Some days, I sit down to write and I write and write and will get out three or four or five posts in a sitting and have to decide which I’m the most anxious to get out to you first.
Some days, I sit down to write and I write and write and am not happy with anything I’ve written and leave it all in the drafts folder because they’re topics that are important to me that I want to represent well but they’re just not publish-ready.
I’ve occasionally just hit publish on one of those “just OK” posts and in comes a lot of positive feedback. I had one the other day (not revealing which!) that a couple of people mentioned privately they liked, and it got some reactions on Facebook. This leaves me a little stuck sometimes in trying to decide when it’s “good enough.”
Just goes to show you: “good” is subjective. Just because something comes from a sincere part of me doesn’t mean it’s going to touch you. And the reverse—if it’s just writing because I’ve committed to writing, that doesn’t preclude it from striking a chord.
I wonder what the feedback would have been like if that post had turned out the way I wanted it to.
Tangent: WordPress followers tend to react to different posts than Facebook followers. Every now and then, one goes out that both groups “like,” but not often.
Another tangent: I remember from a creative writing class decades ago, we had to write for 10 minutes at the beginning of each class, no stopping. “If you can’t think of anything to write, write ‘I don’t know what to write’ until you think of something else.” I don’t usually do that (the screenshot for the pic was really just for the pic), but “just keep writing” has stuck with me … even if it lands in the drafts folder.