“I find it hard to write”.
That was going to be the hook.
The evidence was going to follow: I’ve released 10 pieces of writing in the last two and a half years, that’s one every 3 months, with thousands of hours spent writing.
Together they came to an easy conclusion, I don’t find writing easy, but it’s not quite true.
I don’t find it hard to write.
I find it hard to publish.
I currently have 44, mostly incomplete, things that i’ve written over the last few years. Those aren’t discarded drafts. They’re things that i was interested enough in to actively write and research.
That’s a 4:1 ratio, and it’s not biased towards quality. In fact, the opposite is probably true. When you write more, you get better, and I’ve written more since the last thing i’ve published than before it.
The discriminator is work that I felt was “complete”.
That doesn’t mean rigorous. It means writing that passed all my internal checks at the time. Was it atomic? Would people be interested? Was it sufficiently novel? Does it standalone independent of me?
What it really meant was that I had processed it enough to hedge away everything but the point I was trying to make. That seems sensible when you have a clear goal, but I don’t. I don’t need to be making points as a data scientist, or as a marketer, or as a researcher and the things I write shouldn’t need to have some greater purpose.
Some will, and some will blur the lines, but I don’t want to continue exclusively publishing things that are so distilled. I want them to be rougher.
So there’s going to be a lot more “I” in the future.
Put a little more formally I think it’s a move towards the more artistic and individualistic side of expression. I don’t think that means sacrificing rigour, if anything my appreciation for well referenced writing is at an all time high, but it does mean avoiding the dryness that creeps in with keeping things impersonal.
I think it’s an important change for me to make.
It helps me maintain the identity of my writing as a place for my thoughts, not a portfolio of my ideas. Two concepts that seemed synonymous but are secretly at odds with each other. More importantly, it keeps things fun. It builds a universe with a main character that I find it incredibly easy to relate to, me.
I imagine most people don’t feel like they need permission to write in the first person on their personal blog. It’s probably the default.
If not, maybe they don’t find it hard to write, maybe they find it hard to publish, and maybe it’s because they need to use “I” more.