This morning, a little brown bunny hops across the dewy grass. Robins scoot, heads down in the lawn, plucking worms. Birds sing outside our closed windows; it’s too chilly this morning to open them.
This morning, Tubbles lays across my arms as I write. She whacks me with her tail and looks at me sideways. She would rather I pet her than scrape words on paper. She pushes against my writing arm with her back feet. When I scratch her cheeks, she purrs.
This morning I hear the clock tick on the living room wall. I hear our daughter brush her teeth behind her bathroom door. She and our son both have math exams today. This is their last week of school. This is our son’s last week of high school.
This morning the sky is fresh and blue with a lone long cloud, thin and flat like a fish filet. Our neighborhood street is still in shadow, but the green treetops are bathed in the new day’s golden light. Sunrise is earlier and earlier each day; this morning it rose at 6:18am. It will set at 8:18pm. Today we’ll have fourteen hours of light, plus a little extra on either side of sunrise and sunset. In Iceland, where will be in a little over two weeks, the sun rose at 4:29am today and will set at 10:17pm. Eighteen hours of daylight.
This morning I ate blueberry crisp for breakfast. I drank coffee while I worked the Wordle. I made extra for our daughter who likes to drink iced coffee in the morning before school.
This morning I didn’t know what to write about, so I wrote about this morning.
I like that it gets all this mess out of my head. Without writing, I’m not sure I’d be able to maneuver in the physical space of the world. I’d be too busy following tangled mental threads, running on hamster wheels of worry, running things I need to remember over and over again in my mind until I do the thing and I don’t have to remember it anymore.
I shared once that writing for me is like Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a magical repository where he can siphon memories out of his mind for storage and later review: writing things out removes them from my head so that I can get on with my external life. Unlike the Pensieve, I don’t just write memories, and I don’t necessarily write for later review. It’s more of a mental hygiene thing, like brushing my hair or clipping my nails. Writing helps keep things from getting tangled or growing into gnarly curled claws that get in the way of everything, or that break because they weren’t cared for.
I already spend a ton of time in my head. Without writing, I’m not sure how I would get out of it to navigate life.
I generated a lot of negative self-talk about my writing in 2021. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to. I don’t know what to write about. I write about the same things over and over again. I write too much about myself. I’m boring. I don’t write anything useful/interesting/thought-provoking/beautiful.
And so on.
In 2021, I also listened to a lot of podcasts about happiness. Because, see first paragraph. I was on the rowing machine at the aquatic center in December when a particular episode on how to squash negative self-talk made me stop rowing to pause the podcast and take notes. The advice I noted was this:
Monitor negative self-talk
Dispute
Affirm
I felt bad again last week about my writing rut. Yesterday, when I wrote my Reading in 2021 post, I thought about my writing in 2021. I remembered the advice from the podcast, and I wondered: what did I actually write in 2021 compared to the stories I tell myself about my writing? Can I dispute my negative self-talk with evidence? And if so, what’s a more positive story I can tell myself?
The first story I tell myself: I didn’t write much
One of the stories I tell myself is that, aside from my journals, I didn’t write much last year. I don’t blog like I did in my early blogging years, before I was, you know, employed full time.
Gathering evidence on “did I write much?” is pretty easy. The first step is to remember that I also write at work. I can grab annual stats* on word counts and posts published for my blog, we have similar stats at work (because I work for the company that makes WordPress.com), and I can calculate how much I wrote by hand during the year based on the number of pages I filled and how many words I average per page. Here’s what I found:
Personal
Professional
Handwritten pages filled 590
Handwritten pages filled 150
Handwritten words 265,000
Handwritten words 54,000
Blog posts 84
Blog posts 647
Published words 34,000
Published words 258,000
Total words written 299,000
Total words written 312,000
Words I wrote in 2021
The evidence shows that it is true I didn’t publish much on my personal blog compared to how much I journaled, but I still published 84 posts, which averages to about 7 per month. That’s not bad considering I work full time, I suppose. The word count of my blog posts is equivalent to the length of a novella.
The evidence also shows that I write a lot for work. Objectively, I would say that 258,000 words qualifies as writing much. For a sense of scale, that’s more words than Moby Dick (206,052) or Crime and Punishment (211,591), though of course, not as much as Lonesome Dove (365,712) or Anna Karenina (349,736) (reference). Sure, some of those work-related posts and words are meeting notes or notices of when I’ll be out of the office, but it’d be too much effort to remove those, and they are relevant for work: they are written communication, which is essential in a distributed workplace.
