Last updated on April 4th, 2021 at 06:31 pm
It’s the same thing every time—sit down, pull out my stack of paper and rifle through it ’til I find something good to write about. Sometimes I come up short. Sometimes I find a gem. I never quite know what I’ll find, but the one thing I know’s that I’ll always wander back to my palace of paper with hundreds of half-formed thoughts waiting to spring to life!
A Slave to My Machinations—What it Takes to Put Out a Post
I’ll probably never escape my process.
The most significant problem of this empire of paper I’ve built for myself is that it takes so long to transform ideas into posts that at times it feels like I’m not making progress at all.
It’s a lengthy affair—
- First, I write as much as I can before losing interest or getting interrupted. I don’t expect perfection in the first round, but enough of an idea to remind me where I’m going with a piece.
- Next, I hypercritically go over the post, looking for potential word changes, simplifications, or links to other drafts, hoping to kill multiple birds with one stone.
- The third is typing it up, which sees some self-editing as I do it, but I should’ve caught most glaring errors by this point.
- Fourth: get digital. I rarely put something out without running it through Grammarly and Hemingway first, letting the tools find better ways of communicating than I often find myself.
- Finally, I go in Canva and whip up a featured image for the post and whip up the metadata. With a last check through Jetpack’s grammar checker, I’m finally good to go!
Simple, right? It takes a lot of time to create fantastic work, but it’s important to me to write pieces reflective of my most authentic self.
It’s not the fastest process, but so far, it’s the best one I’ve got.
And that’s my problem with perfection—I can type my thoughts perfectly well, but what they’d be missing is the heart. With every stroke as the ink rolls out, I feel my ideas flow from my mind to the page. The relationship between the post and I’s far more involved—if I relied on a keyboard, it’d feel far too… mechanical. Informal. Like what I was writing didn’t matter. And if I let that become my new normal, what’d be the point in the first place?
No—I need to handle my palace of paper just like I deal with problems at work: by getting things done right the first time with solutions that permanently solve problems. Great content that’ll stand the test of time. Ideas that’ll improve the world. Whatever I do, I need to turn all this paper into something magnificent, because once I’ve put it all together, I don’t intend to look back.
A World Beyond Paper.
It may feel like my handwritten approach is the thing defining my writing style, but even the oldest dogs can learn new tricks.
We’re in an age with countless ways to capture our thoughts, and I can’t just turn a blind eye to things that could make me a better creator. Evernote. Office 365. Typing away on my iPad Pro. Any creator worth their salt continually challenges their comfort zone, and I’m not about to find myself otherwise.
Papier—it keeps me going, whether I like it or not.
Thanks for reading! Until the next,
