Remember when I used to write a blog?

Me too.

Sorry, things have been insane of late – though, fortunately, in a good way – as Cyan has been getting a number of initiatives up to speed.

That said, a year and a half ago, when I similarly fell off the blogging bandwagon, I posted a commitment to shitty first drafts that got me writing regularly again.

I’m reposting it below, in the hopes it will work similarly a second time through:

As Anne Lamott observed, the best cure for writer’s block is a shitty first draft. Convince yourself you don’t have to write something good – just that you have to write something – and it becomes far easier to get words flowing.

Which makes sense in the world of novels, where authors iterate months or years between first draft and final product. But not in blogs, where the first draft usually is the final product.

That puts the pressure back on a blogger with writer’s block. And as the length of time from one post to the next mounts, the pressure worsens. Drop posting frequency from near-daily to at-best-monthly (as I have of late), and each entry need be Pulitzer-worthy to justify itself.

Yet experience dictates that I blog best as habit – post regularly, day in and day out, and, intermittently, excellence emerges.

So, for the balance of this year, it’s consistency over quality. In other words, I’ll be doing my best to accept shitty first drafts. And I hope you will, too.