Hi Reader,
You may (or may not) have noticed that my newsletter has failed to hit your inbox over the last several weeks.
Please accept my apologies for that. I took a self-imposed hiatus from all public-facing writing starting late last month and lasting until mid-October.
On the off-chance that you were curious about how I spent that time - or why I took the time off in the first place - I thought I'd use this space to offer some answers to those questions.
Who knows? Maybe you can use the info for yourself the next time you're deciding if a small break is in your - or your audience's - best interest.
Why I took some time off
Basically, I stopped writing because my work had gotten stale. I was writing the same stuff in the same way over and over again and I was getting sick of it. I know some people on a few platforms who don’t mind going back to their hits on a regular basis but I find it unbearably dull to write the same story 20 different ways in a month.
The reason my writing had gotten repetitive was because my life had gotten repetitive. Not a lot of new stuff was happening personally or professionally, so the well was running dry. There’s only so many ways you can write the phrase, “Same old, same old,” without sounding like an old man retelling his favorite boring story.
But it wasn’t just a lack of new stories to tell. I also ran out of steam because I encountered a motivational drought. My stories on Medium weren’t getting boosted. I wasn’t getting a lot of external recognition for my work. And other areas of public writing were similarly fruitless.
I’ve written in the past about the importance of finding your writing motivation in places you control and how important it is to be your own source of inspiration. You just can’t rely on the reading public to consistently deliver “attaboys” exactly when you need them to.
But, in this case, I ignored my own advice (as I often do). I looked to the outside world to feed my need for acknowledgement and found it lacking.
That combination — a lack of things to write about and a lack of tangible reward for the things I was still writing — proved to be a pretty powerful demotivator.
What I did during my time off
I did a few things I’m happy about during my time off from public writing. First and foremost, I threw myself into my copywriting work for my main client. I’m proud to say I got a shit-ton of stuff done and made a little bit of money while I was doing it.
Almost as importantly, I looked a little more deeply into the queue of stuff I had intended to publish over the next month. Part of me wanted to take a break from writing but keep publishing by relying on the stuff I’d pre-written.
As soon as I took a close gander at this crap, though, I knew that wasn’t an option. This work was bad. Like, really monotonous, boring, pointless, derivative, and dull. My lack of enthusiasm during the writing process had shone through the text. In short, the work as boring as I was bored while writing it.
So, I did what I had to do. It was the literary equivalent of taking an old, sick dog out behind the barn. I took a big-ol’ delete key to the whole, godawful mess. All the hackneyed, half-finished stuff, all the complete-but-uninspired gibberish, and all the poorly considered outlines went right into the virtual trash can.
I thought this might be hard to do. I thought maybe I should try to salvage some of this prose for a later polishing session. But it wasn’t, and I didn’t.
It was strangely liberating. Like, pulling out a fresh canvas and starting from scratch. Freed from my old (bad) ideas, I was now able to come up with some new (slightly less bad) ideas.
The end result
So, at the end of the day, I’m left with a clean slate. I’ve got room to run, the energy to follow through, and the desire to come up with something new to say.
Did I necessarily have to take almost a month off and delete over thirty days worth of content to reach that result?
Maybe not.
But it sure didn’t hurt. And I’m glad I did it.
Thanks for reading,
Steve
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