500 Words — Day Twenty: Writing Hesitancy

One of the things that I often struggle with when I’m writing is running out of topics that are interesting to write about or interesting to me in general. There’s also the idea of consistency. Rather than take a risk and try something vastly different, I like to pigeonhole myself into a certain kind of writing. Nobody is telling me what to write about, but I just pick topics that I’m thinking about when it is time to write and then start tapping the keyboard and seeing where it goes. I could put more deliberate planning into what I about but that would require spending time on research and planning and would probably take multiple writing sessions and readthroughs before getting right. Consistency limits what I feel comfortable writing about and limits the topics my brain is eager to explore.

Another thing I struggle with is quality. Even though the point of this 500 words project is just to write 500 words a day, there’s something about the internal critic inside of me that just can’t accept writing 500 shitty words day after day. That would just lack any real purpose or constructive goal. If I want to become a better writer, I need to at least try to write and construct ideas in my writing in a deliberate way. There’s also an obligation to deliver an experience to people who may come across my writing and happen to read it. I don’t expect people to read what I’m writing since it is mostly practice, but the idea that somebody could be watching, I don’t want to disappoint them. The concept of having the external audience also ties back into the idea of consistency. Naturally, you want to deliver a consistent and quality experience. Which becomes a very limiting factor and has pushed me away from wanting to take risks. In the past when I have written, this has often lead to writer’s block or just losing all desire to write.

When the expectation of a product is formed, there’s only so many ways you can repackage the same data until it becomes dull and worn out. I fully expect that at some point in the future that my writing frequency will decrease as I begin to run out of things to write. In fact, many of the topics that I have written about during this 500 word project have been things that I have written about in the past on other blogging platforms.

So, why come back and recycle some of these ideas? Well some of them have evolved and changed with experience. Most of my ideas are now influenced with several years of engineering and programming experience. The world has changed a lot over the past two or three years. It would be hard to imagine the world of today 24 months ago. Yet here we are. So we’ll see how long this little experiment goes. A lot has changed in my life and perspective in the past month as I look to transition from my career and embrace the uncomfortable feeling change is. Maybe that will be something to write about.