A commitment to writing poorly

Last year (or maybe the year before), I tried to commit to hitting the Publish button once a week.

This lasted maybe 4 weeks.

What went wrong? The usual. Fear of being “found out” as a mediocre writer and as a sub-par designer. Fear of judgment. Fear of imperfection. The familiar list goes on and on and on…

But one of the issues on that list floats to the top.

Too much time was spent on the planning, prepping, brainstorming, researching phase… and not enough time was spent on just… writing.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down to write an article and ended up spending hours just Googling “how to start writing an article.”

So instead I’d like to try a new approach.

At least once a week, I will commit to writing poorly. Maybe these will be valuable to someone, maybe they’ll seem self-indulgant. Maybe a piece may provide some industry-specific insight to a young freelancing designer, maybe it’ll be glanced over once and never read by anyone again.

If nothing else, my goal is to feel more comfortable writing publicly, sharing my process and my progress, and improving my writing overall.

Which means I have to commit to writing things that are just going to suck.

“Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure. Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better. Do it every day. Every single day. If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is the problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.”

- Seth Godin