Full disclosure: I’ve never had a blog before. I’m a writer and I’ve never written a blog. I also have a hard time with conventional journals. For the last month most of my thought process has run on the tracks of ‘where do I begin’ and ‘what if I have nothing to say’?
The second, given two seconds to look at the question, is pretty laugh-worthy. Even when I think I have nothing to say, I can usually find something, especially if given even a minor prompt. (The writing of this post alone has already given me some ideas for following ones.)
The first, as it transpires, was a pretty good landing-pad for my first post. Too on the nose? Maybe. But it’s a start.
And therein lays the theme: beginning and starting aren’t the same thing. Not even remotely. No matter how often we might use them interchangeably, as synonyms.
‘Beginning’ suggests that there is nothing that comes before it. Like the phrase ‘new beginnings’, the word tries to put some distance between it and whatever came before (if it even acknowledges there was a before). The beginning of a new book. The beginning of a new month. The beginning of a new habit. The word really likes to be paired with ‘new’. Like a clean slate, every time, as if the declaration of the word alone can leverage a change.
Except, it can’t. The only real beginning someone has is the day they’re born. When it comes to everything else, there is always something that came first. Even a new habit, a new book, relies on the foundation of the person you were when you decided to invest in that newness. Who you were defines how you experience it. No matter how much you might want a clean break, you’re always bringing something old to the new: yourself.
And if the person you were doesn’t know what you’re doing, doesn’t know how to start, proceed, or persist, then that new beginning can fizzle into same old same old.
There’s no good time to ‘begin’ — because there’s no beginning. Beginning wants to be alone in all its glory. Waiting for the right time can result in nothing ever happening.
There’s no good time to start, either. But at least a start isn’t waiting around for the stars to align just so. At least starting doesn’t care about who you were — or weren’t — beforehand. It doesn’t pretend that starting will change everything.
But it does create a bedrock; because once you’ve started, you can keep going. A beginning is so full of potential and dreams and wishes — the fact of it alone can throttle. How many writers have balked at a blank page?
Starting takes the pressure off. It isn’t trying to judge itself: it doesn’t matter whether the start was a crashlanding. You can always start over.
It isn’t a lot of difference. But when I contemplated the beginning of a blogging habit, the unseen potential path was overwhelming. When I considered starting with just one, the idea suddenly seemed much less intimidating. I had to pick a date, of course. I picked a lot of dates, and all of them weren’t right, because the person I was and the things I was trying to do left no room even for starting. If I’d been making a new beginning, I’d have muffed it.
But here it is, and it’s appropriate that it’s today — my birthday. I didn’t hold out for today to start. (Well, not for more than a few days, anyway.) It just happened to be close-by, and you know what? If there’s really no good time to start, then it might as well be on the day I began.
Are you searching for a new start? Here’s some links to things which have helped me not only with my starts, but with my continuations. A lot of them relate to writing. Some of them just relate to habits. When the potential of a new beginning was too much, all of these things gave me insight, knowledge, motivation or just plain structure when I really needed it.
Insight
Kris Rusch’s Business Musings is hands-down the most informative blog about writing and publishing I’ve ever seen. It peeled away the layers of the publishing industry until something that seemed arcane and rigid had clarity. This blog told me what was possible, and some aspects of how to get there. It is directed toward established writers and publishers, however, so if you aren’t, it needs to be approached from the perspective of the person you want to be, rather than the person you are now.
James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, is the book about productivity I’ve been searching for, for years. It’s about habits rather than productivity, but the result is the same: a step-by-step process on how to plan for and become the person you want to be. Special shout-out to this article in particular, which talks about how your individual environment can make or break your ability to follow-through on habits, and how you can change it.
Kris’s blog showed me how a writing career was possible. Nicholas Erik’s Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing gave me the step-by-step framework on how to accomplish it as a newbie. It’s everything I needed to know about the basic process as a newcomer. This is a new edition (mine is last year’s), so there might be some additional stuff in there I haven’t read — but on the whole, if you’re looking to be an indie writer, this will demystify the process.
Tools
Only two of the tools on this list are overtly writing-related. The first, 4thewords, gamifies writing in a way like no other site I’ve ever seen. 4thewords turns quests, rewards and monster-battling into a vital motivational aid. This is the site that solidified my desire for a writing habit into an actual habit. You get one free month as a trial, so if you’re interested in signing up and aren’t already on the site, go ahead and use my referral code for extra goodies (AXAGR81353).
The other is Dabble, which is a browser-based word processor. If you’ve heard of Scrivener, it’s similar — except dramatically simplified. Dabble’s whole aesthetic is to remove choice paralysis by making itself as minimalist as possible. It has the folder-file hierarchy Scrivener popularised, a plot-grid function which works like sticky-notes (if sticky-notes had a TARDIS-like ability to contain more words than they should be able to physically handle when you click on them), and not a lot else in terms of bells and whistles. Except one thing: being browser-based, its cloud-sync function is better than Scrivener’s — and most other writing software — because you don’t need Dropbox or something else as a go-between.
Now, for the non-writing tools that have helped me the most.
Who wants to talk budgeting? It’s not considered particularly sexy unless you’re a special kind of nerd, but I’m a big believer in making taboos ordinary. When it came to managing my finances so I could even start this particular writing journey, You Need a Budget (YNAB) has been invaluable. YNAB’s system works on the basis of money you have right now, and that budgeting should be flexible and able to change with your priorities. Not only that, but the developers have dedicated oodles of time and effort to oodles of educational materials, so you can benefit from their experience without having to sign up to anything.
My other most-used non-writing tool is Airtable. See, I love spreadsheets. Love ’em. I’m not too skilled with formulas, but I love tracking data and I find it soothing to be able to input data, as long as it’s something that enables me to progress (wheel-spinning data-entry, let’s be honest, is just boring). Excel sheets are all well and good, but when I want to track non-numerical data, like book metadata and editing stylesheets, Airtable is king. Especially when you’re collaborating on, say, a co-written series and need to coordinate plot details.
These are the tools I use on the daily. I’ll be adding to this list as I continue — I am, after all, still closer to the start of my journey than any other part of it. I don’t need to be super organised, but I do like to have things in a place where I can easily find them again, and since they helped me in my starts, maybe they’ll help you too.
~Pur
Aurichalcum Publishing 