Written at the end of December – and somehow a whole month has passed since then, I’m not sure what I did with that time!
I find it harder to write when I’m in a phase of ‘not knowing’. When I’m in between things, or wondering how something will play out.
In this strange place in time, I don’t know what my work will hold for me next week. Endings, beginnings, new approaches, or a period of rest – I don’t know what January will hold. The way forward for me is not clear right now.
The one thing I do know is that I love to write, and whatever happens I will write stuff. I’ll find a way to write stuff and share it online, like I’ve been doing for over 10 years. Sometimes I get comments and likes and shares and messages, sometimes it’s tumbleweed. But I enjoy the process of writing, so to an extent it doesn’t matter.
One of the things I have been wondering about is which platform(s) to use for my writing. Whether the ones I have been using until now are still working for me.
I write on my blog, and I write on social media. I have a newsletter that I send sporadically. I shared an old blog post on Substack to try and get something started there, but didn’t get any further with developing that because it felt like yet another place to check for comments and interactions. I’ve wondered about setting something up for subscribers only – but I don’t think that there are people out there who’d pay to read what I write. I don’t subscribe to anyone’s Substack, or to Medium, or to anyone’s writing on Patreon, so why should I expect others to do so for me? And I regularly assess my metrics – which blog and social media posts are being read and interacted with most, where do people come across my blog posts – to refine where I focus my time.
What I do know is that I enjoy the process of writing and putting posts together to share. There’s something I love about this creative process, and whenever I try to take elements of it to use on their own, it doesn’t work as well for me. I did a freelance features writing course, but didn’t enjoy writing as much on subjects I was given – I prefer to choose my own topic, and often that topic just emerges as I write.
I would love to be paid for my writing somehow, and I’d love to have the time and space to write at my own pace, within my own creative and cyclical rhythms. But that just seems like a ridiculous dream, even more so when the ‘not knowing’ phase takes away some of my inspiration.
But then maybe just writing, continuing to write, is the way to clarity?
In the past I have often found my own answers by writing thoughts about a particular question (I wrote about that here). And I know that it’s something that writing coaches like Nicola Humber talk about – “don’t wait for clarity — write for clarity!” This article that she wrote which includes that point is specifically about writing a book, but I think it applies to my own situation of looking for more clarity as well.
Have you found that writing helps you figure things out? Do let me know in the comments on here or on the social media platform where you came across this post.
