A Month of Writing
My Medium writing experiment
I didn’t actually intend to start writing for a month solid, but when I decided I needed to rant about Webpack, it just happened to be May 1st. So I figured I’d just continue with another about jQuery and see where it goes from there.
The result? Consistent writing is hard.
Daily
I’m not a good pre-planner when it comes to topical writing, so I didn’t always list out things that I wanted to write about in advance, and I certainly didn’t write them in advance. A lot of my writing is spur of the moment writing. And that comes into direct conflict with writing daily on a schedule.
Sometimes you know what you want to write about, other days nothing really comes to mind so you tend to ramble on a bit. Then there’s the guilt of having committed to writing daily but not really coming up with anything interesting to write about. At times, I thought I would just write about my daily work issues, but not everything sums up nicely or in any way of interest per day.
But that’s part of writing (and coding), finding a way to just get into the groove and make it happen.
Again?
I think a daily writing exercise is still a fun concept to try. Would I do this again for June? Maybe, but differently. I feel like I initially just wanted to write small blurbs daily just to touch base on an interesting topic I ran into, but they ended up becoming longer and longer as the month moved along. If I do this in June, I would probably try to force myself to write shorter, smaller blurbs for most of the week, and throw in a longer post once in a while to talk about something more in depth. Or even to allow myself to skip a few days so as not to include having to write daily as a requirement and thus avoid a certain amount of pressure (don’t we all have enough in our lives already?)
Take Aways
I chose to write specifically about things that related to my work in one way or another, not just technical stuff in general, there are enough websites dedicated just to that. In that process,
I used the posts as a way to rant and even gain a little clarity about what I was doing so that I can improve my outlook. These were mainly introspective as I made sure that even though I was writing for a [non existent] audience, that the value was there for me to do this. I think that motivation was important one to keep me going.
Perhaps one day I can inspire enough conversation around my posts to hear different viewpoints. Till then though, I try to concentrate on using this writing experience to flush out the details for myself. So that makes it valuable to me, even if I’m the only one reading this.
Stats
So with every rant about writing monthly, comes some type of obligation to talk about what effect it had on gaining traction and audience and what not. So here you go, these are my stats for May:
Stats are definitely a motivator of sorts, but it really cant be the end all marker for success. Unfortunately, I did develop an unhealthy obsession with checking stats daily to see if anyone read anything I wrote or what my View/Read ratios were, and if I finally managed to get any recommendations. That’s only natural and to some extent that obsession will fade, especially if you’re not doing this to get book deals or are relying on it for anything other than your own education and information.
But yes, at first, stats really do seem important. As with anything else that you get used to, you get used to your stats as well. Just don’t let it dictate if you do this or not. It’s not so important that people read what you write so long as you get some benefit out of doing this, and that’s the most important part of this endeavor.
In the end, are you better off for having done this, not your stats.
