How I keep failing to publish most of my writing
For many years now, I’ve entertained the idea of becoming a writer. Not to earn any kind of money from it, but to participate in the exchange of ideas.
I believe that a blog would be the ideal medium for that. I’m picturing my own place on the internet, built around the topics I really care about. I’d be publishing new articles regularly, and there’d be at least some readers who would either benefit from my writing or enter into a conversation with me.
I even have a pretty clear picture of what I’d like to write about; I can think of at least three major topics with over a dozen articles each. So that part is solved.
What’s more, I’m already setting aside a few hours per week for writing. So this is not just some vague dream, but something I’m actively trying to turn into reality.
Despite all that, I just can’t get myself to publish any of the articles I started to write. Instead, here’s what typically happens:
- The beginning is always easy. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write about and I’m enthusiastic to share my thoughts with the world. The first paragraphs flow easily.
- Then, as more of the article is taking shape, I begin to notice deficits in my work: here’s a sentence that isn’t phrased well, the other sentence assumes too much, and that sentence over there just leads to many more questions.
- At that point I feel compelled to remove those deficits. I rewrite chunks that are unclear, I add additional context where needed, and I remove sections to focus the article on just one central idea.
You’d think that these improvements increase both the quality of my writing and my confidence to publish it.
Sadly, the opposite happens: the more time and effort I put into improving my writing, the more deficits I notice, and the less likely I am to ever publish it.
The few times I actually managed to publish an article, the article just flowed, pretty much from beginning to end, without much editing. Right from the beginning, I knew exactly what the article would look like.
Of course, that won’t do for an actual blog. To publish articles consistently, I can’t just wait for those rare moments of inspiration to strike. Instead, I must learn to somehow overcome these struggles.
So far, I haven’t really made much progress on that. But at least, I have the outline of my problem now.