Writing is a learning

What to write, and what not to write depends on us. In this post, I'm analyzing why I wanted to be an independent writer and not just a designer.

When we write, we’re trying to scribble what’s on our minds with the words we learned from our journey so far. And then there are some moments, where we struggle with how to express a feeling or a situation, right? Yes. Writing is not easy! I believe it’s a valuable skill that you can develop as you practice more.

I encouraged many people to write. I’m really happy about that.

Monologue

I used to love to write reviews, travelogues, and other kinds of writing like journals in my school time. There was a time when I read so many travelogues, novels, and stories in my native language. A few people inspired me to write, S. K. Pottekkatt and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer were some of them.

But at a point in my life, that fire to write, and read was buried under a pile of ashes because I got distracted with other things. I'm in search of that inspiration to write clear things with my occasional blogs like this. Right now, it’s not just pen and paper. We have a lot of tools to express ourselves and that is also a distraction. Never let a tool hold you back is a lesson needed in this time.

I think my online life started around 2010. And up until 2014, it was like a dog chasing a car. I became a consumer-only persona. And that compressed my creativity in me, in many ways. I stopped exploring new books. But it also opened many doors. I remember exploring all the blogging platforms and trying to find a place for myself. I didn't know how to express my thoughts then. I had a lot of ideas to test but never found a like-minded community, still searching.

During my Mumbai life, I tried to set up a blog several times. I had the opportunity to write a lot of beautiful things as it was happening, but I procrastinated on that thought and initiation. Mostly because I had this feeling that “not now”.

I believe blogging is back in many forms. Traditional social media like Facebook is dying and modern social media boosts content for capturing people’s attention. In one way or another, we're evolving in terms of consumption and creation.

There are three kinds of online personas in my experience.

1. One who consumes and engages without any creation.

2. One who observes, but does not participate.

3. And the last one who consumes, observes, and creates.

I went through all this and am currently in the third phase.

Writing for what?

During school times, we used to get homework like writing essays and other kinds of notes in two or more pages, right? Remember?

I don't know how this works worldwide, I’m from Southern India.

Now thinking, I didn't even know what it all meant. That was all an opportunity to strengthen our writing. However, the system was more focused on the quantity of writing rather than the quality. So people tried to fill it with gas content!

An A4-sized paper can contain a maximum of 600 words with medium handwriting I guess. While I started blogging, I never bothered about these insights, but Substack has this feature where we can see the count as we write. 600 words seems like a small note now!

You know, some people populate the internet with a bunch of AI-generated content. They write a few things in the beginning, in the middle, and at the tail end, and then they will infuse AI-generated content in between or sometimes in full.

I don't have a problem with this type of content creation if it’s in the “how to” category. But if it’s intended for people who love to read, I really find AI-infused writing to be a scam. I want genuine experience.

Many people inspired me. Also, sometimes I get bored with a few of their posts too. This is all usual. I get hope and confidence by reading others’ thoughts. Because they might be saying something which I’m thinking, but still haven't figured out.

You can be inspired by others’ writing without copying and plagiarizing.

Like, when you read something from someone, it will naturally create a train of thoughts and imaginations¹ in your mind. And that will create branches. And that will again create branches it will go like this knowingly or unknowingly. Like a butterfly effect.

Just a sample point of view. This will go on and go on and go on!

Our mind is a vast sea of ideas and innovations. It’s up to us whether to trim down the noise and give it a chance to explore something.

Writings will give you closure on many things. That is why when emotionally hurt, people post sad quotes and rant or vent out to someone via chats. I’ve heard that some people like to solve issues via text form. It all makes sense, you know.

When you speak or talk about a complex topic, it’s natural that you may sound a little different. We’re just spitting out our thoughts in words in a fraction of a second.

But when communicating via texts, we're using the “what you type is what you get” format. We’re seeing our thoughts on live and there's still room for improvement. You can think with your writing, I think you won't get that from AI.

Writing for whom?

Writing is an expression but think about the reflection too. Do you plan to write this for someone, or an audience with a specific mindset or for yourself? It matters if you're expecting anything in return from your writings.

If you’re expecting readers, you need marketing and distribution until you reach a certain point. There are a lot of writers out there. And hundreds of thousands of content. Depending only on SEO will not work in the beginning.

Occasionally or when I feel like it, I like to write movie and TV show reviews not for “review-review” but as an expression of how I felt after watching it. I wrote a few and a lot of them are in draft, you can read them here if you like.

There is no restriction needed for your writing. You can write freely, but you need to categorize it accordingly. One thing I realized is that there will always be an audience for your writing in one way or another.

The below image is the first article I wrote. This was on Medium back in 2018. I find it very difficult to add a hyperlink in Dribbble. So once I found out the solution, I just wrote about it in simple terms and then I forgot about it. I didn't expect anything in return. After a point, I started to receive emails about the post insights.

A screenshot from my Medium insights

And my article ranked at the top for a lot of time. But when Dribbble added this functionality, it is not relevant now and traffic was reduced naturally. But it still ranks.

Google search result

I could have created multiple articles like this to gain an audience. But my mind keeps pushing me back like “This is not what you need”.

I still write for no one specifically. I just write. More than 100 posts now. I hope that one day I’ll also find like-minded people.

Writing for why?

“You own what you wrote” is an interesting point of thought. If it is published with a timestamp, no one can take that from you. Also, it’s important to note that you are responsible for your writing.

In most cases, writing is thinking out loud. We have a lot of quality thoughts and ideas somewhere in our minds. Until we try to write them, we may never know the potential of it. Some might cause problems or chain reactions while some might be an inspiration.

Einstein–Szilard letter and Anne Frank's Diary.

In this digital time, we have a lot of ways to generate insights from our writing. Like how many words, and sentences we wrote, and how much time it required to read all this. For a passionate writer, this doesn't make any sense. But still, I believe that insights are good for finding out patterns and other things.

If you’re using Grammarly, you probably know about their weekly insight emails, right?

Some of you are may concerned about privacy with Grammarly. I understand that and I took that risk when I picked this tool back in 2018. From then to December 5, 2023, a total of 1,354,145 words were analyzed. I’m being optimistic here about this.

I’ve been on a different journey since August and I wanted to know how I was doing. Because all this time I wrote my reflections both online and offline. Below is a graph of the total words, alerts shown, and unique words² I wrote during this time.

Graph generated with Grammarly weekly email insights with the help of Graphy

The below graph grabbed my attention. It’s amusing to analyze ourselves by just writing, right? I started to realize the number of tones we share while communicating with each other. It was different before August. So I guess, situations decide how we see things.

From Grammarly’s email. I wish they included an option to see graphs by default.

I wanted to check the whole year, but that’s a lot of manual tasks.

And by using https://howwefeel.org/ I also noticed that the emotions we experience daily are really under-rated. It’s not just happy, sad and angry. We have to understand a little more deeper about this.

I’m really grateful to all the people who inspired me to write. This post is an appreciation for all those people. Some of them have passed away, but their written thoughts are still finding their way to the people who need them. Writing is the best form in which we can be truly immortal.

We’re all a work in progress. Think with your writing, and learn from it - you don’t even have to publish it. It’s only for you.

Photo by Rama Laksono on Unsplash

For offline writing, I suggest Obsidian.

If you reach here, I hope that writing becomes a source of happiness for you too.

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A few other posts related to Substack and writing.

Journalism via Substack

Write more

1. I once used the username “imagine designer” when I was in the observing stage.

2. In reality, the unique word count might be far less, because right now it’s just a sum. It comes like this “You used more unique words than 94% of Grammarly users.”