Having 50 unfinished articles and starting a new one is something that I am guilty of every day.
Even though I have so many amazing articles and ideas, I decide to start writing something new, something that seems that it would have a better chance of being THE ONE than the other ones.
Brand new, something undiscovered and not really tainted by my writing yet, something that I can bring to life and expand on.
That is how my consciousness thinks when every single morning, I press on the button to create a new piece of writing and sit there thinking for a couple of seconds on what I should be writing about.
Why do I do that, when I have a much easier, better approach of using some of the old drafts that are perfectly fine but need a little bit of work. Why do I not focus on improving the good things, while instead of focusing on creating?
Am I dumb?
I actually feel that this is due to the same reason I hated doing editing.
I didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t know where to start. Editing is hard, don’t get me wrong. It is actually one of the hardest mental exercises that I have done because you are forced to read what you have already written and try to find what is wrong with it.
At first, it was tough because I actually had no idea what I should be looking for as everything seemed right. There were no mistakes, but after I started researching and devising a mental plan of ways to do editing, it got easier.
Later I got myself a grammarly which is basically the famous hemingway app right in any web text editor with easy and very clear to understand tips.
I tried using both, and Grammarly is simply more convenient for me. I love being able to edit right in my websites admin page.
So what does the editing and writing new pieces completely have in common? Both of them require a plan, an idea and a clear picture ahead of time of what you want to do. I abandoned most of the articles halfway in the first place because I either didn’t know where I was going with them or because they seemed to be like potential long pieces that I didn’t want to write at that time.
If I didn’t want to write them at that time, what changed, why suddenly would I want to write them now?
I think that this is a fundamental problem for me to realise as now I will be putting out special time during the day when my focus would be on this old pieces as extra to my normal writing routine. This would make sure that I get my daily writing in, but I also greatly improve on the writing that I have done and expand the pieces that could potentially matter.
Klim Y
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