I don’t have a problem with writing. Sure, posts have been thin on the ground, and if I didn’t have my “one post a month” streak to keep up this blog might be finished.

But the real problem is with publishing. With finishing. With catching one idea from the many flitting through my head and chasing it down till it’s done.

In practice, I probably work on at least 4 - 5 posts a month, and scribble down rough ideas for many more posts. And yet, we’re in the ninth month of the year, and this is only the ninth post. It’s also the seventh of those nine posts to be published on the last day of the month.

There’s always a reason

2022 was the first year where I was nowhere near 60,000 words for the year, and where most months had only one post. It was also the year I spent three months in northern America. It’s not surprising I didn’t write much while preparing to travel and while actually travelling. But it doesn’t really explain why I struggled to get things published January - March 2022. Or why I got back in October convinced that with travel over I’d write more - and then didn’t.

Similarly this year, preparing for and then walking the Larapinta Track was a big deal. It certainly explains why I had difficulties getting other things done April - June. But it really doesn’t explain why I struggled in January, or why I wasn’t writing more in July and August.

Another reason comes to mind: January is the height of summer, the days are long, and I’m much more likely to go walking after work than to come home and write. Probably true - but what about July and August? Historically I’ve been more likely to publish posts in the winter months. I still go walking, but the days are short, so evenings are more available. Plenty of time to write, and I’m pretty sure I did write. Publishing, well, not so much.

What other reasons are there? I take a lot more photographs than I used to, so sorting through photos does take more of my time (as well as many of the photos suggesting post ideas of their own).

How about “I’m too busy tonight”? That’s always a good one. (after all, if there’s something else that has a higher priority, it’s fair enough that I don’t write so much).

The problem is that this can easily go on for a week or two. I find that working on a post hovers near the top of my priority list without ever actually getting to the top.

Are they reasons? Excuses? A bit of both? Who can tell?

But I still think the reason is that I’m just not good at finishing things. If I were better at finishing things, the reasons I’ve given would all still exist - they just wouldn’t mean publishing on the last day of the month quite so often.

The cycle continues

And so, each month I start with the idea that this time, it will be different. I’ll finish off the things left in draft from last month. I’ll capture brand new ideas. I’ll publish early and often.

In practice, what happens is that I worked really hard to get the previous month’s single post out. That rules out the first few days - not only am I not wanting to write so much, but there are probably some other things to catch up…

Then it gets to halfway through the month. There may have been drafts, perhaps even extensive drafts, but nothing is quite published. Not to worry - the next week will still turn the month’s writing around (honest!)

Then once more it gets near the end of the month. Maybe there are more drafts than there were at the halfway mark, and maybe the drafts that were there are further along, but there’s still nothing nearly ready for publication. So I frantically scramble to finish whatever can be finished, and the rest gets left.

The numbers bear this out: Years ago, I discovered that I write more (or at least publish more) on the last four days of a month than the whole first half. And I suspect that trend is even more pronounced now than it was then.

This isn’t a new problem

Back in 2020, I reflected on Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle (or: Never getting anything done). Reading through what I wrote, I see a lot that I recognise. It may feel like it’s got worse since 2022, but it was clearly a problem in 2020.

Setting deadlines

From the earliest days of this blog, I’ve set deadlines for particular posts. Often it’s been for anniversaries - say, anniversaries of personal experiences or anniversaries of significant events.

Another common one is year boundaries - things I want to finalise before the end of a calendar year, or things I want to write about shortly after the turning of the year. Reflections on the year passed. Plans for the year ahead. That sort of thing.

Even in the first year of the blog, back when I was more prolific and the posts didn’t seem to get stuck quite as much, I still didn’t always meet the deadlines I set. Sometimes that would mean finishing the post and publishing it later than I intended. Sometimes that would mean the post went back into draft and stayed there for another month or another year. After all, readers wouldn’t know either way (unless I told them…).

In recent years, I’ve probably missed vastly more deadlines than I’ve hit, and a fair percentage of those posts still aren’t published months or even years after the supposed deadline. Will they ever be published? I’d like to think so, and some of them I chip away at every now and then, but I’ve got to say honestly it feels like “No”.