In total, I wrote approximately 611,000 words in 2021, which is more than the entire Lord of the Rings series (576,459), including The Hobbit.
Affirmation: I write a lot. Even if it’s not high literature or published work, writing is like breathing: I do it without realizing it.
The second story I tell myself: what I write isn’t great
I realize I am comparing the word counts of my personal journals, hobby blog posts, and work-related memos to great works of literature. This is not lost on me. It feeds into the second story I tell myself about my writing, which is that I don’t write the kind of stuff I like to read. What that really means is that is that I’m not an amazing epic writer. I am not a story-teller, I don’t have the imagination to craft narrative arcs, create characters, go deep with ideas and produce great works of art.
I don’t have evidence to dispute this. I especially don’t have evidence to dispute this if I’m comparing what I write to the novels and short stories that awe me. I really have to deal with this one, though, because otherwise I’ll never be happy with what I write.
If I go deeper, and identify what moves me in the art I admire, I think it comes down to three main things: connection (I can relate to what the artist presents and so feel connected to them or to humanity or to something bigger than all of us), awe (that such beauty and creativity exist in the world), and change (the work makes me see or think or act differently after experiencing it).
At a much smaller scale than the great artists I admire, I can look to some of my blog posts or ideas that I’m really proud of and see hints of those three elements in some of them: readers and colleagues will comment or message me that they can relate to what I wrote (thank you, it means so much when this happens ♥️) or that something I wrote was beautiful (I feel like I’ve done something good when this happens ♥️), and at work especially, I’ve written things that did effect change, like suggesting a writing coach program that has since been implemented.
Affirmation:My writing doesn’t have to be great. Sometimes what I write brings goodness to people, and that’s what I really want.
The third story I tell myself: I don’t have ideas
The final story I tell myself is that I don’t have ideas. I don’t know what to write about. I recognized myself in a book I read recently, Miss Iceland. The main character is a “real” writer, who churns out stories and poetry and novels because she is compelled to write: she is so full of ideas, she can’t not write, and everyone wants to publish what she writes.
She is not the character I identified with. Instead, the character I identified with is her poet boyfriend who spends all his time sitting around talking about writing with other would-be writers. When he realizes his girlfriend is a real writer, and comparatively he just wants to be a writer, he says to her:
The truth is I can’t think of anything to write about. I have no ideas. Nothing that’s close to my heart. Do you know what it means to be ordinary?
Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir, Miss Iceland
Ouch. I’ve written variations of those first two sentences dozens of times on my blog or in my journals. I am a cliche.
I know that a lot of what I write is just blathering about nothing, but in the 600,000 words I wrote last year, there are surely ideas, even if accidental. If I look through blog posts, I see some idea-based ones, like the benefits of journaling or how an empty morning feels full.
I think what’s really going on is that I have ideas, but it takes effort to develop those ideas. That I write at all shows I have plenty to write about. Time and mental energy are finite resources, though. If I’m worried about having publishable ideas, I need to remember my professional writing. That’s where the majority of my writing energy goes right now. My writing life at work is rich and satisfying: I outline, I sketch, I develop ideas, I think about structure and audience and outcomes, I draft, I refine, I proofread, I publish.
When I get down about not having ideas, it’s usually related to my personal writing. I need to affirm that I do have ideas, and remind myself that it takes effort to develop ideas. Having ideas and developing ideas is an important distinction. The distinctions puts me in control of how I want to use the time I carve out for my personal writing: I can continue to use all my writing time to free-write and just get stuff out, or I can allocate some of my time to developing ideas.
Affirmation:The fact that I write is evidence that I have ideas. Developing ideas requires effort that I can choose to dedicate if I’d like to. I dedicate considerable energy for publishable work to my professional writing. Also, Miss Iceland is a fictitious character.
What’s next
These issues are not new: I’ve written about them before. I have to remember these affirmations. Also, nothing will change if I don’t change something. I started a list of writing assignments for myself rather than using random prompts that don’t inspire me. I’ll change up my practice and see what happens.
*If you have a blog on WordPress.com and want to check your annual stats on how much you wrote, log into your account and go to wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/[yoursiteaddress]. For example, when I’m logged into my account, I can see my stats at wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/andreabadgley.blog.
