I’ve been publishing weekly online for two years as of March 2021. Today’s post is a review of that work and setting my sights on the future. I’ll start with my thoughts on the past year of writing, offer any lessons I’ve learned, and conclude with my goals and plans for year three.
2020, the year of staying home.
The pandemic certainly threw a wrench into my plans, but it did offer unusual opportunities. Like much of the world, I did not travel in 2020 and spent the year working at my kitchen table. I poured an unprecedented amount of time into writing. I was able to regularly hit a pandemic-inspired goal of ninety minutes of deeply focused writing, and averaged four hours of writing and editing each week day.
All that time at home also afforded plenty of reading time. I easily hit my reading goal for the year, and even completed a reading challenge along the way, something which has fallen by the wayside in years past. Most days I read non-fiction books for two hours, then I also spent at least an hour reading online, too.
What the past year taught me about writing.
As I enter my third year of writing online, I’ve picked up some lessons. The first is to keep a schedule. My weekly essay is about the only way I keep publishing with any regularity. Right now, I can draft, research, and edit my weekly essay and my Friday Finds post without much commotion. Each day of the week has a purpose, and I simply follow that day’s outlined tasks. I do very well on shorter deadlines, but that limits the length of work I can complete. I want to write longer, more intricate essays for larger publications, but actually following through and writing something longer will require a schedule I haven’t yet mastered. I haven’t successfully added more to those daily tasks and compiled a larger project over more time. This is something I want to work with and develop this year – an increased ability to finish projects stretched out over months.
Another lesson is I find getting words on the page is both the easiest part and where all the work begins. In one sense, yes, coming up with an idea of what to write about is sometimes tricky. I find that if I just start writing whatever I’ve been pondering, I usually surprise myself with what I have to say and the paths I end up wandering in the process. I don’t believe in writer’s block because I don’t fear writing something dumb. I know I can always edit and rewrite. The most important thing is getting words on the page to work with. Simply getting started, much like with exercise, is the largest hurdle. Once you are in motion, it’s much easier to just keep going.
Perhaps due to that lack of fear of the blank page, my first drafts involve getting the nonsense out of my brain and fingers to get to the clearer, more linear thinking. The first round of edits is where I end up taking a longer-than-intended pause. Editing is when I sometimes find myself wanting to do anything else – “procrasti-cleaning,” doing trivial research, etc. Something about going back and making the draft more permanent makes me want to just stay in bed sometimes. I get nervous thinking about the end product. It’s silly, but it’s true. I think I can make the editing process simpler by simply copy-and-pasting the decently-focused material into a new document, and leaving the remaining anecdotes and ideas in the original folder to peruse later. Then, the editing doesn’t seem so substantial. I’ve done this the past month and so far it is working.
Thirdly, writing every day has helped me process the world around me and my interactions with it. When I write daily, I am calmer, more contemplative, and more patient. I tend to view issues or statements with a longer, historical perspective, rather than with an immediate and emotionally-charged reaction. I become more curious and less judgmental. When I missed my daily laptop writing sessions during our recent move, I could feel my mind becoming more crowded, almost as though it was clogged. My brain and thinking became foggy, unclear.
Writing every day allows you to get everything out of your head, the brilliant and the basic. Getting those surface thoughts written down and extricated from your mind clears the way to concentrate on deeper thinking and problem solving. It’s that moment at a Mexican restaurant when you set the chips and salsa aside and settle in to eat your plate of fajitas. The salsa makes a great start, but it’s not your meal. It pacifies and prepares your stomach until the main course arrives. As with any other practice, you deal with the smaller, easier things, then move on to the larger issues.
Fourth, and most important, the internet is massively underrated as a tool for learning, meeting new people, and expanding horizons. The opportunities publishing online presents are unprecedented. I’ve met such talented people through the serendipity of online writing. What a special irony lies in the fact I stayed home more than any previous year, yet met so many fascinating people during that time. I’ve met writers, scientists, and philosophers I never would have known otherwise. Publishing online means anyone can come across your most exciting ideas, and potentially come alongside you to see your goals accomplished. I’m excited about how that can impact my future endeavors.
