This post marked the end of a year-long weekly writing challenge on my now-defunct Substack newsletter. Will I bring that back one day? Who knows!

This post is my last post on this newsletter. Post number 52, with one post every single week for the past year. Okay, there have been a couple of weeks where I’ve been a day or two late (like this one, actually). My gut wants me to say that I haven’t been overly positive about the experience; especially in the past few months where the quality has decreased alongside my interest. But I’ve learned an awful lot about being a writer from this process. While I don’t necessarily believe the quality of my writing has improved much, what has gotten significantly better is my ability to simply put words on the page, a process I sometimes describe as “shitting it out”. 

When I started this blog, I had neither direction nor style. I don’t have either of these a year later. What I do have is an appreciation for how direction in a project such as this narrows the focus and throws up guardrails, providing a framework within which the writer can work and grow. Without them, I’ve essentially been floundering around doing whatever the hell I feel like, which has not been necessarily bad: I’ve written travel blogs, translated a short story from French, talked about the coming AI boom or how technology has forced little cute stores to modernize. These are the ones that have been the most fun to write, and the ones which have made me grow the most. But unfortunately to say, they are padded out by frankly dozens of rather uninteresting standard blog posts which would have been better off as private journal entries. Or even worse: writing about writing (“meta-writing), a terrible habit which is so easily done, and not at all interesting to anyone.

I can’t believe I finally get to be this guy, but Nietzsche said that Curiosity was a modern vice: “vague curiosity about everything without deep obsessions…” (says the twitter post which I will not be researching to verify) “… goes nowhere”. Being an overly curious and overly lazy individual keeping this blog has lead to some interesting phenomena: some of the posts, the treasured minority, ended up being a fantastic obsession for a week, getting between 5-10 hours of attention and editing. Yet the vast majority end up being the product of laziness as the writer settles into a low energy minimum to crank out that week’s post in as little as an hour or two. Only being lightly curious lead to a sort of blasé attitude which made the writing feel much more like an obligation than a passion project.

Part of the reason I started this blog was o get comfortable with sharing things in public. That has certainly been the effect, but my pride in the work has decreased substantially over the past couple of months. The outcome has been the same however: I find it much easier to start writing, and I’m much more comfortable with the idea of someone finding what I’ve written and reading it. But there’s still work to be done.

To summarize the most important takeaways:

1. There really is no substitute for a journal. I have kept one for years, up until approximately a year ago, and the urge to keep a private record of my life often spilled over into what I was producing to be made public facing.
2. Direction is important. By starting off in a wide range of various areas, I got to try out a lot of things (this alone makes this year of experimentation a success), but didn’t exactly improve. How better things would have been if every week was a travel blog, or a translation, rather than any number of different things.
3. Writing every day makes the act of writing much easier.