Long before I published my first post, I liked the idea of being a writer. And yet, it took me well over a year to get started. What made the difference, in the end, wasn't an epiphany about what I wanted to write. It was a commitment to write one post per week, about anything. You don't become a writer by having a great idea. You become a writer by writing, and by figuring out how to make ideas work, even if they don't look great at first.

Writing one post per week went great, for a while. But at some point, I hit a roadblock. I wanted to try my hand at writing fiction, but felt too constrained by my weekly deadline. I didn't believe I was able to make a story work in such limited amount of time. So I lifted the constraints. Soon I had written an awful short story. Even though it's awful, I remember it fondly. It was a push in the right direction. Unfortunately, lifting the constraint of posting weekly coincided with starting to work fulltime for the first time in my life. And instead of exploring more ideas, I stopped writing completely.

It took me about six months to recover my writing habit. It was still important to me, but while getting used to working fulltime, I neglected it. It didn't help that I had moved to Berlin again in the midst of a pandemic and was more socially isolated than ever before. After one or two months of living from day to day, I got fed up with myself. This time, I took a different approach to pick up writing. My only goal was to write ten minutes per day. I didn't care if I created something worth publishing. Soon I was writing 25 minutes, than a full hour. It had taken me a while, but I was writing more than ever. I didn't, however, publish anything.

During that time, I wrote a lot of unfinished drafts. Whenever I had an idea I found interesting, I spend a few days on it, only to abandon it. Sometimes I lost confidence in the idea. At other times, I switched to something that seemed more shiny. Some ideas persisted, and I spend an incredible amount of time on them – without improving the end result. I remember one post in particular that I rewrote from scratch multiple times. Its starting point was some problem I had at that time. I used the post to reflect on a specific part of this problem. When I solved that specific part, I had a post that was 90% finished. Instead of finishing it up, I started to completely rewrite it, following a new question that opened when I had solved the sub-problem. I did this maybe three or four times before I realised what I was doing, at which point I finished the post in a few days and just published it. I tried to remember what problem I was thinking about, and what post I published in the end. But I couldn't find it anymore.

So, even though I wrote more than ever, I wasn't productive. And I became frustrated. I wanted to become a writer, but I wasn't even able to publish one post per month. Born out of this frustration, I set a rather reactive goal. I set out to write one post every day for 100 days. As with most reactive goals, this was overambitious and hardly manageable. And it burned me out.

One of the stories I keep remembering, especially after a taxing day at work, is how Brandon Sanderson became a successful author. His strategy was simple. He just wrote a lot. And I mean a lot. In his telling, he talks about how his courses at University required a 3000 word homework at the end of the semester, and how he wrote this much every week. Before his first novel got published he had written twelve of them. Once his studies were over, he picked a job where he could write just as much but earn money on the side to pay his bills. I don't remember this story because of his approach, though. I remember it because of a tangent in which he talks about something that didn't work.

One semester, Brandon took an introductory course in Computer Science. Each week, he dedicated one day to work through the programming exercises he was given. But once he was done with them, he was too depleted to work on his current novel. He observed that programming took the same mental energy as writing. After having gained some experience with writing and even more with programming, I agree with this observation. Both activities are similar in a lot of ways. If you want to write fulltime and have a job at the side to pay your bills, being a programmer is a bad choice. I didn't want this to be true. I still don't. But you can't evade the truth, you can only ignore it. And over the long run, this will backfire.

During my daily blogging, I wrote some of my favourite posts, How to recognise an E-mail address with (a variation of) Ludo being a prime example for that. I had had the idea for this post for a long time. I wanted to make it perfect, spend at least a week getting it right. But then I said "fuck it", and wrote it in a day. And guess what. It isn't perfect. Even when I published it, I saw ways to make it better. I went ahead with it anyway. And I'm glad I did. But even though there are some posts I really liked, most of what I wrote during that time is awful.

One of my biggest influences is Seth Godin. His blog, and his conviction that everybody should blog daily is one of the reasons I started writing. Recently, I listened to an interview with him. He was asked the question, how much time he spends each day writing his blog. His reply was 10 hours. Naturally, not all of this time is spend typing. The reason he likes the commitment to post daily is because it puts him on the hook to write something worth reading every day. Most of his time is spend thinking about will make his next post worth reading. I like this idea. But I don't think I can sustain doing this while also working as a programmer.

One of the things I learned from posting daily is to take an idea an turn it into a post in a few hours. Writing a post that took me a week now takes less than a day. What I'm still not very good at is to find ideas worth writing about. I believe that part of this can't be enforced and takes time to ponder. I like being a programmer, so I won't take the time to do this 10h per day. But spending 10h per week seems like something I can do.

So that's what I'm going to do. I once again created a habit tracker, holding me accountable in writing one post per week. I don't know what I will write about, but I'm overflowing with ideas again. I will experiment. But I will make sure to focus on experiments that are manageable. Failing is not only fine, but part of trying something worth doing. The key is to recover quickly. And not to pursue reactive goals that burn me out, and make me leave writing for almost five months.