I personally consider myself a decent writer. Yes, I still have a lot of things to learn and most importantly, I have no understanding of why some of my writing works and other doesn’t. But overall, I feel that it gets my point across.
Again, there is a lot to learn and, most importantly, many more hours of hard work and practice before confidently saying that I am good.
I have been practising now for more than 4 months, and it is showing, especially when I compare the writing that I did 4 months ago when I just started and now. The only problem is that my style is exactly the same as before and also that the way I write articles stayed exactly the same with no new techniques that I used.
What do I write for?
This is a fundamental question that I feel makes or breaks a good writing habit.
Let’s be honest, writing is hard, and most of us struggle to be consistent even when we love what we do. The problem of procrastination arises when we feel extremely unmotivated because the writer has no purpose. He writes words online for others to read. If the writer doesn’t know what the person must feel and what would he do after reading your writing, then it is a waste of everyone's time.
With the number of words that get put up on the internet every second, useless content achieves nothing but worsens the situation. Most of the websites that are created are useless and don’t have a clear purpose.
I have gotten a great tip one time. On the main page of my blog, put a single sentence that will tell the reader that comes onto the website what he should expect from it. What it will be and why he should stick around.
I have done so in summarising my newsletter, and I even myself understand now better for who and what my content is. It is for readers who also write or are in tech jobs and would like to improve their mental and physical well being. Those that are trying to be productive and looking for ways to overall improve their life.
Writing as self-expression
One of the other reasons that writers simply can’t stay consistent is that their writing is foreign to them. Writing is not something that can be done one and only way. There are multiple ways in which you could write and make sure that you are achieving your goal.
There are sometimes concrete rules in the world of writing that most writers are too afraid to break. An example would be to have an outlier or even a full structured plan before starting your writing.
Yes, it improves the quality as well as the structure of your initial draft, but isn’t the initial draft just as good as an outlier and probably is good enough to be called writing already.
It is not the problem of the overall writing process being hard. It is a problem of starting to write.
That is why doing anything to make it easier to start is a win in my book.
Start now. Get perfect later.
Klim Y
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