prodissues

On Not Writing

Sun 17 April 2016 by yaniv

I'm sitting in Pret, at my favorite spot in the store, dark coffee with tons of sugar, listening to Requiem For A Dream for the gazillionth time. This was the soundtrack of my life for the last month, playing in an infinite loop, and with every repeat charging me with more energy. So much energy, that I'm about to explode.

For a month now, I'm doing some of the coolest stuff I've ever did. At work, the product and team I'm leading got the recognition it deserve1, being featured by Mark Zuckerberg in the opening keynote at F82.

In parallel, I'm working on my own thing, and while looking for a technical co-founder, I've started to get my hands dirty with code. Elastic search, python scripts, email scrapping, logstach and kibana are just few of the technologies I got myself familiarized with.

Everything good except for one thing: I didn't write a single post during all that time. If writing was part of me, this would have been the best month for it to flourish. I could share so many experiences, learning and lessons; I could also even brag (just a little) about some the successes my team had. But nothing got documented. This month was like a dream vacation where I took no photos.

But all is not lost. When I started this blog, I "bought" an "insurance policy", specifically for that situation. I initiated the Blog Writing meetup and surrounded myself with people who are passionate about writing, who can support me, while supporting each other, to stay on the wagon (or is it off the wagon...).

This week, I made a claim to my insurance. In our monthly meetup, I shared with the group my struggle in keep writing during this crazy month, and my frustration when finding that the writing mussel got weaken so quickly when not being trained for only this short period, hindering me from getting back to writing.

Fortunately, my investment paid off. I learned from members of the group not only the writing-hacks that might help me get back on writing, but that I'm not the only one suffering from those symptoms.

Sue Hellene, a novelist and a published author, shared that she has different moods for writing, and can't write productively at night. She also related with my feeling that writing is like a muscle, and that it weakens if not trained regularly. Melody had many good tips to overcome writers' block. For her, setting a deadline for each post, absorbing herself in the editor, eliminating any possible destruction (read - disconnect from the internet...), and, sometime, the a glass of wine, help keeping her writing on track. Dee-on reminded me of the morning pages, which were my initial inspiration. And lastly, Joe's post, "The Look of Silence", helped me think of my posts as notes-to-self again, and not worried about those who might read them, hence freeing myself to write whatever on my mind.

And thanks to that group, here I am, writing again. Sitting in this coffee place, starting from a morning page that turned into this post, my Emacs is in full screen and I'm committed to push publish before going back home. Nothing special, interesting, or helpful in this post, just a small, personal, step forward; a light jog after a month of no exercises. Rarely will a quote from physics will be that appropriate:

"Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." Newton's First Law of Motion


  1. At least from the technology world. wish it would have a fraction of it internally... 

  2. Details on what that product is will come in a follow-up post...