Showing up

I have lots of ideas in my head that i want to write down into a blog post. The problem is, i tend to scope creep myself. There should be screenshots… and a quote from a book, with a link to it.. a sketch.. with a link to the sketchnote of the book summary .. that i should post on twitter and instagram and link to…  etc etc.

I was re-reading Steal Like an Artist (I’m having to stop myself from editing that title and adding a link to the book on amazon right now) and I remember reading about how we tend to edit ourselves a lot when we create with a computer. Backspace is too easy.  We save as drafts, and end up never publishing.

That got me thinking that I should just go ahead and publish. At least on this blog, as it is a more personal platform, I should just publish and not be so mindful about it being perfect.

I randomly pulled up a blog post from many years ago, which I did post on twitter:

Clearly still juvenile but I actually think there was a little bit of creativity in my writing before, a little bit more risk. I think I remember when it changed for me. At some point in my career I started blogging for work, technical blogs, and that’s when I had to think about checking the facts, taking screenshots, giving proper attribution and so on.

There is nothing wrong with that when it comes to technical blogs of course. But somehow, that mentality and that way of writing crept into my other forms writing as well.

I think another factor was the advent of social media. All of a sudden, things became more shareable and discoverable and we become more careful and restrictive about how we express ourselves, sometimes even too an excess.

I remember my first ever geocities blog which no one ever visited. Making a new “entry” meant editing the html and re-uploading the file. No save-as-drafts, and once I’d published something, i rarely went down the page to update or edit.

I have recently checked the traffic on this blog, and it’s zero, so that’s great! I have decided that I should stop editing myself too much and instead try to publish more.

I want to really get back into creative writing. Yes. That’s the hobby for next month.