Recap of 100 days of daily blogging
Back in October of last year, I set to write and publish on this blog every day. This week I crossed the milestone of 100 days of consecutive posts.
I have been intrigued by the activity of daily creation for a long time. I am fascinated by people who consistently create and publish. Austin Kleon talked about the value of regular practice. Focusing on quantity can help free us from the pressure of perfectionism and might even deliver better results in the long run than focusing on quality.
When I started writing daily I was trying to dry the well. This is a similar idea to Julian Shapiro’s Creativity Faucet:
Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives
Because your pipe has only one faucet, there’s no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater
—Julian Shapiro
We have to get through all the bad ideas before we get to the strong ones. To do that we have to turn off our inner critic and create freely and really let it all out.
Seth Godin said it best:
The goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you have enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up
There are many benefits of writing (ideation, mental health, mindfulness, etc), but here’s what I have learned from writing 100 posts in 100 consecutive days:
- You don’t know what you are thinking until you write things down. Writing is a great way to clear your thinking and generate new ideas.
- Some of the best ideas come from extreme constraints like having to write a post when you have only a few minutes or are extremely tired.
- Short and sweet beats long and overdone
- When stuck free writing works wonders. Most of the time some good nugget will come up after a paragraph or two.
- Sometimes bullets instead of paragraphs, are the best way to get ideas flowing.
- Writing is a great way to feed your curiosity and learn.
Looking back at the last 10 years of writing I haven’t always been this consistent, but this is not the first time I start a project of daily practice. I wrote 101 science-fiction flash-fiction stories in 101 consecutive days, and I am currently on my 262 day of fiction writing (for a novel that might or might not ever see the light of day).
If you need inspiration here are some posts I wrote about other creators who believed in the power of the daily practice:
- Henry Darger and the Perseverance of a Lifetime
- Ernest Hemingway on the Daily Practice of Writing
- William James on Daily Rituals
- Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Daily Drawings
- Austin Kleon on Daily Blogging
- Hemingway on Daily Writing
- Seth Godin on writing bad
You know, in order to do something, you need to organize your time. It is very easy to do — you organize your time. You say, “One hour a day you will write. From this hour to this hour, I will write that. And even if I don’t have idea, one hour I write. Even a line. Even three words. But I write. Every day I write.” You organize your time and then you do whatever you want. You take your time like your friend and you don’t lose your friend. Because your time is your life and then you organize your life. I do that, everyday I do that.