A MUST READ! Why forcing yourself to write too much is counterproductive

in #writing6 years ago

I've noticed this trend that appears quite a lot which is the fact that many of you feel the need to write daily. Because there is a possibility for a monetary reward of our work here, most of us are highly encouraged to post as much as we can in hopes of raking in more rewards. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad in being ambitious and daily throwing your ideas onto this digital storyboard to get some upvotes, but there are some drawbacks to this aswell. As soon as you acquire this mentality you will run into several issues which I wanted to talk about so that maybe, just maybe, I'll get through to some of you and get you to slow down a bit.

Trust me, it is worth it.

You will make more mistakes

If you pressure yourself to write one or two high quality posts a day, it will become counterproductive habbit. You will end up posting something you wouldn't post otherwise, just because you didn't have anything ready for the day and you felt the need to post. You will start rushing through the creative process just to finish on time and you won't search for additional information other than what you already got in mind nor will you read through the post before publishing.

If you are in a hurry the stupidest mistakes will slip by even if you proofread the post because:

When you rush through it, you will most likely make much more spelling mistakes than you usually would and even though you proofread the whole post, when you look back (in a normal state of mind) you will notice some of the stupidest spelling mistakes you ever made.

If you are not 100% concentrated while proofreading your brain can fool you into auto-correcting the misspellings and you will go past them without noticing.

Your markdown will suck

You probably won't bother taking the extra steps to ensure that your posts shine and that is to style them using markdown. You won't bother trying to arrange your thoughts into nice looking paragraphs, resulting in a bad reading experience for those who are unfortunate enough to stumble upon your blogs. Moreover, your posts will end up looking plain and boring, driving potential readers away.

Articles that aren't pleasing to the eye at first glance has 80% chance of losing 50% potential readers halfway through the read. The longer the post, the more readers you will lose if it isn't eye catching

Yes, I just made the numbers up, but you get my point. If not, let me explain. When a post is nothing but a block of text, no one will read it. No matter how good the actual content is, and how well placed every single word in the article is, or how good the information it provides, The Fact is that most users will either scroll through to leave a spammy comment, or run away to another, more attractive post.

You will get creatively burnt out

No matter how good you think you are, you will encounter the Creativity Drought. You could write for weeks or months on end, and come up with nothing but great ideas 24/7, but at some point you will hit rock bottom and it will hurt. Not phisically but mentally, and slowly but surely, you get trapped into the despair of not knowing if you will ever find your inspiration again. Needless to say, this effect amplifies under the burden of the daily writing pressure.

Being creative is hard. Pushing yourself to constantly create written content, multiple times on a daily basis is even harder and will inevitably suck your creative juices dry! Preserve your inspirational mojo by allowing yourself to go down a gear or two and reduce the throttle on your mind.

Even physical laws confirm this. As the third Newton's law states: "With every action (creative process) there is an equal and oposite reaction (creative funk)." So don't be so hard on yourself and think that you need to constantly produce amazing content and give yourself a damn break! Your mind will appreciate it and your creativity synapses will rejuvenate and grow stronger. When you come back, your ideas turn into gold and everything that comes up to your mind is nothing less than that, it can only be more!

You won't be motivated to improve the quality of your content

By pursuing that pot of gold by constantly overproducing content you will always stay at relatively the same level you began at. You will have very little to no Time/Motivation to think about above mentioned subjects. Like an anchor, without anyone pulling you out you will be stuck at the bottom of the sea, waiting for a sperm whale to come by and drop a load of fresh upvotes on you. Over time your ideas fade, you have nothing to write about and you are stuck in the bottomless pit. Without creativity to continue or whales to help you out, you are lost in nothingness, ready to give up. Your shinly little minnow scales are eroding, and you are turning into something hideous. A couple weeks go by and you see a bright light shining. Thinking it's a sperm whale on his his way to drop a fresh load, you swim towards him only to bump into a metalic object reflecting the image of what you have become. A dreadful apparition of a happy minnow you used to be.

So if you don't want to become an Angler fish and want to preserve your minnowness, slow down a bit! All jokes aside, don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to talk shit about anyone here, I just want to give you some constructive advice and share my opinion. There are some of you who can pull this off but the majority can't. You might think you can while in fact you can't, you are cutting yourself short from the quality of ideas you would have got and results you would have had achieved if you had really given yourself some extra time.

What I'm trying to say is that

Take your time with the creative process. Write a basic draft of a post, read through it and add anything that comes up to your mind, then leave it. Step away from the pressure forcing you to keep going. Stop writing and do something you enjoy. Go play a videogame and let your mind run free or engage in another creative process that you like that doesn't pressure you to produce. Do whatever you like, just don't write untill you have been in Chill Mode for at least an hour. Then you can return back to your post with a clear mindset and a set of Fresh Eyes, ready to drop fiercely creative BOMBS on the digital storyboard.

Read through it again and work on the final form, improve your ideas and the way you present them to the readers. Find and correct all spelling errors and to finish things of stylize your blocks of text (add titles, cursive, quotations, pull images left to right or center them...) and organise them into neat, easy to read through blocks. Aesthetic is key here, and in an era where the avereage content consumers attention span is less than 3 seconds you don't really have much time to leave a good first impression.

