or: To write, or not to write – that’s never the question

This is one of those days where I don’t have anything in mind to write about and one of those unusual times where I don’t feel like writing at all. This doesn’t happen very often so I’m going to push through anyway since I want to keep my chain of Sunday posts going and the only way to do that is to write one.

Writing is one of those activities where a lot of people wait until they feel like it to do it. I was like this too and have been changing this over quite a few years now based on some reading I’ve done.

I’ve realised that if I wait until I feel like doing something (this doesn’t just have to apply to writing) I may never get around to it even if it is something that I enjoy doing.

With writing and anything creative, many wait for the muse to strike. The other school of thought is that the muse comes as you do whatever creative activity it is and it’s more about creating a routine or habit around it. I like this school of thought because it means I have total control about whether I do it or not. Otherwise all I’d have is excuses and blank pages. Not so good.

This is one of the reasons why I wanted to have a Sunday writing routine in the first place.

One of the other reasons is because many creative people (myself included) are nervous about sharing their work and keep putting it off until it’s perfect. Of course perfection never happens in the eyes of whoever’s work it is so this is another method to make sure that I put my writing out into the world, whether it’s perfect at that stage or not.

Seth Godin, marketing guru, calls this “shipping” and we all need to put our work out into the world as soon as it’s ready rather than trying to attain perfection. This is how our work improves over time as you gain feedback on what you’ve shipped whereas, if you never put anything out into the world and continually work on that one piece, you will never receive feedback and never know what needs to improve.

So while all of my blog posts go into the world with a spellcheck and a quick read over, none go into the world with the expectation of perfection. That is not the point. The point is to create a habit, to have an opportunity to write and know that it is expected of me by others (whoever happens to be reading may or may not be regular readers however I have it in my mind that I have a few people that like to read my posts each Sunday / Monday morning depending on their time zone) and I don’t want to let them down while I’m also improving my writing and finding a style that works for me.

Sometimes I read some of my earlier posts and they still make me smile.

It can see what I’ve been up to many years ago now and can also see how my writing has changed over this time.

All in all, I’d say blogging has been quite a rewarding activity for me.

And this isn’t too shabby a post either given I didn’t even know what I was going to be writing about as I started it!

Thanks to Normani for the title to this post. Awesome dancing in the video too – check it out here.