An Interesting Experiment
When I started this writing challenge 14 days ago, the main expectation was gradual improvements in exchange for daily grind for posts.
I’m not going to lie. On one hand, when the day comes to an end and the blogpost still needs to be written, my dread for opening the WordPress app and typing these words often takes physical form as it becomes so intense. On the other hand, I know that once the first few words have been laid down into the virtual draft system, the motivation for the post properly takes off, together with the length of the resulting post. This observation has already been covered in this post.
In a nutshell, my excitement for this writing challenge is only matched by the dread of the daily writing; seems like a healthy balance? ;p
But what about the improvements?
Well, these are, as expected, incremental.
First, it has only been 2 weeks, so any gains remain unstable and stopping – or even a short break – now would definitely erase them permanently. As much as there are claims for habits starting to form from 21/66/200/whatever number of days, I’m far from feeling this one from being solidly rooted yet. By the way, Prof Huberman does have yet another interesting podcast about habit forming. So my best bet consists in carrying on with this challenge. After all, I purposely didn’t set an end date or end point, since I consider this being a life-long challenge; just hopefully getting easier over time.
Improvements, for sure. Minor ones, indeed. Permanent gains, work in progress.
What to Look For Next?
On top of my mind, the two main improvements I’m aiming for now consists in writing these posts faster (ideally earlier in the day as well) and start working on the editing.
Advice and my own experience have demonstrated again and again that writing usually only produces a fraction of the quality of a final text. The real gem lies in the editing, which I’m honestly lacking. These blogposts are often written with little planning and on-the-fly editing. I suppose that writing experience does help at this point but better quality posts are yet to be unearthed by better editing yet. I suppose the first obstacle will be to face the guilt of reading one’s writing again. A step easy to confront by simply skipping this part of the full writing process.
One thing at a time, the first objective was to overcome the fear of writing; the fear of editing will come next.
Closing Words
What are you looking for in this blog? Do you have any pieces of advice on how it has been going so far and which direction to focus next?
Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.