Radical! Awesome! Mega!

Now that it's been a billion years since I last published any writing—thanks to volunteering commitments and depression—it's time to revisit my writing structure.

• My diarrhoea blog will continue (or resume, depending on how you look at it), but in a cheaper and more accessible place.
• My Trello board, full of half-written articles, will need a clean-out, whether that means finishing and publishing pieces, chucking them in purgatory my backlog, or deleting them.
• I'll need to get some more writing up on Medium. One article per century isn't exactly a streak.
• BigBeefBurger.com will need more substance, and perhaps repurposing.
• I should be using this blog (right here, hello, hi) to talk myself back on my feet.

Depression be damned. I enjoy writing too much to watch it fester.

To build myself up to a consistent and reliable level of productivity, I’ve taken to allocating 30–60 minutes to sit/stand in isolation and write nonstop. Mostly I’ll pull a topic off my Trello board and riff on it, but sometimes I’ll just type whatever’s in my head and follow my thoughts wherever they go. So far it’s working incredibly well, at least in terms of turning my ideas into properly articulated arguments.

This was always the purpose of my private stream-of-consciousness journal. What I’ve realised this week is how effectively it can turn an unproductive morning or day into a productive one. If the first ten minutes are rubbish, usually I’m much better structured and more cogent by the end.

Although I now have the bones of a few solid posts, tidying them up for publication is still beyond me, for now. This is as much down to my neurodivergent struggles as my need to build skills and establish habits.

I’m still reluctant to set myself goals for publishing on Medium because I don’t know when I can find the focus and confidence to get that final polish done. I’d like it to be within a week, but if I set that goal and fail to meet it, I’ll feel worse about myself and less confident about my ability. So, for now I’ll keep doing this as often as possible. If I write 50 drafts and publish nothing, at least I’ll have 20 posts close to completion.

When I decided to write again, it was the joy of writing that drew me back.

Then I discovered the possibility of writing on sites like Medium, where writing is read and a small amount of money might even come in. But I was still focused on writing for my own satisfaction.

Then I read a bit more about how a few writers have made a career from writing on Medium. I watched loads YouTube videos on form, audience, titles, the lot. But I still knew I wanted to write for its own sake.

Then I realised my writing can develop and improve if I work on it, so I made piles of notes about how best to write for success. I would definitely work that into my plan, but it would only ever come second to writing for pleasure.

I spent the next week or so coming up with ideas, building structures and salient points through brainwashing and bullet points. I even tried writing complete articles from those notes, but I couldn’t get a piece finished to my self-imposed standards. It was increasingly frustrating to be sat down, focused, determined, but not able to produce anything worthy of publication.

Here I am a month later (including two weeks of illness), only just realising that my aim has shifted. I’ve been so hellbent on writing to a high standard that I’ve still not published anything on Medium.

So, in remembering my incentive to write in the first place, and realising how sharply and unexpectedly I’ve lost my way, I’m now wrenching myself back on track. That doesn’t mean I’ll have something up on Medium tomorrow or even this week, but it does mean I’ll publish what I like writing without too much second-guessing, not what I think will set me up for some objective judgement of success.

It seems my inability to write this past week was due to illness.

At first I thought the ADHD medication wasn’t working. Then I thought I was just terrible at writing. It’s only yesterday that I realised I’ve been sick, and not only last week. I was struggling to focus in a volunteering engagement a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, it’s been obvious I was fighting off a virus, I just didn’t connect the dots.

This is a sequence which happens to me at least once every year: enduring brain fog, followed by frustration and fear that I can’t get things done, followed by the creeping realisation that I was unwell the whole time. Usually the trigger is a sore throat, or sinus pain, or noticing that I’ve had 12 hours of sleep three nights running.

Today I’m feeling more switched on than I have in about a week, so perhaps I’m recovering. Now I’m finding myself pulled between the need to rest patiently and the drive to get some work done. Some of the brain fog is still there, so rest might win for the time being.

That’s not to say I ground to a halt. I’ve had ideas and made plenty of notes, and dealt with another WordPress technical issue which hoovered up the best part of two days. So, there’s definitely been progress, just not the kind of progress you can see.

In doing research for my return to writing, I was aware early on that publishing on a site like Medium, where actual people will be offered my work, would require more work. I’d need to address an audience, rather than write introspectively (as I’m doing here). I’d need to work hard on my titles and plan SEO keywords.

Now that I’m in the thick of it, as it were, I’m realising how great that difference is.

When I write here and on my WordPress blog, I assume someone might see it eventually, but it doesn’t matter a great deal because I’m not using these outlets to grow a following or trust. I’m just writing for me.

However, if Medium is to be worthwhile for me at all, I can’t throw up even a half-cooked idea. I see loads of underdeveloped writing on Medium, which leaves me disinclined to read more of that person’s work. If I rush headlong into Medium, I’ll have exactly that impact on most people who see what I’ve published.

I already knew all that. What I didn’t anticipate is how much harder it would be to write to that standard.

Having an idea which I think would appeal to Medium readers isn’t difficult for me, but shaping it into a compelling piece is really quite a steep learning curve, and I don’t know why—it’s not at all far removed from the kind of writing I’ve done for ages, professionally and personally.

Word count also seems to be an issue. The piece I tried to write yesterday didn’t even hit 300 words, which is a pretty short piece for Medium (I’m aiming for at least 700 words, in line with the typical minimum length of good Medium posts). Forcing it to blow out in size led me to expand it in a way I’d already decided was deviating from the focus of that piece, but I did it anyway to boost that word count, and my concentration and purpose quickly drained away. (By contrast, this post hit 500 words inside 20 minutes.)

Yesterday, in trying to understand why my brain wouldn’t perform, I Googled the causes behind brain fog. Most of the results were hilariously useless to neurodivergent people (and I might write a Medium piece on that, if I shape it into anything at all—see above), but I saw anxiety mentioned a couple of times. It’s possible that anxiety is what stops me developing ideas for Medium but allows me to pump out posts for my personal blogs.

It’s probably foolhardy of me to think I can identify what’s preventing me publishing something to Medium, because trying to analyse my roadblocks and failures usually ends up being a failure in itself. This is especially difficult because I know the next failure will hit me harder than yesterday’s, and I could very well reach the point of packing it in and being lost in the dark yet again.