Writing advice?
If I may offer a word of encouragement, something approaching advice, it is this:
*I’m learning that in writing there are few definitive good or bad choices. No, instead, there are better and clearer choices, and less precise or dull choices. Whenever possible, choose clarity.
*Write every day. Set a goal of either a word count or time, and stop when you hit it. Take a break. Maybe you write a bit more, maybe you stop for the day. Either way, you’ve accomplished your goal. Write every day, and preferably at the same time every day. Just as exercise becomes easier the more you do it, so will writing. It is a muscle improved by repetition. Making writing an expected daily appointment goes a long way in reducing the effort required to get started each day.
*Do not fear the blank page. The only thing you can do with a blank page is write. You can’t improve what does not exist. After you get words down you can edit or delete or refine those words. Get the words down, then bring out your red pen. As prevailing wisdom dictates, “You cannot edit a blank page.”
*Read the kind of writing you want to create. Find a technique, lesson, or flourish to incorporate into your own writing. See how it works out. Then try a different one. This is the “steal like an artist” ethos of Austin Kleon; copy, but give it your own interpretation and use. Borrow and transform.
All writing advice boils down to two things: read a lot, and write a lot. Writing requires much material and many efforts. I’m not an expert, but I have published more than a hundred articles online at this point, and I can confirm; many efforts and much material is required. The only way to succeed is to keep hitting publish, keeping putting in your reps, and keep working to improve.
These are the biggest predictors of success. Only after paying respect to those great, stone-carved commands may you enter the secondary domain of practicing experimenting with form, studying the craft, and adding interest to your descriptions and metaphors. It all starts with a crummy first draft, refined and reworked into something decent, over and again. The crafty detail I am currently focused on is the sage advice from author Gary Provost to vary the length of my sentences and create music.
Looking Ahead: Year Three
In 2020, I published fifty-nine essays, which averages out to a little more than one a week. I would like to maintain the weekly essay, along with a form of weekly roundup of interesting articles. Right now that is the Five for Friday series, which goes live every Friday morning at 7 EST. It’s one of my favorite parts of the week, because it is a representation of the articles and ideas I discovered in the previous few days, and contains my brief thoughts on why I recommend the piece. I read them, summarize the best parts, and share them. Many of these ideas end up in my writing later, but my first interaction with them is published in those Friday posts. They are published online right now, but I am toying with the idea of converting that into a weekly email instead of a public post.
I will experiment with longer form essays. By long-form, I mean over 4,000 words. Most of my work here is around 1,200 words, so this goal is a good way to stretch my story-telling muscles, weave in multiple influences and sources, and try my hand at writing considerably longer, more immersing work. I am at work on two long-form essays on the media right now, and how their role has changed over the past century. I also have plans for courses I want to teach down the road on media literacy and deep dives on other topics. As I said in the first section, keeping the momentum of writing on a single topic for an extended time is a personal hurdle. The biggest challenge for me is getting drafts edited. Writing words and filling pages comes rather easily now, but the first round of edits is a brutal slaughter.
My reading goal remains at forty-eight books this year. This works out to four books each month, which is an attainable, but quick pace for me. While I don’t think setting an arbitrary number of books to read is the best reading goal to have, this number represents a daily practice of reading actual books and not only articles. Recently, I’ve tended towards articles to the neglect of my book lists. Having a hard number to hit is an explicit reminder to read books – and read deeply – every day. If I don’t devote an hour a day to reading, I simply won’t hit that number. Contained within that figure is an expectation of reading new-to-me titles, deep dives on selected topics (my current topic is race in America through the autobiographies of great Black Americans), and a handful of fiction novels I read before bed. All of that is difficult to quantify into a single goal, but part of my thinking in settling on the forty-eight figure.
I will continue to send out the monthly email with my reading recommendations. This newsletter contains summaries and my personal recommendations for books that shed light on timeless wisdom, but are not widely known. The books on this list have influenced my thinking and writing for weeks, months, and years after I initially read them. Writing about them keeps the lessons at the top of my mind.
