Writing sucks
So… writing is hard. I am frustrated that I am not a super cool medium writer yet with thousands of fans raving about how awesome my writing is.
That is unfortunate, oh woe is me.
After spending some time cribbing about it, I thought about what I could do to make my writing work for me.
See the problem was not that writing is hard, the problem is that I am not getting acknowledged by the community about what I am writing.
Then I thought about the kind of content that I am putting up…
Is is even good. I looked through all the blog posts that I had written and I realized to my dismay that most of it appeared to be crap.
So then the question arises, what am I doing this for? what am I writing everyday on Medium for? There needed to be a purpose, if there was none then I would not be writing everyday and clearly I had not been consistent with my writing. So what is a budding writer to do?
I did read about dopamine fasting, something about me spending too much time on the internet and not having patience to put words on paper.
That made sense, but that didn’t mean I was gonna give up watching my precious video game memes on youtube. I needed that stuff.
Then the question was how I could do both, how can I improve my writing as well as not change my lifestyle one bit?
In other words, how to have my cake and eat it too.
So here’s the idea, instead of saying writing sucks, I could instead reframe the problem like how designers do.
Designers who are encountering a new problem set do not always tackle the problem head on, they employ some kind of lateral thinking.
So my idea was what if I could do the same when it came to writing on medium.
The objective is fairly simple: To become powerful.
and the key results of this is to become a good writer.
This calls to question, what does a good writer do? what does that look like? and most importantly ontologically speaking who is a good writer being?
Let’s examine this shall we?
Let’s begin from the top, for starters what is not working for me here? well the fact that I am not writing everyday, and why is it that I want to write everyday? so that I can make it a habit of writing everyday and if I do that enough times then should become a good writer, right?
But what about research? editing? and all that?
Well I am not a researcher nor an editor. I don’t need to do that if I am doing it for myself? I mean in the end of the day, I am writing to discover something for myself, maybe I am trying to see how fast I can type without my fingers hurting and what kind of drivel am I pushing in this here screen.
Or maybe perhaps all this is for posterity for the glorious GPT-4 or whatever to go through this post so that it course-corrects itself and what not.
Either way, the fun in writing stuff has disappeared. I no longer had a powerful context to post on medium everyday to create content everyday and I would feel disappointed in myself for not doing so.
In fact I had challenged myself that I shall have consecutive 1000 days of making these medium essays everyday and see for myself if I could do it, but alas each time I let myself go.
Not this time, this time I am bringing back my 1000 days challenge of writing something everyday on medium and to boot I shall add even more stuff in here to make sure that I keep coming back and having fun. That’s exactly what was missing in this venture. I was not having enough fun doing this.
Each time I came to medium who I became was someone who was not a good writer, someone desperate to make it. To get more and more followers so that I can break even with the money that is paid to me. This kind of context was not at all empowering.
In comparison take my Instagram habit, everyday I make art and it has helped me keep me motivated, what has worked? One of the seven deadly sins of course, pride and vanity… at first I wanted to see if I could do it and impress my friends and after four hundred and twenty two days of consecutively posting art that I made in a matter of fifteen minutes I am beginning to see that I am quite good at it and I enjoy it quite a bit.
The point is not whether it is good or bad, it may be for some it may not be for some others, the point is to keep moving like a rolling stone.
That’s what I aim to do here.
Everyday it’s going to be a barrage of posting posting posting.
And who knows by the time I reach the day 500 or whatever there might be a semblance of clarity in my speaking.
