The mere act of writing involves a certain amount of hubris.Writing something, and particularly publishing something, assumes that what you have written is worthy of being preserved and subsequently read. In other words, your thoughts are valuable enough for others to read about them.
It is not arrogance or folly, per se. After all, writing invokes no more requirement that others take in your thoughts than speaking them aloud does. However, there is something to be said for how one assumes it is worth taking both the additional time and effort to commit ones thoughts to a more permanent form.
I bring this up not as an in-depth essay on the merits of writing, nor the merits of those who should (or should not) be writers, but rather because of a bit of hubris that occurred here recently.
Last week, I committed publicly to writing every day here on my freelance writing blog. For those of who follow along, you have no doubt noticed that no such thing has happened. This might have just been an embarrassing lapse, except for in the last daily post I mentioned how easy it was to write ahead for your blog by scheduling posts in WordPress.
With the 4th of July weekend coming, I knew there was no way that I would sit in front of my computer composing pithy and engaging blog posts rather than enjoying the July 4th festivities and long weekend. Therefore, I followed my own advice and wrote up some blog posts ahead of time. What I did not do was schedule them to be published.
Doh!
So instead of a website building exercise, there was a troubleshooting exercise followed by a a bit of embarrassment.
Moving On
There is even more hubris in writing down advice for others. Now, not only are you suggesting that your thoughts should be heard and considered by others, you are also suggesting that you not only know something of value, but others would find improvement in someway by heeding your words. This is neither folly nor overly bold, but it does seem poor form to become one of the many do as I say, not as I do prophets out there.
On the other hand, it is a very different thing to know something than it is to do something. For example, everyone knows that the road to riches is nothing more than spending less money than you make. Losing weight takes nothing more than eating less and exercising more. Being healthier requires only that you exercise regularly and make healthy choices. Doing those things is a lot harder than knowing what to do.
It is with these thoughts that I will once again state that writing every day is the best thing you can do for your writing, both as a skill and as a business. I will endeavor to do just such a thing here at ArcticLlama both to build my craft and my freelance writing business. I do not claim that I will never falter, but I can assure you that both you and I will be better off if we do our best.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to schedule some blog posts.
Awesome post 🙂 I always wonder if you’re using a wp plugin like wp-simplicity to get out great content regularly/and make a living on your blog. Just tried it myself actually and it helped a lot making life easier. Watch the video haha and youll see 😛 Anyways, looking forward to the next post. (You don’t need to approve this, I just wanted to let you know personally :P).