It's not your day job that gets in the way of your writing, it's you.

One of the many unexpected delights I currently encounter on my long walks. Photo be me.

I just wrote (and scrapped) a post describing the difficulties of focusing on writing during our pandemic times, while having plenty of mental rambles* that would make good material, if only I could stop vacillating on how to approach each and every subject that eventually results in the piece dying because I can't form an internal consensus.

Is this happening to you? I'm incredibly productive at my day job that requires plenty of writing and creativity, but that work is also propelled by creative briefs and group reviews and collaboration and the general all-around smart thinking of the people I'm teamed up with for each project, so the momentum and focus never wanes.

Years ago one of my college writing teachers was Alex Shakar and he gave me the advice to never go into advertising because it would kill any personal writing, since a similar outcome applied to his own experience, leading to his exit from marketing and entry into academia and novel writing.

I understood Shakar's advice for what it was; Alex wasn't telling me to actually never enter ad-land, but he was sharing his own experience to let me know that if you do head down a similar route to his, you have to proactively work to keep the individual projects and outlets going.

And I did! An unusually large number of folks long thought that Chicagoist was my full-time gig due to my output on a wide range of topics alongside the editorial position and influence I held. But the whole time it was my actual 9-to-5 that paid most of my bills. Writing for myself "part-time" wasn't reducing my productivity, it was amplifying it!

Maybe I was more driven back then? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I think that writing for a site where the vast majority of my output had to be relatively short, focused, and digestible certainly helped knock down some of the barriers I'm now facing. That doesn't mean my writing was any less fully considered in my head back then, but the workflow was certainly different than it is today.

So now, each day I take long walks and come up with lots of great ideas and worry through tons of questions and very occasionally come up with something I believe has value to myself and others.

I hope you got some value out of this today. I know it helped me to get some of this down and out of my head. Of course, now I've unlocked numerous other avenues on how to approach this ... so I'm glad I managed to bang on my keyboard and get this out, even if it's a momentary observation of a particular juncture in my evolution.

Thanks for coming to my TANK Talk.


*In this case I'm using "ramble" in the pleasantly wandering sense, and not the realm of unhinged discourse. Though, with me, I could see how you might confuse the two. Hee.