hao Yang for reading the draft of this essay and providing comments.
You may think of another question such as where to publish on. I say the question is irrelevant as long as you can drop your readers a link to which they have no problem accessing. Some examples are Medium, WordPress, a GitHub Page, or even a Notion Page. ↩︎
Of course, people experience “a-ha” moment after several months—or even years—of research on a particular problem, but I’d say it’s rather uncontrollable and shouldn’t be considered when you want to make sure you’re exposing your ideas. Arguably, I’d say it’s the continual discussion of the same idea that leads to the epiphany. That means, paradoxically, that if you want new ideas, you should publish as fast as possible. ↩︎
For those who are still worried about the piece you’re working on, a trick is that you can pseudo-publish your piece to your friends only. Let them read it for you before the actual publication. They will identify where your enemies really are and help you attack them more effectively. Besides, by getting feedback from them, you get another pump of energy to finish the piece afterward. ↩︎