Rediscovering The Joy Of Writing
Getting back to writing every day has been cathartic and exhilarating
From the beginning of 2016 through to mid-2018, I wrote and published an email to my list, every single day.
The final totals of the emails were ~865 consecutive days and over 1m words published. If you added up the total number of emails that I sent out during that time, so list size multiplied by the number of emails that I sent, I delivered about 5m email messages all up.
That’s not including the fact that I had a paid monthly physical newsletter for two years (each issue was about 5000 words), I wrote a book, countless blog posts, and a bunch of other stuff.
I don’t even want to think about how much during that time I wrote on Facebook, Twitter and private forums that I was a member of.
I was ridiculously prolific and easily spent two to three hours per day writing original content on top of having a full-time job which was not only intense but sometimes required extensive writing as well.
But after two and a half years of writing and publishing every day, I lost the passion for it and stopped.
The Day The Passion Died
I remember the day in early June 2018, it was a Saturday, and I sat down at my computer to write out the daily email. The words flowed out of my fingers and onto the screen. Writing had become a muscle for me that I could easily flex whenever I wanted.
I got to the end of the email and started giving it a read-through.
It was funny, the humour was incredibly sharp. I found myself chuckling at what I’d written. Sometimes when you are in the zone, you read back what you’ve created and it’s almost like an out-of-body experience — you know that you wrote the words, but you have no memory of writing them.
The problem was, the humour was too sharp.
It had veered from a witty turn of phrase here and there to almost contempt for the reader. It reeked of cynicism and resentment.
My daily emails were always designed to be “edutainment” —the idea was that they made you think, made you laugh, made you cry or at least made you FEEL SOMETHING, but they also taught you a lesson.
They were entertaining and educational.
But not this email. This was written by something deep inside of me that was trying to make myself laugh by making the reader the brunt of the joke.
I knew I was done.
I deleted the draft, wrote another email that was rather tame and banal. A few days later, I informed readers that my run would be coming to an end soon.
As I sat there that night, having written that spiteful email, I couldn’t help but think of the great Ernest Lawrence Thayer poem, “Casey at the Bat”:
The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.
It was joyless coming to the realization that I was finished. The end seemed so anticlimactic that I didn’t celebrate it so much as I just moved on.
Reigniting The Spark
It was nearly a year to the day, mid-June 2019, when I found myself sitting at my Mac staring at a blank page.
I felt the urge to write again.
There had been times during the previous few weeks where I’d sat down and started writing something, but I never completed anything.
This time was different… the fire had really started to come back.
While I do many other things and have several other interests, one of the things that I consider myself to be is a writer. It’s part of my own internal self-identity.
For the last year, I wasn’t writing and in some ways, it felt like part of who I was, wasn’t have the ability to express itself fully.
On that evening in mid-June 2019, I started planning my comeback to writing — I set up a Substack site, told my email list that I’d be periodically writing on there, and the best part was, they could get everything by email or share it on the web.
I wrote a bit and published those things to Substack, but it was a false start. Again, it just didn’t feel right, pardon the pun.
Fast forward to August, and I found myself reading more on Medium. I join as a subscriber and then decide to start writing as part of the Partner Program.
The words begin to flow again. I’m telling stories and feeling good about writing. My productivity climbs — in just around a month, I’ve written over 100,000 words in about 50 published articles and dozens of as yet, unpublished drafts.
Writing is a passion pursuit for me that gives me a type of freedom. To paraphrase the classic line from Jerry McGuire, “it completes me.”
Being able to sit down at my desk, fire up my Mac and write for several hours uninterrupted brings me pure joy. I now look forward every day to finding the time to just sit down and write something.
The spark has been reignited and it feels amazing.
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