My Writing Hasn’t Gotten Better From Daily Writing

Rebecca Zeines
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read

In fact, it feels like the quality has become shoddier the more regularly I write.

During the month of July, I managed to deliver a blog post for each day of the month — sometimes, they just didn’t get written or published on that day.

The experience in itself was an amazing one. Making a commitment to any kind of daily activity tends to have a long-term impact on you. I learned how to stop overthinking the writing process and delve into my thoughts to see how I could come up with a topic that I could put into writing efficiently and in a timely fashion.

I delivered, writing about education, feminism, my opinion not mattering, and random tidbits in life that would suddenly come to me when dealing with Resistance in delivering my latest blog post.

Some pieces were deep, most were incredibly superficial because I didn’t take the time to really ponder the topic before writing. The obligation towards myself to deliver something every single day took precedence over the actual quality of my words.

In the end, the most successful things I wrote were the ones that I actively edited several times over. I honed my own voice to deliver my thoughts exactly as I wanted them to be understood. The first draft of my work was only very moderately successful…because when I write I sometimes fall into my old English literature essayist voice, which tends to be on the more formal side of the written spectrum.

Writing every day taught me about the challenge of delivering as per my commitments, even if done shoddily. It taught me to stop overthinking things and actually get to the core of my ideas.

Writing daily has helped me pinpoint narrative devices I enjoy using as well as what topics seem to come to me the most naturally, and what I enjoy writing the most.

Writing daily is helping me hone my narrative voice and understand what I need to do to carve my drafts into magnificent finished pieces.

When I took this challenge on for the first time in November 2016, writing every day taught me to ignore my perfectionist tendencies and to stop using excuses. It showed me that I can choose to put myself — and my words — out there in the way that I want.

But writing daily doesn’t show the depth of my learning because all that you see is the first draft. So instead, I write when the mood strikes, which tends to be every other day. I write when I feel the thought forming naturally thanks to training for it for 30 days last month.

And as I write, I see new challenges forming ahead of me, such as rewriting all of my blog posts from last month and making them into the beautiful finished pieces daily writing has allowed me to draft out first.

Let’s see what comes of that…

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Rebecca Zeines

Written by

Copyeditor, Dreamer, Agile Facilitator and all-around joyful misfit

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