Okay, I’ll Admit. Writing Is Hard.

It has been a little more than a year since I started writing. As I have admitted a lot of times before, I had zero knowledge about writing. I did not know anything about structure, my grammar and vocabulary were not as good, and I was not organized.

The COVID pandemic led me to write. I was working from home at the time. So I decided to start a blog. While it was pretty easy for me to start my blog, I did not know what to expect. Plus, I wanted to write for myself, not for others.

Slowly, I began to enjoy writing. I wrote about books, personal development, and investing because I was interested in these topics. I also had good knowledge of them. Now, I have written over 100 articles across different platforms and published two ebooks.

My writing journey was not smooth. There were a lot of difficulties along the way. Sometimes, things would go out of hand. Writer’s block and running out of writing ideas were my main problems. In the early days, my goal was to write at least one article per week. But that was not easy. Sometimes, I did not have anything to write for more than a week, and that would drive me insane.

My Writing Process

I never had a fixed writing process. Initially, I used to write whenever I had something to say. There was no organized planning. An idea would randomly strike my mind, and I would write about it.

Along the way, I discovered different writing processes used by renowned writers. I would follow their work on platforms like Medium, Entrepreneur, and Business Insider. I also followed best-selling authors to learn about their writing processes.

Medium was a game-changer for me. It is a writing platform where you can write and share your stories with other people. I discovered many writers and their writing processes through Medium. One day, I found an article about planning your ideas before writing your stories. The writer had written how you could plan a year’s worth of ideas in a single day.

I was intrigued. Since then, I always plan my ideas before I sit down to write. I still do not have a specific format or structure. I usually experiment with different styles. But my writing has improved a lot. Now, my articles are very organized and grammatically correct.

I write on many platforms. I also write for my clients. On each platform, I have a different writing style. For example, on my blog, my writing is free-style. For my clients, I do a lot of research and planning before I even start typing a single word. Sometimes, an article (about 3,000-4,000 words) takes 2-3 days to complete. It’s the research that takes a lot of time.

Why is Writing So Hard?

You sit down to write your story for the day. You turn on your computer and open the word processor. When you are about to type your first word, you suddenly realize that you don’t know what to write. Sometimes, you write a few lines and then, you are in the same situation again. This state is commonly known as writer’s block.

All writers experience writer’s block in their careers. It is one of the worst feelings for a writer to have. I have experienced it many times, especially in my early writing days. Thankfully, writer’s block is not much of an issue for me now.

Another reason why writing is so hard is that you can quickly run out of ideas (or at least you think you have run out of ideas). What to write about next? That’s the common question. Every piece of writing is unique and requires you to give some thought and energy to it. If you don’t know what to write, you will be staring at a black page with the cursor blinking in front of you.

How I Overcome Writing Difficulties

Here’s a line from a book I recently read, called Show Your Work:

Bob Pollard, the lead singer and songwriter for Guided by Voices, says he never gets writer’s block because he never stops writing.

I overcame writer’s block the same way.

After taking the advice of many professional writers, I understood that if I wanted to become better at writing, I have to be consistent and write every day. It doesn’t matter if I write a full-fledged blog post or a small 100-word LinkedIn post. The key to writing success is consistency.

I still do it every day. My writing is spread across different platforms. Further, my writing includes blog posts, LinkedIn posts, tweets, journals, goals, to-do lists, ideas, etc. Overall, I write at least 800 words every single day.

For the idea problem, as I said before, I plan my writing ideas before I sit down to write. At first, I wrote 50 ideas across different topics of my interest. From those 50 ideas, I have used 40 of them in my articles. So writing down ideas worked for me.

However, now, I do not plan out ideas that way. Instead, I plan my writing ideas for the coming week. So I do not write all seven days of the week. I organize my content ideas on Saturdays and write every day for the rest of the week. So my writing process has become more organized and consistent.

Takeaway

Writing is hard. But like all difficult things in life, you need a plan to overcome the difficulties. Analyze your process and identify your main problems. Once you do that, it will be easier for you to find the solutions.

Learning should be a top priority. Do it every day. Thinking that you know everything is going to stop you from making progress. There is always more to learn. Always remain curious. That is the way to finding solutions to all your problems.