Chris Hannah

My Writing Cycle

I think a lot of internet writers go through a stage where they focus more on refining their workflow than they do than actually writing. What I’ve noticed is that for me, this can be represented as a sine wave. In that I go through phases of really wanting to nail a perfect workflow for every situation, then periods of time where I just don’t care about how I write, I just get on with putting words somewhere and then publishing it to my blog.

Right now, I’m at a stage where I feel like I can write a blog post in any application that can handle plain text. In the past few weeks, that’s mainly been Obsidian, but I’ve also used TextEdit recently, and even the Ghost web interface for my blog.

That may sound rather boastful, but I say that while thoughts about refining my workflow start to creep back into my head.

I already know now, that at some point in the very near future, I’m going to be spending more than necessary trying out new writing apps, working out more efficient ways to publish to my blog, and generally focussing on my writing process.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. While it may seem like misplaced effort, a moment of introspection can be very valuable. Because it can make you think about not only the process of how you write, and how you publish, but also what you write about and who you’re writing for.

The next stage I usually go through, after a short period of refinement, is that I usually write about what I’ve learned, and what my new writing workflows are. Essentially, I start to write about writing. At times that can be seen to be a tad too meta, but I’ve found that process useful to get myself back into the habit of writing regularly. Once you’ve built up that habit, you can start to relax back into the flow of writing more, and focus on the actual content. And with that, the cycle starts to repeat.

As you may expect, this will probably mean that I will no doubt be doing the above very soon. I’m sort of looking forward to it. Once I’ve improved my writing workflows, the tools I use, and also spend time deciding what I want to write about, I know I’ll then be able to spend more time writing. Which hopefully means I can continue to improve.

#Writing #Process #Blogging

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