Find Meanings to Continue Writing

After writing Overcome the Resistance to Write for so many days, I started to feel bad again. I felt every day’s growth was a small incremental process, so I don’t have insights to share, intellectually and emotionally. I texted my teacher, Tung.

He replied to me with the following two messages.

1. One of my students wrote that in order to start this challenge, you only need 1 reason. but in order to finish, you’ll need to come up with new reasons along the way. Try to find some. Assign more meaning to what you’re doing.
2. In the challenge, after day 15, I tell my students to look back on all of the pieces they’ve written and find: a) pieces that are fucking good (in terms of stats as well as your feeling writing it). Then expand on the topic/ format. b) pieces that you feel like the idea has a lot of potentials but flopped (just because the execution that day wasn’t great). Then give it a second chance. This way, you don’t need to come up with new stuff, but rather build on existing data. In our class, the first 15 are called Exploration. and the next 15 are called Exploitation. Time to exploit.

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Conflicts of not being my own audience

If I think of this first question, what is my meaning to write? There are generally three styles for me.

1. What I learn & What I want to learn
2. What I feel strongly
3. Reflection through clarifying and debugging my thoughts

Observing all the things I enjoyed writing about, most of them are not what I expect myself to write about. My writing is rather emotional than intellectual. Even if most people find me more rational and intellectual, writing gives me a safe space to breathe, especially after a long day of intellectual stimulation. Oh no, because I often dreamed of being an intellectual writer for my specialty, such as education, data analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and large language modeling (LLM). But writing technical contents have strong mental barriers too. How to compete with 100 other people who have written similar things around it? For instance, I’m so happy that I learn a lot about creating a new website recently. I want to write about I figured out all the debugging processes, but I’m a new newbie.

When writing, I want to be in touch with myself, but that made my writing a storytelling journey. Will people be interested in my story though? I don’t even read my friends’ stories when they publish on their substack. Not being my audience makes me question the utility of my own writing.

Unblocking myself by analyzing my favorite writing

Most people want to write high-quality information that they can share better than no one else. But what is high-quality information? Does it only need to be intellectual? Hence, I analyze the three top readings.

• I read Wait But Why by Tim Urban because I can feel like a child, funny, crazy, and think in the first principles.
• I read Paul Graham because he brings me the depth to see through the surface, reminding me not to merely accept what society brings me. His work is very concise too. He feels like a wise old man with a low voice.
• I read “A complete guide on X” because I want to have a hands-on guide to learning something technical and feel adequate without searching for more.

To conclude, I’m not only searching for mere information. I’m also looking for new perspectives, new emotions, and most importantly, having nuances and counter perspectives from how people usually think and behave. Besides, Tim Urban and Paul Graham, have strong images in my brain.

Tim Urban style (source)

Positioning myself as personal branding rather than information sharing

My friend suggests, “Esther, you are so unique. I would love to read more about your brain!” She made me realize I don’t need to focus on topics to write because I’m not good at being traditional and classical, I should have my own branding with a specific style. For instance, when you see a stickman, you think of Tim Urban. Not having my own personal branding, and don’t know how to demonstrate it in my style, is what I’m lacking now.

Overall, I realized the process of commitment produces many new problems no matter if it’s writing especially, but most problems are mental problems, and voicing it out to bring them to the front of my mind, and analyzing the underlying assumptions I hold, is the most important step to resolve the problem.

This is the 18th post from my 30-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. He overcame the fear of creation through mass-producing blogs and eventually found his own niche audiences.