Just start

Writing is hard, how to enjoy the journey and overcome internal resistance?

The traditional advice on this matter is to “just start”. Dedicate some time to this task and try to build a daily habit. Don’t worry so much at first about the quality. Just start, and maybe one day I can write shamelessly or even enjoy it.

Knowing all this, I still find it hard to just start writing. After all, what do I have to say that isn’t already said? Won’t I be writing just for the sake of writing? Why do it at all if I don’t really enjoy it? Isn’t there something better I could be doing with my time?

It’s times like these, that I find it helpful to define why I write.

Why I write:

The mind is very good at coming up at excuses. That’s one reason I want to force myself to write more. It’s a way to force myself into the third person so I can call my own bullshit. This effect is especially strong after some time has passed and the waking me is truly not the person who wrote this piece.

Is writing a way of self-realization? Meriem-webster defines it as “fulfillment by oneself of the possibilities of one's character or personality”. I was thinking about it in more of literally… like the more I write, the more I realize who I am. So maybe writing is literally self-realization!

Another reason to write is to perform a kind of mind transfer. To whom? Anyone who will read, but if nothing else… I’ve got a few LLMs in mind for once I have more content. With how quickly AI is advancing, it would be interesting to feed all the content I generated into it and see how close it comes to impersonating me. Not sure what the use case is yet other than for science-and-giggles.

Now one might say - why don’t I just write in a personal journal instead? Why write publicly? The answer is that I do journal, but my private journals are never fleshed out enough because I know who I’m writing to and therefore never feel the need to explain myself. Writing to someone else, even if no one reads it, forces my mind to work in a different way.

Obstacles to writing

Even as I struggle to remind myself of other reasons to write, I’m finding that the biggest obstacle of all is the sense of producing an incomplete or imperfect work. What if I hit publish on this and later on think of other much better reasons to write?

It’s at times like these that I’m reminded that perfect is the enemy of good. If I don’t start somewhere, I will never even get good.

I’m reading two books on writing at once right now, so I’m sure there will be more thoughts on this subject later. But this is all I got for today!