I typically plow through books. Whether fiction, memoir, professional development, or self-help, I start, and I keep reading until I’m done. I don’t take a lot of time to process.
A few weeks ago at work, I participated in a salon, which is basically a fancy word for book club. As part of the salon, we read books on the same timeline and discussed them in writing via our internal blogs. I read Deep Work by Cal Newport and Think Again by Adam Grant. While I was interested in the material of the books themselves, what I was most interested in was that we’d be reading them slowly. With time to digest. We read one chapter per week.
This was new for me. I’d never read this deliberately or slowly before. I didn’t want to read ahead, so each week, I actually stopped at the end of the designated chapter. And since I did not allow myself to keep reading, my brain had to do something, so I’d think about what I’d already read.
I used the time that I wasn’t reading ahead to read writing books using this same slow reading approach. I started reading a page a day in the Little, Brown Handbook and a chapter a day in the HBR Guide to Better Business Writing by Bryan Garner (the chapters are short). I was delighted each day by how much those texts overlapped and complemented each other, and by reading slowly, I was able to make connections between them. I also used them to help me with my salon reading, and to practice writing for work.
This all came together most usefully on the day that both Little, Brown and the HBR Guide covered summaries. Summarizing may be what I struggle most with in writing for work: I always want to explain too much or give details that are fine for the body of a post but are too much for a tl;dr. Summaries need to only capture the most important elements: the point of the piece. The takeaway. This part is challenging for me, to pull out the relevant bits and only the relevant bits.
But as I read my writing books in the spaces between salon chapters, I sat with my notebook and tried to capture, in two to three sentences, the essence of the chapter I’d just read from Deep Work or Think Again. It was hard! But the practice helped me revisit and absorb the material as I tried to explain my understanding of it in my own words.
After finishing those books, I decided I like this approach for non-fiction: to read slowly, then summarize. I’m still not satisfied with my ability to summarize, and I want to practice. I’m reading a book called How to Take Smart Notes now — slowly — and it’s funny because the book hammers on how critical it is to explain the gist of a lecture, book, article, or meeting in your own words if you actually want to internalize knowledge and learn. If you’ve ever tried to teach before, you’ll know that it forces you to face gaps in your understanding when you try to explain something to someone else. Summarizing, or taking notes in your own words, is the same as teaching: it’s impossible to do if you don’t understand it yourself.
I continue to practice reading non-fiction slowly. To help with summarizing and getting the gist of what I read, I preview each chapter to pull out the headings and know what to expect from the structure. Then I read. Then I attempt to summarize. It’s hard for me. I’m still not great at summarizing. But reading slowly is a fun way to learn new stuff while also trying to get better at a form of writing that’s hard for me.
I hit a big milestone at work yesterday. A bucket list milestone.
The company I work for, Automattic, makes the WordPress.com blogging software: the software I use to publish this blog. This same software powers the internal communication tool we use so that 1532 of us in 82 countries can work together without having to co-locate in offices. The tool is called P2, and basically it’s an internal blog. Or, more accurately, more than 1300 internal blogs that we use to communicate with our coworkers, to share and discuss ideas, document projects and processes, brainstorm, and communicate progress, obstacles, and successes.
In other words, I get to blog all day at work. (not really, but kind of). We have a dashboard that shows P2 stats like the number of posts and comments we’ve published. Yesterday, I checked my word count and squealed. I finally passed a milestone I’ve aspired to hit: I’ve written a million words on our P2s.
Since my twenties, when I completed a 330-mile bike ride from North Carolina to Washington, DC, I’ve day-dreamed of being a writer. The bike ride was the AIDS Ride, and I raised $1700 to participate. The event changed my life in many ways. Before the ride, I was a non-athlete whose gym grade brought down my grade point average. The AIDS Ride opened my eyes to the power of my own body. Training for and finishing the event showed me I can do things I didn’t know I had the strength to do.
It also showed me the power of writing, and more importantly, how much I enjoyed writing outside of my journal. I wrote letters to fundraise, and once I hit my fundraising goal, I wrote letters to my donors to share the experience of those 3.5 days in the saddle of a bicycle. I loved describing the donuts we ate, the people I met, the pain and the joy of climbing and then careening down the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Writing those updates was a delight to me.
After that was when I started to seek books to learn more about the craft of writing. In my journals from my twenties, I wrote many variations, in many entries, of “I want to be a writer.”