I was always amused by the classic Douglas Adams quote:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Back in Uni days, I made an art of just meeting assignment due times. The same was true in my religious days of leading Bible classes and editing the youth group magazine. Sometimes it happens at work as well.

I said after I quit religion that my blog had replaced my lay preaching, and it’s partly true (including the 4AM finishes!) The main difference is that blogging doesn’t have the same consequences for going down to - and beyond - the wire. I may set deadlines for myself, but the only really hard deadline is publishing a post by the end of the month.

The cycle is also something I could see in my university days. Each semester I was going to be better prepared and better organised. Each time this was the semester where I’d get onto things early and it wouldn’t go down to the last minute. And perhaps that works for some people, but there I always found there was something due this week. How can I possibly prepare for the deadline three weeks away when there are closer deadlines? (similarly, it was not good when I had exams on multiple consecutive days, since I would have great difficulty preparing for the second exam till after the first one was done).

Blogging isn’t quite the same, since failing to publish regular and scintillating posts won’t affect my perfect grade or ruin my life. But if I miss a deadline and then keep working on the post anyway, it makes it more likely that I then miss the next deadline. And the longer it takes to finalise a post, the more likely it is that I abandon it to move onto a new, shiny idea.

One post a month - no matter what!

This is the 94th consecutive month where I’ve published at least one post. I’m proud of that record. But it looks like 51 of those months (more than half…) have had only one post. And that includes most of the months in 2022 and 2023 and every month so far in 2024. I don’t even want to think about how many of those single posts fell on the last day of the given month.

Now is a good time to re-emphasise: This is usually not because I’m not writing. I do continue to work on at least 4 - 5 post ideas a month. But as far as publishing goes, it’s nearly five years since I last published five posts in a month, and more than 18 months since I last published three posts in a month.

I used to reckon that in any calendar year I’d have at least as many words in significant unpublished drafts as I did in published posts. This year it looks like the multiple is more like 2.5x. If I’d been able to publish even half of those drafts I wouldn’t be writing a post like this right now…

Procrastination

Subconsciously, at least, if I can delay starting actual writing till late enough in the evening, I can then go to bed without having to wrestle with it. It’s tomorrow’s problem. Or at least, it’s tomorrow’s problem till it gets near the end of the month and I know I can’t keep putting it off.

In practice, what this might look like is that I say “I’ll head for bed in an hour - just enough time to do a bit of writing first!” Then I distract myself with other things, and it’s like I’m mentally counting down to when it’s late enough that I can say “OK, I’m really not going to achieve anything tonight - guess I’ll do better tomorrow”.

Even where I manage to start working on a draft, there seems to be a mental resistance to getting it close to finished. I can only chip away at the edges, not do anything more substantial. And so a thing that feels like it should be a day takes weeks - enough weeks that it’s stuck in draft forever.

Recently I was reading Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write. The quote that grabbed me most was this:

Writers become addicted to procrastination. It gives them something to do instead of writing: namely, they can hate themselves.

This rings very true to me. To be 100% clear, I don’t actually hate myself, but I do get frustrated by my continuing and long-standing inability to finish and publish my writing. And yes, sometimes the “procrastination” is “completing other important activities”. Sometimes, well, it’s not.

This has always been a problem, but it seems like it’s more of a problem now.

Writing about other things

Last week, I was working on a different post that was supposed to be my guaranteed one post for the month. For the record, it was actually a post that had a soft deadline of early August, and a hard(er) deadline of the end of August.

The post is a photo post, and I’d finalised the photos to include and given them captions weeks ago. All I had to do was write a little more explanatory text for each photo and then publish. Sounds easy - right?

What actually happened was that writing a couple of introductory paragraphs brought me onto a completely different topic, which I wrote about at length. It was fun writing, and it flowed a lot better than the actual post would have. But it also did very little to advance the post I wanted to publish.

Perhaps some of those words would be very useful to publish, but they would probably need to be a separate post. And if I did that, should it be before the post I was supposed to be working on? After it? Something else? Clearly, in the end I dropped all that back to draft and moved on to work on this post instead.

If I listened to people writing about writing and about productivity, they would probably say something like “You should take it bird by bird”. Which seems like a really good idea. But I’ve actually read the book, and Anne Lamott also talks about how often what you think you’re writing about turns out something quite different from what you end up writing about. This isn’t a bad thing.

