treading water until you find gold (mixing metaphors FTW!)
These blog posts don’t just magically appear. I sit down every Wednesday and Saturday, open up a Word document, and start typing. Even when I’m tired or uninspired.
Sometimes I’ll have an idea of the topic I want to write about, but I often don’t. I just know I want to write. I want to keep my streak up. I want to process life and hopefully give you who are reading this something—a new idea or way of looking at things, encouragement, empathy. Something.
The problem is I often don’t know what that something is.
Rather than stay stuck with nothing on the page, though, I start where I am. If you were to read the source documents for these posts, they would have a lot of treading water. Phrases like:
“I don’t know what to write. I need to write something, but I don’t know what. I feel like I’m repeating myself if I write about [something] again.”
Etc.
I guess I’ve always found writing to be a physical act, not a mental exercise. While certainly ideas come to me, it’s in the actual writing them down—whether by pen and ink or keyboard—that makes them come to life.
(And frankly, they don’t count if they remain in my head. Then I can’t share them with anyone else.)
But I’m amused by the idea that someday someone will go look at the source documents for these blog posts and see all the false starts before I actually stumble upon something I deem worthy to post. All the half-formed ideas, the posts I abandoned because they were uninteresting or too vulnerable/personal or too controversial. Sometimes I think that they will come across in a way I don’t intend, so I pivot to another topic.
(Needless to say, I’m sure they could be better edited and better written. The imperfection, I suppose, is part of the charm of blogging.)
The point for me, though, is to keep them going.
The point is, to do the act of writing and publishing.
If you’re struggling to write, I suggest you just open up the document and start. You might have to delete a bunch of junk, but better to have something to delete than nothing.
And who knows? You might stumble on some gold.
