Seeing as how this is the halfway point of my 31-day blogging challenge. I thought I would go over some of the lessons I’ve learned up to this point.
Fear can be a great motivator.
When I started this project there was nothing that scared me more than staring at a blank screen and having to fill it with words. I knew writing every day was going to be a huge struggle for me. I started the night before the first post was due, putting in 3 long hours of hard work just to bring myself to the halfway point. I resumed that post in the morning, fighting for 2 more hours to have it ready to go. It certainly wasn’t pretty, but I learned a ton from that post.
The next stage I went through was getting my inspiration from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.
I would take a quote from the pages of that book and expand on how it applied to me. During this stage, my ability to write improved dramatically. Also, my time spent writing went down significantly. Posts took an hour from start to finish, and I was able to transform my thoughts into posts that garnered positive feedback.
I learned to better edit my thoughts and write shorter, more concise blog posts. I don’t want to be someone who pours out thousands of words in long, dense paragraphs. There is certainly a time and place for that, by why use 1500 words when 200 will suffice?
At this point, writing became fun for me. I never enjoyed writing more than I did with Shifting Gears. This was a breakthrough post: my first attempt at writing something in a first person account. It held an almost fiction-like feel to me, but I can assure you it was very real. All of 30 minutes went into that post, and my confidence was at an all-time high. I have since written a couple pieces of fiction, but I’m not quite ready to release them yet. We shall see what the future holds on that front.
It’s amazing to realize how dangerous a little knowledge can be. I attended a writing workshop and learned some of the finer points of writing, such as using a more active tone, incorporating analogies, and tightening my phrases even further. This was a great experience except for one thing. It led me to completely overthink my writing. I went from a technique where I just put down as many words as I could and edited them down into the final product, to one where I edited my writing as I went, trying to be perfect from the start.
I wonder what the next 15-days will hold.