I’ve been writing an essay every month for almost two years now and this practice has started to feel tiring. The deadline to publish forces me to write, but I don’t think it forces me in the right way. The writing starts feeling stiff and forced and there is no joy in writing and the readers can feel that.
I’ve tried removing the deadline in the past to fix this, but that made me stop writing completely. When I don’t have any constraints I get lazy. I remember thinking that a month is too short to compose a good essay and that I shouldn’t force myself to send emails to people when in reality I don’t have anything good to say.
There’s another constraint that potentially sucks the energy out of these essays and that is the fact that they need to be in a particular format. Because of the fear of losing subscribers I tend to stick to a certain format and this means that every essay ends up looking similar.
By contrast, I don’t have that constraint on this blog, since I’m not sending any emails and I don’t have any analytics so I don’t know how many people are reading this (thank you for reading this). This means that I have freedom to write in whatever way I want and about anything that I find interesting here, which is very liberating and fills me with joy.
This is why I think having this blog for unpolished writing — for having fun — is the right strategy if I want to continue writing after I remove this once-per-month requirement for my essays. I think that will force me to have more ideas so when I do decide to write a higher effort piece it will be better than the essays I’m currently writing.