Tag Archives: writing

Publish button pangs

It’s hard to believe that I started blogging 13 years ago! I’ve gone through many different web addresses, and I’ve published things on other platforms like wikis and discussion forums, (and even in a book), but blogs are my favourite way to share.

The challenge with blogs, and even this daily one, is that all these years later I still get pangs before hitting the publish button. I still want to read over my post one more time before I commit to publishing. Is my message clear? Did I miss something? Is my grammar good? Is there a better word I could use to describe… ?

And then I still make mistakes! My last post was written on election night, and scheduled for the next morning. I woke up, meditated, re-read the post, made a few small changes, and hit the update button. All nice and easy. I dropped my kid to school and my post got published while I was seeing a teacher and some students off on a field trip. My post auto Tweets, posts to Facebook, and to LinkedIn.

I walk back to my office and I check Twitter, someone ‘Liked’ my post and on a whim, I click on it and re-read my post again, this time as a published, ‘final’ copy…

I find two typo’s. Two careless mistakes! How could I have missed these, they are so blatant! So I go to my WordPress App, click the edit button and make the changes. It’s 8:15am, the post was live for 1/2 an hour, maybe 3 people have read it, but I’m embarrassed. Ashamed. Upset with myself for being so careless.

It’s stupid. I know it is. But any work I’ve done until now to reduce the publish button pangs is gone. They are back in full force.

The weird thing though is that I like it! I like the pressure I put on myself. I believe I write better because of it. I believe I care more because of both a real, and an imagined audience. I get to be a writer! I also get to be my own editor, and I want to be excellent at both of theses things.

Let the pangs come. I want to be hesitant before hitting publish. I want to feel the pressure to do well, to not make careless mistakes, and to look things over one more time. These pangs are a badge of honour that I wear as a blogger.

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P.S. I’ll still make mistakes, so feel free to point them out to me. You will be doing me a favour.

P.P.S. I’ve seen students care far more about their writing because they were sharing their work publicly. They too can benefit from the publish button pangs!

Blank Page

Sometimes I have a thousand ideas running through my brian and I can’t get them all out.

Sometimes I look at a blank page and my mind goes to mush. My mind isn’t blank, it’s not that I’m not thinking, rather what I am thinking involves being distracted by unimportant things. Writing a daily blog puts me in a dance between these two states. Sometimes I’m driving in my car and I think of 2 or 3 things to write about in less than 5 minutes. I will create draft titles and put a sentence starter or two on the page before I hit save. (No, I don’t do this while I’m still driving.)

Other times I can sit with a blank page and have no idea what to write? I go through my drafts and don’t really want to expand on any of them. I check the news, and search some of my social media feeds, and suddenly I’m no longer writing. This is when the discipline of just starting to write is important. This post was called ‘Wrapping’ and while it might sound interesting to some, the first few lines told me that I wasn’t going to unwrap the idea. So I deleted the title and once again faced the blank page.

In ‘The War of Art‘, Steven Pressfield said, “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” I have the audio version of this book and I have listened to it twice. The fact is, that although the blank page can be intimidating, it doesn’t hold any more power over you than you give it. It can be an unapproachable mountain, it can be a desert plain, it can be a white-out blizzard, or it can just be a blank page, waiting for you to add some ink, (or digital ink).

This page is no longer blank. From the second sentence, this has been easy to write. It has taken me less time than most of my posts usually do. The words have flowed, the quote I was looking for above came up very quickly in a Google search, and so even that wasn’t a distraction. I just had to get past the blank page.

What are the blank pages that hold you back? And what can you do to get them started?

Challenging myself to write

I consider myself a blogger, but in the last year and a half to two years I’ve been writing very little. I realize that in my 10th year of blogging that I’d go through times when my writing would ebb or decrease, but this seems to be a slump that I’m not getting out of.

What’s weird is that I still think in blog posts. I come up with ideas, and I start writing them in my head… But they never get to ‘paper’, or rather, they never go digital.

So here is my attempt to change that. After being untouched for a long time, my daily-ink will go daily… For the month of May.

If I’m truly inspired, I’ll write something to share on my pair-a-dimes blog, but I will put something here daily.

I’m doing this because I believe that I am most enthusiastic and passionate about my job when I’m blogging about education, and I miss the ‘me’ that used to blog regularly… I hope this process helps get that ‘creative-thinking’ part of me back! 🙂

Ink is ink is ink

When I started my daily ink, I really thought I could do a daily hand-written journal and that I could stick with it. But the reality is that despite wanting to live in both worlds: http://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/daily-ink-both-worlds I am very tied to the digital world! I walk around with my phone, I don’t walk around with my journal. I went away on a retreat last week and took my journal with me. I didn’t feel like writing on the long journey, and was fully occupied on my holiday while there… thus no daily-ink. I came back and left my journal in my travel bag, which I just found today almost a week later. Ooops!

I really like the idea of finding time each day to write something even though I’m a slow blogger and will often go a week or two before crafting something for my Pairadimes blog: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com I also like to post links! I like my ideas to be connected to other ideas. So, with that in mind, I still want to try and continue with my daily ink but sometimes, or rather most times, it will be digital ink and sometimes it will be on paper and hand-written in my messy printing. But the reality is that in some ways ink is ink and it doesn’t matter what medium I use, but in other ways digital print really is different!