Wait that’s not the right usage of the word irony! Well, either way, I made my blog post last week as if it were for real for real the final one, and now here I am typing up another. This must be how making the new star wars movies felt, you’ve already finished it off and you’re just making another cause you have to.
Luckily, I am incapable of shutting my mouth. My power to type endless words is unprecedented– if only I could put all that ability into writing more books (and then editing them, and then rewriting them, looping over and over forever).
What’s the use of that? Or rather, where can that possibly be useful?
In content strategy videos are (allegedly…) king. Yapping is all well and good, but content exists beyond social media, and in those places text is the king. Brochures, tutorials, reviews, stories, they’re all text based. There’s a lot of times people prefer text, such as needing to refer to the same point again and again as you proceed in it.
But that still wouldn’t be it would it?
They say that if you love your work you’ll never work a day in your life. But, as Brian David Gilbert once said,
Inspiration is good, but the true way to keep pumping out high quality content again and again is discipline. Inspiration can get you something good one time, but that inspiration is short lived. You need to cultivate the skills to make even the “floor” of your content, the minimum level of quality, still pretty dang good. That way, when you do get inspired, you write a nuclear bomb of a piece, but your disciplined writing will still let you put things out week after week after week.
When I was writing my book, I didn’t stick to the 2000 words per day that NANOWRIMO insists on. Instead, I stuck to 300 words per day. A truly trivial amount that, nonetheless, I could slam out even during a boring, wretched evening. I almost never wrote 300 words, I’d get inspired and write, dare I say, 2000 or more! Yet having that 300 word fall back built up the discipline to write every single day.
Now that was a few years ago now, I’ve been in the long agonizing editing process ever since, but what I did get from that process was the proof that I could do it. When next I write the book after, ol’ reliable 300 words will come back and I know– I know because I’ve done it before– that I can pump out a decent first draft.
Just, you know, edit. Good lord, edit. No edit even more than that. No, no, even more than that.