There is no need to publish one, two, three or more written posts a day, that is just your greed emerging, not allowing the best version of yourself to shine through. Publish only when you write something that you are proud of because it's going to be on the blockchain,FOREVER! Don't just write for the sake of getting the rewards but rather strive to write about somethin that matters and increase the quality/value of your content, otherwise your readers will get bored quickly, go elsewhere and never return.

While you might find mistakes in this or my other posts and be like: "Why is this guy schooling me while he is not much better?"

Well ladies and gents that is only because English is not my native language. I didn't even get to use it in written form in years (before coming to Steemit) let alone to talk in English with someone. I'm constantly evolving and finding out new expressions and ways to neatly pack my ideas into sweet bundles of joy you will gladly indulge in. I might still make some mistakes but they are only here because I haven't yet got a chance to master this language completely. I wish you could hear what Croatian language sounds like. Well you can actually. Just find a video on youtube of someone talking in Croatian and you will be able to draw a parallel to see how hard it is for someone like me to make that big of a transition.

Even though my mind is racing 24/7, I'm always letting myself Chill Out, step away from the laptop, and take a break from whatever I'm doing when I feel like I need it. I came back to this post with a set of fresh eyes and a clear mindset a couple of times, because whenever I get stuck at a paragraph or a sentence I won't mindlessly stare at the letters trying to find a better way of arranging them into meaningful sentences. Instead, I will pick up something else, ideally something that I enjoy doing and something that will relax ,and mellow me out. Something that will shatter the creative constipation that is preventing me from spitting fire. After an hour or two, when I'm refreshed, I'll return back to the post to drop some fire, and blow your mind with a couple of well placed BOMBS.

By trail and error, after a day or two, I have sucessfully baked my masterpiece, and the insanely delicious, triple chocolate, crispy crunch, fudge cake has came out of the oven ready to be served through the digital bakery you are currently looking at.

Take my advices, give yourself more time to relax while writing, STOP OVERPRODUCING, don't be so hard on yourself and you will achieve more

It is hard enough on its own to succeed here but it is even harder if you are continually forcing yourself to do it. You won't get more upvotes by producing more content. In fact, the exact opposite might happen because here, like everywhere else in life, QUALITY always beats QUNTITY. So, no matter how many individual letters you can organize into lines of purposeful text, if they don't bring any value to the table, they are not eye-catching or thought-provoking, no one will bother to read them. Most are overly focused on producing content anyway, so they don't have time to read through all of the plain text you post.

If for some reason your feels got hurt reading this know that had no intentions in doing so. Everything I wrote here was only to help you and to serve as motivation to be better in the future!

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Waw it was like you read my blog before publishing this post. I am one of those that decided to publish atleast one post a day, not because of the upvotes or rewards I just feel its a matter of being consistent. U made some value point like the part where one begins to put pressure on ones self I think it happened to me last night as I couldn't get enough sleep trying to put a post togetherm. Thanks for sharing Sir. its really personal to me.

haha I read your blog and yeah, it seems like our minds connected on another level and we thought/wrote about the same thing in the same time.

This is very true.
For my fiction works, I'm doing my real work well ahead of my schedule for publishing on Steemit - simply for that reason! I don't want the pressure last minute. I also make myself take Sundays off - I'm only allowed to read and (maybe) fix minor typos or take notes.

I also don't force myself if it's simply not flowing - or I shift gears and work on a different piece - or do some editing or map-making for awhile. Or I work on my update post, or get next week's posts queued up. There's always something to do, so I don't have to feel useless if the words aren't writing today - there's always tomorrow (and then, yesterday, I wrote 5000 words at the end of my developing novella, bringing it to editing mode - so, today, I can relax more.)

BTW, I've found that the best way of proofreading one's own work is to read it aloud. Somehow, that gets past the auto-correct mode in the brain. It also tells you whether your words flow correctly or if one of your made-up towns needs an adjustment to the name - that happened to me recently - I had to quickly make an adjustment to the spelling/pronunciation of the town to make it easier to say.

Just my 0.02 SBD on that. :-)

Glad you recognized and fought against the writing pressure so well. That are some very well organised ways of going about this issue.

That is a great idea, havent thought about that tbh. Will try doing it from now on!

I recently learned the same.

I tried to write as much as I can and ended up stressing myself out. If you visit my blog you'll notice that I recently took a 2-day break from Steemit. It started getting a little overwhelming at times and I didn't wanted any stress to affect the quality of my posts.

If you don't write often, but still write your best whenever you do, that's more than enough for a satisfactory result. But if you keep writing all the time, you'll eventually run out of creative fuel and your posts won't be as enjoyable to read.

Creativity is never consistent.

You have good reason, nothing worth publishing and publishing and that those posts do not achieve any gain, Better to work, some day will come the triumph.

This is so true. Steemit ecosystem is like that to get more reward we should write every day without concern about quality. You explained very well the issue.

Very good your observations @runicar. Particularly I write every two or three days

I do believe that quality goes over quantity and that quality takes time as well.

I also believe that a certain habit and discipline regarding topics like these are also rewarding in their own ways. Being consistent in your tasks has it's own appeal.

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