Every time I told people I blogged, I said that it was my way of practicing writing. My way of keeping my writing sharp. Yet, it’s something that I haven’t been doing consistently. Am I truly honing my skills? Does writing once a month count as practice?
Let’s look on the bright side – it’s infinitely better than zero times a month!
I set aside some time today after work to check myself in(to a cafe), free of all distractions, just to get some writing done. It was a chore. But I forced myself to do so and I’m glad I did.
It took me a couple of minutes to get started but now the words are just flowing out from my fingers. Yes, this post is going to be a brain dump.
I’m writing less frequently than I used to which isn’t a problem. But not doing anything else productive with all the free time is. However, after sitting through an SEO workshop today, I felt inspired. The advice from my colleague who ran the workshop wasn’t directed at me, but I felt it. He said, paraphrased:
“There’s no being perfect, just write. You can come up with the perfect article, but if you don’t optimize the keywords, nobody is going to find it. And in our fast-paced landscape, being late means other people are going to rank their pages before you. Write your article quickly, then use data to optimize it later.”
It wasn’t a revelation, in fact, it has been my philosophy for creating content. I’m the kind of guy who will push out shit thinking I will go back to make it better in the future (which rarely happens when it comes to personal projects). I enjoy the feeling of creating content. It pleases me to work on something that other people (no matter how few) can enjoy.
Why? I don’t know. I’m just built that way. In case you didn’t know, almost all my hobbies involve creating some sort of content (the other hobbies involve consuming content). From writing blogs to recording and performing songs and drawing drawings and trying to make videos (I know, I still haven’t started work on a video essay) – these hobbies give me a sense of achievement.
Okay, back to the lesson from the workshop: I know I’m not writing hard-hitting SEO-optimized posts on this blog (did you know I moved from number to text slugs over the past year? lol). I don’t even categorize or tag my content properly most of the time. But the advice reminded me of one of my favorite quotes: “Progress, not perfection.”
It got me thinking, about how when I first started blogging back in school, I would treat my blog like a diary. Writing all sorts of cringy shit…it was all but a Xanga in name. Over the years, it has evolved. Slightly. Still cringey, but I hate what I write now much less than what I did before. Decades of aging does that to you, naturally.
(10 years later, I’m going to come back to this and laugh.)
I can’t believe that after writing for decades I’m still not some writing savant. See, I used writing twice in a single sentence. Check out my unbridled vocabulary. Yet, I have the audacity to call myself a writer and ask to be paid for my work.
What is this mid-life imposter syndrome crisis resurfacing?
Writing about writing. It seems to be a frequent topic on this blog. Me feeling bad about not writing enough and writing about that promising that I’ll write more. I’m not going to do that because I don’t need to. This site doesn’t survive on clicks (it survives because I give money to my web host annually). And as long as I want to keep a public place to pen my thoughts, it’ll remain that way.
Keeping in line with the theme of today’s lesson, I won’t be editing this drivel. Hope you enjoyed reading it. If it inspires you to write or create something of your own, great! I look forward to ingesting it…like a fish swallowing a worm. And it means that something positive came out of this.