Showing Up to Write
Showing Up to Write
Continuing to show up for existing content initiatives usually beats abandoning them or starting something new.
I’m writing this when my mind is heavy with other to-dos aside from getting this blog post to you. Romanticize blogging as much as you’d like — I’m good at that, too — but blogging is a to-do. It’s also much more than that, but a to-do nonetheless. And that’s because it needs to be. Good blogging is done consistently, whether that’s weekly, monthly, or somewhere in-between. You show up even when you don’t feel like showing up, like I’m doing now. You show up for yourself, your readers, your clients, or anyone else who’s connected to your writing.
I didn’t used to keep showing up. This morning, after waking up from a night of restless sleep, I thought: “I have too many content projects. I have to give one up.” Sometimes this is true, but this time it was a trick. It was tiredness, laziness, and stress speaking instead of truth. I’ve fallen for this trick enough to know better. That’s what they call experience. Feel free to benefit from mine.
How many cool content initiatives I’ve started for myself and clients, only to abandon them when times got tough. The most difficult part is seeing projects you’ve long-abandoned but are still live pick up steam years later. This is starting to happen with my remote work blog that began receiving traction from content repurposing work I did on Quora years ago. If I kept going, it could have become what I wanted it to become: a secondary source of income and community of like-minded humans. But I stopped showing up. Now that blog is mostly a lesson. It teaches me to continue writing for my current projects — this newsletter, my movie newsletter, my screenplays, and my client work — even when morale is low or traction is low and it feels like I’m writing to no one.
I love all of these projects. If I was not working on them I’d be working on other projects I love. So why not continue showing up for these? They are equally as important as any other project and have the benefit of momentum.
Thousands of blogs are started each day and thousands come to an end. I’ve been on either side of this enough to appreciate the sliver in the middle: the blogs that continue to show up over weeks, months, and years and are responsible for some of the best content on the web. These are blogs produced by writers who continue to write through laziness, depression, and challenging times. Strong writers. Strong people.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to take breaks. Take a week off, even a month. But don’t think that ending a project will provide relief or starting a new project will fill you with more joy. The joy comes from persisting with what you already love. After 34 years in this skin suit, I’m starting to learn (or remember) this. For writing, work, relationships, and everything else.
The content marketing expert, Joe Pulizzi, who got me excited about self-publishing online in 2014 says that it takes 12 to 18 months for a content initiative to gain traction and requires consistent publishing.
“Generally, it takes 12-18 months for a content-marketing strategy to start delivering revenue of some kind. Sadly, most brands do not deliver consistently over that period. If we have a weekly newsletter, we should be delivering at the same day and time each week and never miss. Content is a promise to our customers. If we don't deliver, they simply will forget about us and seek out other information”.
Joe Pulizzi, Creator of The Tilt newsletter
So the advice to myself and you is: keep showing up for at least this amount of time. You’ll feel like quitting as I did, but don’t. Instead, switch it up somehow. Blog on paper. Do speech to blog. Take a road trip. Even take a break. But keep coming back. Do it for you. Do it for that one reader who really looks forward to what you write. Do it for your future self who will breathe in deeply and say: “I accomplished what I set out to do.” That’s rare and something I have yet to do. It’s happening, right here, right now, with all my projects, but I need to keep showing up.
Which of your writing projects will you continue to show up for?
I felt like this is something I could have written (in sentiment, if not quality), and it comes at an especially relevant time when I'm continually wrangling with "showing up." I know I have plenty of projects to show back up for too; putting them on the backburner certainly didn't provide me with any long-lasting relief.