Writing challenges are hard. I am trying to write an article every single day for the month of February. Thank god this year isn’t a leap year.
5 days in and I’ve already fallen behind. Yesterday I did not manage to come up with a topic that I wanted to write about. The pressure that I’ve put on myself to have every single post be interesting is stifling my output. I don’t want to write an article that isn’t up to my standards.
I think it was Kobe who explained this best as why he goes as hard as he can every single game. It’s because the fans are there to see him perform, they don’t care that he’s tired, and they don’t care that strategically this game isn’t worth that much. They have come to see a show and it’s his obligation to go all out with his performance.
I feel a similar mentality when it comes to publishing articles on this blog. Every article may be the only article you ever read of mine, so I want it to be a good impression. I don’t want the fact that I’m forcing myself to write every day to be an excuse for the subpar quality of my content.
Yet here I am. Today I have to write two articles to make up for yesterday. This one, a very meta commentary on the struggles I’m facing doing this challenge, will count for February 5th, but I still need to come up with a second article that I feel “provides value”. It’s this pressure that held me back yesterday because nothing I thought of was good enough.
My first instinct when trying to come with a subject was to google “blog post topics”.
With 900 million results, this seems to be quite a popular dilemma. While reading 81 Topic Ideas for Starting a Blog I realized that most blogs have a theme or topic. This challenge has no topic.
When I think of a blog topic two thoughts immediately come to mind. The first is the movie Julie & Julia, which is based on a successful food blog. The other is the generic tech company blog where it’s all about things that the employees have learned, tech or business related, and usually ends with some sort of plug promoting the company. Perhaps if this blog had some sort of central theme it would be easy to come up with ideas for new articles.
Let’s dig deeper into 189 Creative Blog Post Ideas (also how are they creative if you take them from another website?). #2 is embed relevant videos… is it just me or this is more of a tip than a full idea. I am by no means trying to shit on the author of the list, but come on man: I can’t base an entire article around embedding videos…. unless I talk about the tech behind it… oh wait there may be something there….
Anyways, #19 is What Would You Love To Learn How To Do? and honestly it is to become a better writer (but also ballroom dancing). The purpose of this blog is to let me practice writing and to become a better writer, but maybe I should seriously consider a theme or general topic to write about? Perhaps I could do Surviving My Final Semester at UofT.
Until I find something to talk about, I guess I’m going to take the suggestions I’ve gotten.