Posts tagged writing
Posts tagged writing
In the last eight years I’ve written maybe a million words of content. That’s episodes of SciShow and Crash Course and blog posts and Vlogbrothers videos, and overly-wordy responses to really simple Tumblr asks. I’m not even counting emails, which would probably bump me up another million words.
In those eight years, I’ve tweeted over 10,000 tweets. With an average of 10 words per….I’ve written 100,000 words OF TWEETS!
The vast majority of those words were consumed by their intended audience within a week of them having been written. And that’s why I wrote them…because I wanted to elicit a response. I wanted to make something that people would enjoy or be moved or changed by. Very quickly after having written them I knew whether they’d had the affect I intended. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but the important thing is I KNEW!
But a book…GOOD LORD…it’s like “write a hundred thousand words BUT OH NO! DON’T SHARE IT WITH ANYBODY!” It’s so opposite of how I’ve lived my life for the last eight years. I don’t have a solution to this problem because I think that not sharing a novel while you’re writing it is important. I don’t want to lock myself into a beginning when I’m not quite sure how the end is going to go, but it’s extremely frustrating.
Having a thing that I think people will like and then just letting it sit there on my hard drive totally weirds me out. It feels wrong. I’ve shared it with a couple people and I’ve gotten to talk about it with them, which has been really wonderful, but my brain has gotten used to a certain work/reward/obligation/work cycle and this really isn’t fitting into it. A book is more work/obligation/work/obligation/work/obligation/work/work/work/obligation/work/reward-if-you’re-lucky.
It’s just hard…every time I write something I like I think “Oh I wonder if other people will like this” and then I’m like “Well, I guess I’ll find out…in a FREAKING YEAR! MAYBE!” It’s just hard…so I’m complaining about it instead of doing something about it.
This. So very, very, much this. Except substitute “papers” and “thesis” for “book” in my case.
(Source: edwardspoonhands)
My main impetus for starting a blog was to improve my writing. While I think I’ve accomplished that in the 5 years since I started, I’d like to increase the speed at which I write, and establish a regular writing routine (something I’m definitely lacking/procrastinating about currently). To hopefully fix this, I’m considering assigning myself an outreach writing challenge project to write 250 articles highlighting newly described species in 2015. That’s pretty much an article every weekday for the entire year (with a few days buffer built in for holidays, travel, etc). I’d keep each article to no more than 300 words, and I’d distribute them taxonomically to reflect global biodiversity (i.e. 1 extant mammal all year, but a beetle pretty well every week; take that vertebrate bias).
Not only will this hopefully establish better writing habits, and allow me to learn about organisms that I’m currently pretty clueless about, but it should also draw some attention to a lot of new species which may otherwise go unrecognized. YAY Taxonomy!
I’m not going to call it a New Year’s Resolution, because resolutions are meant to be broken, but rather a goal, something to strive towards. Am I crazy to try it? Maybe, but I think it’s worth a shot.