December 2021 seems a million years ago rather than just 12 months. Perhaps not the most salient take, what with all of us surrounded by people for whom 2020 is still going. But for me especially, having experienced several major life changes makes the same year be a lot longer than I expected it to. And in all of it I’ve had one constant. Writing.
For most of the year, with a little exception here and there, I’ve written two posts a week throughout all of 2022. Not because of anyone’s challenge or a commitment for someone else. I honestly wanted to know if it was possible for me to do it. And now that the year is over, here’s some of the things that I like to think I figured out about it.
- It’s Difficult if you don’t go for easy pickings: On his columns, Jeremy Clarkson used to say that as punishment, his headmaster would occasionally force him to write long essays about topics like the inside of a snooker ball. And that such punishments are what eventually allowed him to make a living as a journalist.
I don’t know about the inside of a bowling ball, but sometimes it’s really difficult to write about current events while avoiding the easy pickings of political nonsense or billionaires doing billionaire things. There’s something about adding to the traditional feeding frenzy about them that just rubs me the wrong way. - Consistency is key: This one is a staple of writing about writing for a reason. On the weeks that I skipped, it was always more difficult to get back to writing. While the advice of treating writing like brushing your teeth may not be the best for everyone, I know that at least for me it is. I suspect the entire thing would’ve come undone really quickly if I had stopped for more than a week.
- You get better, but you don’t notice it: So the way I write is rather pedestrian and should not be a secret to anyone with more than a passing interest in the craft. First I spew a bunch of text with some semblance of coherence into the world. This is generously called a first draft. That one stays in a drawer for a day or two and then I come back and work it into something not completely embarrassing to display in public. That’s what you’re reading right now.
And yet, if I go back and look at my first articles they’re basically unreadable to me. Excellent. It means I’m somehow better now than I was when I wrote them. I look forward to coming back to this article and finding it absolute cringe.
So what’s next? Well, like everything else that I have done with writing, I’ve done it with vague nebulous goals apart from the writing itself. That’s always been the important thing. But now, I dunno, maybe after a decade of on-and-off writing and a year of doing it with some consistency I can do something else with it.
The questions now are, naturally, what and how?
