This Post Is Only 80% Finished
I have a goal to write a more. Just a little bit, every day.
It’s part of my initiative to take advantage of the mornings more. I’m tired of spending 60–90 minutes upon waking just scrolling on my phone.
And whilst I’m not committed to posting something every day, I’m going to try to.
However, I struggle with getting a post over the line – getting it from 80% done, to 100% done and hitting ‘publish’.
I find the final details around things like sentence order and ensuring a post has a beginning and an ending really tough. And very slow going.
What often happens is that I get the draft 80% completed and plan to come back and finish it, but get distracted or lose the motivation. And if I do come back to it days, weeks, or months later, the momentum is gone. So it languishes in my drafts folder until I delete it six months later.
Also, as any writer will tell you, looking at old writing is painful. After just a month or two, you’ve often changed or improved enough as a writer that reading past writing is an exercise in cringe and pain. I’ve never published a draft that was more than a week old.
But I had a thought yesterday: why not publish and then do that final little bit of editing? The writing is still decent and readable – it has a serviceable skeleton. It just needs that final finessing.
And hey, if I publish it and don’t come back to ‘finish it’, at least I got it out the door.
So that’s my goal: be just as willing to click ‘publish’ as I am to click ’new draft’.
Read this next: On Writing: Short Enough to Finish, Long Enough to Matter