on writing

I have divided this post in two parts. Part I is about my writing journey and Part II is about why I have started writing in public again.

Part I – For a few years now, I have been writing on and off, and publicly and privately. My first experience with writing publicly was as a 20 something young professional trying to improve his social currency through blogging. And naturally, I ran out of topics and then views. When the views stopped, the ideas too.

Then as a 30 something, I tried both Linkedin and Twitter. This time, I wanted to show my newfound maturity, knowledge and smarts. This did not last long. Once again, when the views stopped, the ideas too.

Since then largely, my writing has been in private. No views except my own. But I do enjoy writing in private a lot more. Somehow there is no shortage of ideas. I seem to have an opinion on everything and just a lot of ideas, it almost doesn’t matter how random those are. But the problem now is different. The problem is technology. I have experimented with everything – Evernote, Onenotes, Apple notes, Goodreads, Notion, Whatsapp self chat, Twitter threads, physical journals etc etc. Now I have things written in multiple places, some typed and some handwritten, and I cannot seem to track my writings.

Part II – But there is another aspect to this. I have been having this thought of creating a journal where I can capture everything I ever have to say about everything. A journal where I can capture my thoughts about life and my time here. How wonderful would that be to travel back to your thoughts and witness your journey ?

And there are more powerful reasons to write too (reference). There are countless articles talking about the benefit of writing and I don’t need to repeat that. Still, I can talk about my personal experiences. Often as you put pen to paper, you distill your largely dispersed thoughts into meaningful sentences. So often, I think that I have many coherent things to say but the moment I start typing I find it hard to write more than a few words. But if I can overcome that resistance then I either find the topic to have no meat and I drop it or I gradually start building up my thoughts on paper.

But I still haven’t answered the question why do I want to write in public? I believe the answer is a mix of many emotions. In no particular order, one reason is to build consistency. It is easier to feel the pressure of having a public blog with handful of posts. I can use that pressure to push myself to write. Extension of this reason is that knowing people will read your writing you automatically tend to write in your best grammar. Often, private writing (this could be true of Twitter as well where your word count is limited) leads to lazy writing and using shorthand. I find that lousy writing. Finally, I cannot deny that a tiny reason is to get likes but then I also hope that I exchange likes for something valuable through my posts.

Part III – I can confidently say that I will keep coming back to my posts and edit them based on my learnings. How beautiful is that ! As I evolve, I can reflect that in my writing. I can already sense that some of the writing already needs to be redone. That is the reason, I intend not to have any timestamps on my posts.