Writing for the Sake of Writing is Not Worth Reading
I wasn’t going to contribute to the garbage on the internet.
I have been in a weekly writing habit since 2009. Two or three times per week, I will sit and compose something in my blog, even if it is the typed equivalent of a few scribbles of thoughts. Never a fixed habit, where I would commit to “Writing every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday!” But every few days, I have gathered enough thoughts in my head to form a few paragraphs.
For some reason (a new challenge, perhaps?) I thought “I am going to write something every single day for 30 days! I even found a series of writing prompts to help with the days when I had not come up with a topic on my own.
I put my first post in this challenge here on Medium, rather than in my own blog. On to Day 2.
Day 2 came. I wrote. I hit publish. I waited about ten minutes. Then I deleted it.
It was garbage.
I had written something only for the sake of hitting “publish.” It wasn’t well thought out. It wasn’t well constructed. It wasn’t even very well written. It wasn’t worth reading.
Austin Kleon is a writer I follow, and he is a big proponent of “Show Your Work” (even wrote a whole book about it). The concept is that writers…
