A Short Guide for Writing Articles: From Building Knowledge to the Final Draft

What I Have Learned on My Substack Journey

Before we start, I want to make clear that I do not present the following guide as the absolute correct way to do things, nor do I want to present myself as an expert. Over the past months, a number of people have started reading my work consistently, subscribing, and asking how I actually write these texts in the first place. That alone made me think it might be worth articulating the process.

Thus, what follows is not supposed to be a guide from on high, nor a formula for “successful writing,” but simply a concrete account of how I personally build knowledge, generate ideas, and move from a vague interest to a completed and finished article. If you are just starting out on Substack, struggling to begin writing / reading at all, or simply curious about how someone else thinks through the act of writing, this may give you something useful to work with.

Building Knowledge

Before you can start writing in any meaningful way, you need to build the right environment. This is, in my view, the most important and most underestimated step of the entire writing process. Writing does not begin when you sit down at your desk; it begins much earlier, with what you expose yourself to every day. One could say what goes in is, more or less, what comes out.

Ideas do not just emerge out of nothing. They are the result of exposure to certain kinds of material, questions, styles of thinking, and problems. So, if you want to write interesting texts, you need to live in a environment that constantly feeds you interesting input. That environment shapes what you think about, how you think, and ultimately what you are even capable of writing.

Of course this also includes the things you do everyday, but since that is something we often cannot choose, let us focus on media.

Media, in this sense, should be understood broadly. Books are media. Podcasts are media. YouTube videos are media. Articles, Substack posts, lectures, interviews, all of this counts. Writing quality is downstream from media quality. If your daily input in all of these areas is shallow or simply uninteresting, your output will reflect that. Building the right environment therefore is the very foundation of the writing process.

Reading Books as Part of a Media Environment

First, books are of course a central part of this media environment. Not the only one, but an extremely important one. Before worrying about how to read difficult texts, you first need to pick the right books. That sounds trivial, but it is not.

You should deliberately choose books that actually interest you and that relate to the topics you want to write about. There is no reason to force yourself through books that bore you or feel irrelevant to your intellectual interests. For example don’t have to torture yourself through 600 pages of a philosopher you do not want to read. Reading something that genuinely interests you will give you far more in return, both in terms of understanding and motivation.

This also means that you do not have to restrict yourself to nonfiction, even if you mainly write nonfiction. Reading fiction is often underestimated, but it can be enormously valuable, although this has gotton better in the last few years. In my opinion fiction is usually more enjoyable to read, but beyond that, it shapes how you think about the world in ways that abstract argumentation often cannot.

While philosophical or scientific texts tend to lay out ideas explicitly, fiction, by contrast, works indirectly. But this indirectness is precisely its strength. Kafka, for example, shows with remarkable precision what everyday bureaucracy can do to the psyche and how impersonal structures can lead to profound inhumanization. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment can give you a deeper understanding of guilt, bad conscience, redemption, and Christian morality than many theoretical texts ever could. The point is fiction teaches you things, even if it does so without announcing itself as teaching.

What has helped me a lot is combining fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes I want to read nonfiction to understand a concept more clearly or systematically. But when I spend too long with demanding nonfiction, I often switch to fiction on the side. I do this regularly. I don’t get confused by the story, and I still learn something from both books simultaneously. This balance makes it much easier to maintain a consistent reading habit over time.

If you want to move into more complex nonfiction, it also helps to structure that progression. One useful approach is to mix things up: alternate between lighter and heavier texts, rather than forcing yourself through only difficult material.

Another helpful strategy is to start with guides or secondary literature before moving to the original work. When you want to understand a complex philosopher or theory, beginning with an accessible overview often leads to better comprehension than diving straight into the most difficult primary text. I did this, for example, when writing about Heidegger. I did not start with Being and Time. Instead, I read a guide written by another philosopher, which gave me a coarse but a much more functional understanding of the terrain. Only afterward did the original text become readable and meaningful to me. This means, reading the original work is important, but it does not always need to be the first step.

Moreover, building knowledge takes time, and it is cumulative. Knowledge does not grow linearly, but as a network. The more connections you build between ideas, authors, concepts, and problems, the more active your entire conceptual network becomes. Memory and understanding work through spreading activation. Knowing how ideas relate to one another allows insights to emerge much more naturally than memorising isolated facts ever could. Incidentally, this is exactly why our education system does not work.

Finally, don’t feel bad about reading slowly. Reading is a skill, and like any skill, it requires learning proper form before attempting the hardest tasks. As Jared Henderson put it, reading is like going to the gym: you first learn the movement before you try to lift heavy weights (By the way, if you need inspiration or help for your reading journey, I highly recommend his channel). If you skip this step, you risk injuring yourself in a different sense, by making reading so frustrating that you eventually stop altogether.

Do Not Underestimate Different Forms of Media

Again, books are not the only relevant medium. Podcasts, YouTube videos, interviews and long-form online content can be just as important, sometimes even more so, because they shape your daily consumption. Let’s be honest, you probably spend more time reading YouTube videos and listen to podcasts than you spend reading books (If not, congratulations!)

While reducing screen time is of course one option, the, in my opinion, more realistic and effective strategy is consciously reshaping the media you engage with every day. There is still a widespread belief that screen time itself is inherently bad, but research suggests that this is not necessarily true. Overall, the negative effects of screen time on mental health are small and largely depend on the content being consumed (Beyens et al., 2020; Vasconcellos et al., 2025).

Screen time, in itself, is not the problem, consuming low-quality media is. So, reading a good Substack post or listening to a thoughtful podcast is not fundamentally different from reading a book, as long as you engage with the material seriously. Moreover there is only weak evidence for a screen inferiority effect in reading. A meta-analysis by Salmerón et al. (2024) found a very small advantage for reading printed texts over digital formats, and the most plausible explanation is not the medium itself, but engagement. That is, people tend to annotate and interact more deeply with physical books.

From my perspective, the solution is straightforward. If you read, hear or watch something digitally, keep a notebook nearby. Engage with the text in the same way you would with a physical book. If you do that, the difference between online and offline reading becomes largely negligible. In general when you consume media you should always have something to write nearby. You want to collect the ideas you hear or read and always be able to actively engage with them. Obviously, if you just listen to a podcast while doing the laundry, you will take in less than if you sit down and take notes as you would in a lecture.

Sometimes, however, we are unable to take notes or actively engage with the material; we just want to relax or have fun, which is equally important, of course! In fact, if you only did things for ‘productivity reasons’, I would worry about your psychological health! Just so that’s clear.

Starting Out

At this point, you have built a solid knowledge base and curated your environment, but you still need to actually write. For me, this is the most crucial part of the entire process, and it is somewhat dialectical, even contradictory. On the one hand, it is extremely important to schedule your writing time, which aligns with goal-setting theory in psychology (Locke & Latham, 2002): the more specific and concrete a goal is, the more effective it becomes. This means, you should be clear about what you want to write, when you want to write it, and how you want to start. Even if you only have 20 minutes a day, find those 20 minutes in your calendar and dedicate them to writing, making that time your inviolable writing slot. Making writing fun also matters: use your environment to support the process by making a coffee, gathering your books, and turning writing and or reading into a ritual. For example, I have made it a ritual to make myself a nice coffee with my Bialetti moka pot and enjoy it while I start my studies or writing. These kind of incentives can be very important to build a ritual.