This is post #36 of my #365 day series.So it’s been 30+ days of writing every day. Here’s where I’m at and what I’ve learned:
- I was off to a rough start. I knew that I wanted to write but not what I’d write about, so at the beginning I was vacillating between ranting and overly technical articles. About 5 days into it and I felt like I didn’t have anything else to write about.
- After about a week into it, it got a lot easier to write and come up with ideas. I just made it a practice to write down any ideas that would float about during the day. I write down the title of the article and let it sit there until I can come up with something to say.
- A few weeks in and it became a bit harder not to write every day then not to. To be fair, a part of this is because I publicly committed to writing every day, and I hate losing a bet.
- Sometimes I just don’t put out the best work product, but that’s ok, not everything I put out has to be perfect. Learning to let go of being a perfectionist is an important skill for me, so learning to put down text as opposed to judging everything I do has been rewarding for me.
- I learned that sometimes getting down the clay is important so that I can let it breathe and come back to it in a bit. I often find that I spend the last part of my writing process by reordering what I’ve written. More times then not, the reordering makes everything read a lot cleaner. This makes me realize that my thinking isn’t always linear.
- I have a new respect for professional writers who have to write every day. I also find myself being a little bit more judgmental when I run into bad writing.
- I don’t publish everything I write. Sometimes I write a lot more about a topic, but this isn’t a journal and this is public facing post so I don’t need to share everything.
- Writing something that I know is going to be public forces me to look at each position at take from multiple perspectives, because I’m not just writing for people that will agree with me. I also talk to myself a lot, so you can see that in my writing as well when I pose questions to myself. It’s mostly just me writing to think.
- It’s hard to write down 500 words that are interesting. I think a part of this is because of the way communicate with others on a day to day basis. We send short text messages. Read super short headlines instead reading fulsome articles. So when we try to write things we are just trying to mimic what we read every day. Writing long form has helped with my ability to pay attention to longer form articles.
- Writing has encouraged me to read more, because I want to get better with my writing patterns and get inspired by good writing.