Would I be well served by picking one top priority post and working on it till it was done? Perhaps. But, rightly or wrongly, sometimes it feels like the choice is between actually writing what is flowing right now (whether it will ever be publishable or not) or staring at the draft of the post I should be working on and wondering why I can’t advance it. And where that’s the case, it’s hard for me to justify taking the proper, disciplined path when I don’t think it will actually achieve what I want.

Yes, if I were at work and it was a document or an email that really needed to be completed today, I would figure out ways of making it work. But this is my personal writing. It’s a hobby that’s meant to improve my life. The deadlines I set are meant to help me achieve that goal, not to turn me completely against writing in the name of productivity.

I do think that, on balance, I would be better off if I published more. I know the very act of getting a piece of writing finalised makes me more careful about it, and also takes me in directions that I wouldn’t go if I were just writing rough notes for me. Often I understand whatever I’m writing about much better by the end.

But by its very nature, the act of trying to finalise it also often takes me on tangents, sometimes extensive ones. That can be frustrating sometimes - but it’s also fine. I still learn from that writing process even if I don’t publish it.

This post will just take a day…

The ideal is that I have a simple idea, I write about it the same day, then I publish it. That’s something I did occasionally in the first year of the blog, but I’m not sure it’s ever worked out that way in the last few years. Sometimes it ends up with “one day” becoming a week or a month, but at least with a post to show at the end of it. Sometimes it ends up with the post uncompleted before I switch back to the previous “priority” post or the next brilliant idea that’s only going to take a day (honest!). And even where I finish it - if I’d known a particular post would take a week or a month and then go back to draft anyway, perhaps I wouldn’t have abandoned the more-important-feeling draft to work on it.

The other issue is that in the struggle I can easily forget why I wanted to write a draft in the first place. Yes, it can be a struggle picking up drafts that are months or years old and figuring out where I was going with them - but there are no guarantees even with things that are a few days old.

But I think it’s also to some extent self-fulfilling. Because I know I don’t publish much, I don’t want to spin out important sections into separate drafts because I know they’ll never be completed. And yet keeping them in makes any draft I do even bigger, and makes it more likely that I either shelve the entire draft unpublished or spend all month working on it.

A week ago, this post was actually one of those “I’ll do it quickly tonight”. It wasn’t even the first one I’ve worked on this month. I’m glad I pushed on with it, because there are a lot of interesting things in it that wouldn’t have been in the five hundred word “I don’t have a writing problem, I have a publishing problem” post I started with. But it wasn’t meant to be this hard, or take this long.

Would I have been better going back to the original post due in August? Would it have been easier to get published? Perhaps. But ultimately, I think I need to make sure I write about the things that are actually filling my mind, not just the things I think I should be writing about or that are somewhere high up on a mental master list.

It gets overwhelming

As should be clear, the list of posts that I want to write, or that I feel it important to write, grows a lot faster than my list of published posts. Some of them are posts with extensive drafts that didn’t quite get over the line, while others are just ideas that feel important and/or interesting to me, but haven’t had a lot of work. Some go on the back burner because I can’t figure out where they’re going, or because their time has come and gone (a lot of Covid posts went that way). But most of them are still ones that I’d love to write about - it’s just a bit too hard to prioritise them all.

Often it feels like all my time gets chewed up trying to decide which post is actually the highest priority right now, leaving none left to actually work on one of the posts. As the days go by, the priorities shuffle: First one post is highest priority, then another one. Meanwhile, none of them are actually being worked on - or at least, not worked on enough to finish. Not to mention that “feeling overwhelmed” isn’t a great state of mind for focused writing…

This is also where a lot of the “just one day” posts mentioned above come from. If there’s something that’s fresh and new and is a burning idea right now, I don’t have to worry about pesky things like prioritisation or whether it’s more important than existing drafts. So long as it only takes the one evening, it isn’t going to significantly disrupt those other priorities (as above, I rarely do finish it in that one evening - but I frequently tell myself that I’m going to…).

