One foot after the other? A little bit about writing and motivation

Another day, another blog. I may have mentioned this before, but one thing I like about this daily blog project is that it pressures me to find something to talk about. The good thing is, I can talk about a single topic in many different ways. Some ways are concise and some convoluted. Some are entertaining and some boring. Much like driving from point A to point B in a big city.

A downside to sticking to a single topic is that I risk repeating myself, even if the approach is different. I used to think that my limited breadth of knowledge was a sign that I was too stupid to write. However, I am beginning to think that it is because I haven’t truly lived my life.

So I have been living my life and I try to pull moments from my day to write about. The problem with this method is that I am not the most skilled storyteller. I struggle to pick out the right level of detail to help my reader experience what I want them to experience. I either don’t put in enough or I put in too much. I haven’t figured out that balance yet.

This brings me to another good thing about this blog. As I write, I get to see where I find my writing lacking. I used to theorize where my writing abilities lie — I didn’t want to start work until I had sussed out in my head what good writing looked like for me. This is for fear of wasting my time.

But before I ever got anywhere near to that point, I would get tired and pass out. I wouldn’t write anything down at all.

It really is better to just write things out now, and deal with it later.

I used to think that to “deal with it later” meant I had to obsess over what was written before I wrote anything new. For example, I would have to force myself to refine this blog post before I allowed myself to generate more content. I wanted to make sure I learned from the mistakes of the old work so I wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes with the new work in fear that to doing so would be “wasting my time.”

That sucked all the fun out of writing, though. I always want to create. And denying that creativity because my previous work wasn’t up to my standard made it so that I didn’t want to write again. Editing is fun, sure. But to not write new stuff until the current work perfect dragged the whole process down. I lost my enthusiasm.

And I’m sure that’s why I stopped writing for years.

Now I don’t care. I love creating. I love to edit. And both help me improve. A lesson can be learned in theory, but it takes many iterations of actual practice to make that lesson stick. And I can continue to practice before I fully learn the lessons of my past work.

And it’s okay to make the same mistakes again. As long as you are actively working on improvement, you can trust yourself to minimize those mistakes eventually.

I am essentially telling you what my writing teachers have been trying to tell me for years. And I didn’t follow their advice for years. The problem isn’t that I didn’t know what they were talking about. I did.

The problem is that I never believed in myself until now. Nobody but myself could help me with that. I hope my writing will be good enough so I can tell you how I came to believe in myself.

Hell, I would like to know. Maybe I’ll let you read my personal journals and you can tell me? Nah.