I couldn't find my quiet keyboard this morning, but I couldn't keep quiet. I felt the words would explode out of me if I didn't let them free. Even if it woke my slumbering family on an Saturday morning and now the kids are crying. I don't think I'm good at writing. That's exactly why I have to do it. I need to learn to articulate what I think and feel. I don't have any patience for going back and fixing things. But historically, it's what I do whenever I write on a computer. I edit, over and over again. Every word is so easy to change and that's what makes it so hard. I think I'll just write until it comes out right. I'd rather not stop and question every word.
Reminders to Myself:
1) Let it be a record - if I change it then it's no longer a reflection of where I was and how far I've come.
2) I need to learn to love and accept myself in the past. The part of me that always wants to delete everything and start with a "clean slate" is the part that rejects my past self for being imperfect, messy, and different than who I am now. But I don't reject other people who are different than me so I certainly don't want to reject a version of myself who is different from me now.
3) I can learn from the journey by sharing as I go. I think the idea of sharing what I learn after the fact is silly. I won't remember what I thought and felt during the experience once those thoughts and feelings change. I have to let them go to progress. I can be a living, breathing, changing thing and my writing will show me how that change occurred.
Otherwise it's the knowledge effect:
"To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge." - Understanding and Reducing the Knowledge Effect: Implications for Writers
4) A blog is such a nice way to share things because I can share it in whatever form it takes - audio, visual, video, links, etc. Writing is an easy default, but if I find myself wanting to do something else, I can.
5) Austin Kleon is my inspiration as a creative blogger. His weekly emails share a few of his posts and thoughts each week and he responds on his blog to the things he is watching, reading, listening to, etc. He shows his work and lets it be different and inconsistent.