This thirty-day challenge has brought about a bit of a double-edged sword.
As you can imagine, finding a new topic every day worth writing about becomes difficult after a while. There is of course the crucial first step of identifying an idea. Then, each idea that could be explored faces a series of questions. Is it interesting? Is it valuable? Can I sufficiently capture it in the time I have available that day? Am I in the right frame of mind for this kind of topic?
A huge benefit to this is that I’ve found myself becoming much more observant. I’ve been doing this daily publication long enough now that my brain seems to be primed to pay more attention to things, perhaps because it knows that I’ll be sitting in front of a laptop later that night scouring it for something to write about. This has generally made my day-to-day experience more interesting.
The other side of this coin, though, is that I sometimes notice myself trying to force something that isn’t there. I’ll take an arbitrary event and analyze it to see how it might be possible to assign it a deeper level of significance. This is both exhausting and futile; some things just don’t need to be overcomplicated.
I think the lesson here is that writing daily is a fantastic habit, but publishing daily can be unnatural and unnecessary. Each day doesn’t have to produce something finite and profound.
This seems like a good reminder for both writing and life. But maybe I’m just forcing it.