Considering the Great Ocean Walk

I walked the Great Ocean Walk in March 2021. So March 2022 (the first anniversary) was the perfect time to write about it - right? I wrote a post about sunrises (and vampires), which had been an important experience on the GOW. I think I had a draft of the main post, but March was ticking on and other post ideas were clamouring for attention, so I put it back in the queue. March 2023 (second anniversary) I worked on it some more - then put it back in the queue again.

So at the start of the year I was determined that I would finally complete it this year. So determined that I actually did a lot of the preparation required in January and February.

How did I go? First I missed the anniversary of starting the walk (8 March). Then I missed the anniversary of finishing (14 March). Fast forward another couple of weeks, and the end of March was near without a single completed post. The Great Ocean Walk draft had become large and complicated, with far too many photos.

I finally published a part 1 on the final day of the month, and spun off the rest into a separate draft. Next month saw the second part published. It’s now more than six months from the 2024 deadline, and a whole 2.5 years from the original deadline, and the third part is still sitting in draft.

At first I was going to complete it before my next overnight walk - the Larapinta Track. That walk started near the end of May, with no Great Ocean Walk post in sight.

I completed the Larapinta Track, and returned to Melbourne in June. I don’t really know what’s happened with the remaining post since then, but most of the time I don’t think it’s even been in my top 10 “drafts to work on”…

Perhaps soon I’ll feel an urge to complete it by the end of the calendar year. Or perhaps it will never be published…

Some post ideas (or: The Great Info Dump)

Here are some of the posts I’ve worked on this year. Some of them have substantial drafts, days or weeks in the making, while others have just a few rough notes and some promise. I’ve tried to group them together in a semi-logical order, but they’re certainly not prioritised.

  • Completing my Everest challenge (done in December, this was another one that was meant to be finished before Larapinta)
  • Reawakening the Tookish spirit
  • The Scythe of Time
  • Blogging goals for 2023 (obviously never published, though ideas from it have been recycled into this post…)
  • Favourite photos from 2023
  • Mid-year photography update (guess that one’s come and gone…).
  • Everyday photography
  • Blinded by my camera
  • A feather out of place
  • Oh, hollow, hollow, hollow!
  • Why monthly photo posts didn’t work out
  • Getting used to disappointments
  • Joy
  • Trying a different route
  • The binding of the winged monkeys: A horror story (here - published 26/October/2024)
  • Becoming less British
  • The Separation Tree
  • Come, let us reason together (with the sword)
  • Finding atheist icons: Tiktaalik and friends
  • Testimonial: What atheism brought me
  • Thus endeth the Testimony
  • God could have done it another way
  • Titanic
  • Witness to a cancellation
  • In celebration of Hosier Lane
  • Considering the case against travel
  • You’ll regret it
  • Settling down
  • Local knowledge
  • Little things that make me happy
  • Trail name: Rock wallaby
  • Childhood in Denver
  • 20 Years of Australian Alpine adventures
  • An untitled soliloquy
  • You’ll never catch up
  • Places to visit in Melbourne
  • Meeting a badger

That seems like 37 posts. So, what, more than three years worth? 😛

It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these posts are eventually published. With those numbers, though, clearly many won’t ever be published. And of course these are just rough working titles - some of them may end up published under different titles (and perhaps slanted in different directions).

Looking forward

As I publish less, I think about this topic more, but it’s been true since the beginning of the blog that there has been far more I wanted to write about than I was ever able to finish and publish. I don’t know any quick fixes (or perhaps I’m just unwilling to consider the quick fixes I know of).

I need to do a lot better to have even a chance of publishing all the posts I’d like to in the remaining three months of 2024. Right now, it feels doable to publish at least a few posts each month - but I’m sure it did in the last nine months too.

It turns out that it’s often far more fun sketching out yet another ten post series than the time and effort required to publish even one of those ten posts. That’s not a good thing - but it’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Because, in the final analysis, it’s still supposed to be a hobby. A hobby that is frustrating and rewarding, but still a hobby (isn’t that what all hobbies are meant to be like? 😛)

In the meantime, I will continue to explore and try to understand the world, and writing will continue to be a part of that. That’s pretty much a guarantee, no matter what makes it onto this blog. I’m going to continue to get excited about new blog post ideas, and I’m almost certainly going to find most of them stay in draft.

Most importantly, I’m not going to take my self-worth from whether I met an arbitrary post count or word count for the year. But it would be nice to publish more…