Sometimes, seeing how somebody else approaches writing clarifies how you approach your own. Or, rather, how not to approach it.
Take the following piece of advice, given to one blog writer who very much took it to heart.1
“Knowing when to stop is not exactly the same as knowing what to start. Determining what’s worthy is harder than simply finding something interesting.”
Different advice helps different people, and that’s fine. But speaking personally: I can’t think of anything more dreadful than having to decide what is worthy for me to write about. If something is interesting, that’s more than enough. Why put barriers in your way before you even start?
The person who was given this advice even struggles with it to some extent:
“Years later, as I emerge from what does indeed feel like an extended dormancy, I’m still seeking clarity on what’s worthy. But what I do know: time to start, it is. These handful of words mark an official commitment to an unofficial restart of writing.”
And I feel bad for them. Because to me, thinking about what’s “worthy” when writing on your own personal site is a recipe for treading water, and publishing nothing. And guess what: that’s exactly what happened.
We love to put barriers in the way of writing. Sometimes we want our backend to be perfect first. Sometimes we worry too much about being helpful. And sometimes we question whether what we’re doing is important at all.
It’s all nonsense. If you think something is interesting, it’s worth writing about, judgements about whether it’s “worthy” or not be damned. It might go nowhere. It might go somewhere. Just occasionally, it might really go somewhere. But the absolute worst thing that could happen?
You’ll have put something interesting into the world.
I’m not linking to the source for this, deliberately. But you can easily find it yourself, if you know how to use Google and quote marks. ↩