I didn’t really know what that looked like. When I thought of “writer,” I thought novelist, short story author, journalist, columnist. Writers write books. What would I write a book about? I couldn’t visualize myself creating any of these things. I couldn’t see myself as a writer.
And yet. I’ve written a million words at work. My title is not Writer. But writing is what I do.
I couldn’t see what being a writer would look like for me when I dreamed of being one. Now, I’m beginning to understand that I like writing as a communication tool, not because I want to write books or magazine articles. Writing to communicate brings me deep satisfaction and makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my potential.
I think the framing of being a writer threw me off because I had a preset image of what a writer is or should be. What I really wanted wasn’t a title or a specific job. I just wanted to write. I dreamed of writing for a living, and my dream has come true.
I opened my notebook to find a sticky note to myself: “Free write about the benefits of journaling.” I left it the other day when I read a chapter in the Little, Brown Handbook about journaling and felt a thrum of excitement about what I learned there. Until I read this chapter, I’d felt like journaling is the easy way out for me for writing. It’s comfortable and private and I don’t have to worry about how I write or whether the structure makes sense or if there are too many words. So journaling almost feels like cheating.
And then Little, Brown gave me this:
Indeed, journal keepers often become dependent on the process for the writing practice it gives them, the concentrated thought it encourages, and the connection it fosters between personal, private experience and public information and events.
– H. Ramsey Fowler and Jane E. Aaron, The Little, Brown Handbook
I’ve been transcribing my journals from 20 years ago to digitize them. Random entries here and there describe how I’d get mired in my thoughts and feel overwhelmed by them if I didn’t write. I developed a habit of pouring my thoughts onto paper so they wouldn’t confuse me and wrap in on themselves and make a tangled knot in my brain. I developed a habit I’ve become dependent on.
I became dependent on journaling as a way to sift through my thoughts, to express my feelings, to examine my troubles. Journaling has built a way for me to process the world via the written word. I remember when my brain scared me because it was such a mess in there. It made me feel panicky, and I wish I could go back and give 25 year-old me a hug. I rarely feel those snarls in my brain anymore, and I credit my journal for that. It’s almost like a part of my hygiene routine: I brush my teeth, wash and comb my hair, and journal.
If unsnarling the thoughts in my head was where the benefits of journaling ended, it would be enough. I’m that grateful to it. But it goes deeper than that. Writing doesn’t just untangle the thoughts in my brain to keep things a little smoother in there. Processing my thoughts through a pen helps me connect ideas, dissect thoughts, examine the world and myself. I learn through journaling. I learn about myself and what I think. I grow as a result.
Recently I realized I’ve been telling myself a story that I think may not be true. The story I’ve been telling myself for years is that I don’t have ideas, and specifically that I don’t have ideas to write about. As I read Little, Brown‘s tips for generating writing topics, I realized I have a lot more ideas than I give myself credit for. I need to change the story I tell myself. I do have ideas and thoughts and feelings to write about. I do it every day if I’m not worried about what someone else would think.
Journal writing frees me to just write. Whatever and however I want. It’s liberating because nobody is going to read it. It frees me from the analysis if “Is this clear? How do I say this with fewer words? Am I getting my intention across?”
Instead of stopping to rethink, edit, revise, and interrupt my thoughts like happens when writing for readers, with a journal I can write whatever comes. I can brain dump or heart dump or soul dump, and I can write a thought five different ways if I struggle to articulate it to my satisfaction. It can all go onto the page, I don’t have to stop anything to check and recheck, I can just pour it out in words. After years of journaling I like to spice things up by experimenting with sentences, verbs, exercises, or tips I get from writing books, but even that is just play.
And that leads to the final, unintended benefit of journaling for me. Journaling has built a way for me to process the world via the written word. And what this does is give me practice. I do like to communicate via writing. I do want to actually publish on my blog and write meaningful and useful stuff at work. I’ve been beating myself up that I write secreted away in ink on paper, in my own bubble. That for journaling I don’t need ideas, I can just write. I’ve been telling myself that journaling is the easy way out because I don’t have to think about all the stuff that needs to happen when you’re using words to actually communicate with others.
That’s another story I can now change. Journaling is not a cheat; its ease does not diminish its value. Journaling keeps the machinery oiled. It maintains my writing engine, and that makes it easier to transition to writing for my blog and writing for work. And I love that. So very much.
Butterfly Mind 