There’s Nothing New in this Town

Why are writers constantly writing the same articles over and over again?

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

This morning I read a piece about how a writer finally made $100 bucks in a month after a year of trying. One hundred bucks. This is worth writing an article about? It’s not, and this stuff pollutes the reader experience. There are a million things to write about and we still get a constant stream of this ultra lightweight stuff.

I’m not a fan of Western philosophy, aka ‘navel-gazing’, the attempt to explain life intellectually and logically. Life is either supremely logical or completely illogical. Zen would say it is both, simultaneously. But whatever view you espouse, we can’t argue that life is not interesting. So, when you create, delve into that interesting part.

Not something stupid about your dreams of fame and fortune.

Take a look at the writers you truly enjoy reading because their stuff is interesting or thought-provoking. They write about how they feel, what they’ve experienced, or how they overcame challenges. Most are modest or genuinely want to help others by sharing their POV and life experience.

Some express opinions strongly held. Some tell of hardship and adversity and how there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if there was not, they find ways to learn from the experience, and they sit down and work it out in words.

It is a form of self-therapy and it is private, during the creation phase. Only when they go back to it to edit do they decide it is something to share, or not. This creative process generates the best articles found here, in my opinion. Not how much money or Tim Denning’s secrets. Tim Denning’s secret is he writes a lot about stuff that interests people.

If you are not getting traction, you need to look at your writing critically

Don’t try to make it conform to some outside notion of what ‘works’. There is no formula- in fact, you know what you get if you write to a formula? Formulaic writing. That is not a good thing.

I have often written about how mysterious writing is when it is flowing freely. You let your thinking mind go and unwind a story from an…