Fine, I Guess I’ll Just Write Shit
Published:
**Update 13 August 2023:**T he quote on the graveyards being full of indispensable men didn’t make sense in the context of unpublished drafts. What was I thinking?
My unpublished drafts are filled with (allegedly) great writing. Doubt the quote fits but the point is that I’ve made hundreds of drafts which are never published because I’m scared they’d suck. I kept deferring applying for jobs so that I’d make perfect posts and projects. Instead I rarely published anything. Reading around a bit, the conclusion for how to get better at writing seems to be to just write more. You can always edit things later. This post compiles some places I got such advice.
What is anyone learning about me? Nothing, while I hide in my functioning perfectionist hole. Safe from being wrong. Safe from being found out that I’m anything less than amazing at everything.
Chris Coyer remind us there’s no bar for a blog post:
…something has always compelled me to punt out a thought early rather than wait until I have some perfect way to present it. And for the record, I don’t mind reading your posts like that either. We’re not shootin’ for the Pulitzer over here mmkay.
Matthias Ott says to just put stuff out there:
Maybe, we are overthinking it. Maybe, the one thing we should care most about is just putting stuff out there. At least, this is the primary reason we have a personal website, right? We have it to document and share random thoughts, things we learned, and nuggets we found. If we don’t put stuff out there, why have a website in the first place?
Finally Cam, who learned a lot from drawing an Ibis every day [VIDEO 13:19], paraphrased since he’s discussed the story before but I can’t find the original:
A mentor told me “do you know what your problem is”? I wasn’t ready to hear it but he told me anyway. “You do all these different things and expect them all to add up to a creative career buy you don’t finish things and they’re also separate as if you’re laying a brick of a million houses and expecting a mansion–it’s not gonna happen.
Thanks bro, but I later realized he was right so I asked him advice and he said:
Just draw the same thing every day and finish it too.
For a year I concentrated all of that scattered creative energy into drawing an Ibis everyday. I’m so great full for that advice because it worked and I learned that the more you finish projects, the more projects you will finish in the future.
Adding these quotes, it turns out I wasn’t reminded as much as I thought I had. Still, all of this is encouraging me to put time into writing more. It’s mostly comments on links for now to clear my RSS backlog, but I hope to publish more posts at some point.
Funny enough besides Cam, Chris seems to inspire people to write more. Heck, I even wrote about gas stations because of him. Here’s to hoping that something comes out of all this writing🍻!