What I learned writing twenty posts
This is it. The 20th and final post of the month. It feels like a genuine achievement. I had no idea how this was going to turn out at the start - if I would stick with it, what kinds of topics I would write about, or whether I’d be pleased at the end.
I am pleased with how it turned out, and yet I doubt I will ever do this again. Let’s take a look at three takeaways.
1. Pressing publish is not that big a deal
I knew this at the start, but I didn’t understand it. Forcing myself into publishing things that weren’t Ready (whatever that may mean) got me out of my comfort zone. And nothing bad happened. Nobody noticed. It was all fine.
Perhaps if I had established some kind of audience then this would have ruffled some feathers, but luckily nobody bothers reading the nonsense I post on here.
This is a valuable lesson for the future. It was the main reason I took on this challenge in the first place, so in that sense: mission accomplished.
2. I care about quality
I have learned that I can push out posts every day or two, but I have also learned that I don’t want to. It still feels uncomfortable to put work out there that I’m not proud of, because it’s not what I want to be doing. I would rather push out 1 good post per week than 1 OK post per day. I would rather push out 1 great post per month than 1 good post per week. I would rather publish one incredible masterpiece in my lifetime than dozens of great posts over many years.
The main thing to consider here is, what will push me towards that masterpiece? Sitting in my office and clacking away in total isolation is not enough. There needs to be a cycle of feedback. So far I have had feedback in terms of reviewing my own “finished” works and being able to view them with a critical eye. The next (much scarier) step is to seek feedback from other people out in the world.
The way to do that is to Press Publish once I feel something is good enough. Over time I hope I’ll get an idea of where that bar should be. Too high and I’ll never publish. Too low and I’ll lose my enthusiasm.
3. Editing is hard
Most of these post have been recorded as a stream of consciousness. That means spending a few minutes talking into a notes app on my phone, then editing it down. Writing - or speaking - the first version of the post takes only a few minutes. Then I would spend half an hour to an hour editing the post down, removing some of the fluff and finding better ways to phrase something. I could have spent many hours refining and tweaking further.
The hard part of writing is not having ideas or getting the words down on paper. It’s removing the words you don’t care about until you feel the idea is expressed clearly enough for other people to get on the same page.
What I didn’t learn
I still have no idea:
- What I blog about
- How often I blog
- How to write well
Those are topics to breach in October and beyond. This is the end of the latest chapter, but a new chapter starts soon.