I woke up early to write. And without worrying about any audience or any goal. I time-boxed to one hour. I felt good and free. I find useful what I wrote. But it wasn’t appropriate for a short post. So this is a meta-post, it’s how I feel about the fact that I wrote, today. I hope I can repeat this experiment.
This is post 309/365.
Today I made an experiment. I am not going to publishing anything I am not going to feel comfortable with.
That’s it.
The more I keep on writing daily. The more I feel like I don’t want to do it. I have made a commitment. I will write and publish daily on my blog for one year. But I have less and less will to do it. Sadly, if I go back to read my first articles, I find them better compared to what I’m writing right now. I feel different from that time. Initially, I had no idea what it would take to write and publish daily. But I had a lot of enthusiasm. It felt new. I felt a lot of energy. And it was frustrating but also fun. In the last few weeks. I feel like it’s a chore. I always do it at night when I am exhausted, and I really don’t want to do it. It is clear to me. I’ve been reporting to myself that it’s a bad habit. And so this is what happened. A good habit that would fuel my creativity and would represent a challenge to demonstrate my capability of being coherent and consistent became something which is repetitive and flat and devoid of energy. I need to accept that. Because I never set the standard for the quality of what I am publishing, my commitment was only to write every day. I’m doing it. But I’m not satisfied with the quality of what I am writing. What is coming closer, is the end of this year of blogging daily. So I’m wondering what will happen when I don’t have the need to write daily. Will I ever write again? And what will I write?
I have the thoughts I want to write down mostly when I am not in front of this screen. I need to collect them when I am walking or preparing coffee.
I cannot stand dozens of browser tabs open, innumerable lists of things to do, accumulated unread emails. I want to purge everything, restart from scratch and change the system because this is highly inefficient, frustrating and wasteful.
I have two main creative pulses: writing a journal about what I think and feel about what happens to me during the day and the desire to understand reality. They put me in two different moods, I tend to have urgent needs to journal but I consider it not always appropriate to be published. On the contrary I would want to have more articles with reflections and research but they are usually bits and pieces not refined enough to be published. I’d like to invert this balance.
I find it pleasing to read my daily notes one or two or more years later: it’s the connection I was looking for between my past, present and future selves. It gives more continuity to my life and contributes to increasing my self-awareness. Sometimes it’s superficial observations about practical things, some others it’s about how I react to life’s events. I am looking for this kind of continuity in my research: leveraging on the evolution of my thoughts on things which are not just intimate and personal but looks upon others and the world.
Reviewing and evolving my writings is what I lack and I desire the most. I am trying to be patience because I have so much available time to pursue my daily habit building practice. So I decided to keep it as it is until I’ve achieved the One Year Of Blogging goal which will happen sometime in November 2021. It’s an important experiment and I need not to miss its completion.
So far so good.
It doesn’t matter where you are now and what you are doing. The people surrounding you or the next important task. If you committed to write, daily, you have to steal time and refuse to give the needed attention because you need your private writing time.
Maybe you don’t have your comfortable keyboard and that last meal you had didn’t leave you quite well. Still, this is that moment of the day when you have to do it.
And there it is. That’s my selfish moment, today.
I should not worry too much about what I want to write or what I need to write. I just need to do it. In addition to that, I need to organize my thoughts, my questions. My research into clusters aggregates. When I review the connection between the different pieces, I am able to find longer and more elaborate threads.
I am doing it wrong by thinking that each time that I am on a blank page, I have to write my daily journal, or my daily article, that I need to be exhaustive about a grand topic. I should write about the smallest topic I can think of. A small idea to reflect upon. And I should use it as a magnet to attract somebody else’s ideas or notes I wrote about, things I’ve read in the past from other books.
The real creativity is in composing those ideas into a bigger one. Not in having brilliant, big and exhaustive treatments of ideas, impromptu, of the day . I have been saying these things forever. I really don’t want to learn it. I am relearning it every time. I’m doing it. I just need to keep it present. So the daily effort of creating something that will remain is not to write something memorable. But it’s to create a small contribution, even insignificant, that put together with all the others you have been writing for hundreds of days. So that together, connected, revised, and even rewritten, they will become something really worthwhile.
Hey, Max, this is your past self. I am present, yes, but as long as I write a word, it immediately becomes a thing of the past. I have finally a bit more time to reflect: I don’t like the latest trend with your daily writing practice, it has become a chore and a burden. Something emerged, though, your desire to leave a meaningful trace to be read back in the future. I wanted to highlight the nature of this pattern so you might take actual value out of it when you will read this.
You are writing for yourself but in public. You keep on saying that you should be your first reader, the primary audience of your blog posts. It seems like you are failing all types of audiences since you are bored of your own writing. Hint: if you are bored while you are writing and you are not satisfied with what you have written you cannot expect anybody else to find your words to be interesting nor valuable. Curate better your list of interests and write about them, as a starter. Visualize yourself rereading what you are about to write: how will you like it? What value will you find in it?
By being more self-empathetic you can try to understand better how to create more engaging content for others.
A few months ago I did some critical exercises in trying to post myself questions about what I want to write and what I would actually write. It would slow you down but by being more critical towards your ideas you can improve them.
Remember to separate the research, the first draft writing and the revision phases. You are too bent towards writing impulsively, because you’re lazy and bored (see above) and you tend to be undisciplined in your creative workflow. Write less and shorter but never skip the key stages of the creation process. Better one single sentence, meaningful, engaging, worth to be remembered rather than mumbling gibberish for the sake of filling a page.
See? That’s better than the previous days. I’d like to read this again.
Well done.
If character shows when nobody is watching us, I need to recognize it. I’ve been making a public show of my habit-building challenge. I wanted everybody to see the struggle to write every day with mixed results: some free-flowing brainwriting, some well-researched pieces, some wanderings in the random realm of the moment. After so many days, I’ll need to check my list to see today’s number. I still come back here to share my thoughts. Still, I am failing at planning, researching, reasoning, and preparing a well-crafted article. I can only perceive, distinctly, the improved fluency when I write. I got enough of spelling-checker, preparing the draft to be revised, bolding words to break the dullness of a wall of text, the concern about readability. I just write.
I am unsatisfied. I still am. I was more accurate and used to write more deeply when my schedule was erratic or once per week. The pain was more brutal, the research, the infinite draft, the hell of the revision. But I was publishing articles deserving the name. Now I have disconnected thoughts, spitting from my fingers in that moment of the day when I remember, OH, I need to write. So I am not hiding behind a finger. I am just living this daily challenge as it comes.
Day by day.
Yes.
The word is about, there’s something evolving,
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving…
They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution’s near,
But to me it seems quite clear
That’s it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
The newspapers shout a new style is growing,
But it don’t know if it’s coming or going,
There is fashion, there is fad
Some is good, some is bad
And the joke rather sad,
That it’s all just a little bit of History repeating.
And I’ve seen it before
And I’ll see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating
Some people don’t dance, if they don’t know who’s singing,
Why ask your head, it’s your hips that are swinging
Life’s for us to enjoy
Woman, man, girl and boy,
Feel the pain, feel the joy
Aside set the little bits of history repeating
Just little bits of history repeating
And I’ve seen it before
And I’l see it again
Yes I’ve seen it before
Just little bits of history repeating