My writing Journey in 2023

Welcome to my journey in 2023! Writing has been my passion for nearly 15 years and I’m excited to share with you what I have learned and experienced in this first year. In this post, I will discuss my writing journey, the tips and strategies I’ve picked up along the way, and the lessons I have learned. I hope to inspire younger aspiring writers and provide perspective for those looking to start a writing career of their own.

1. How I Started Writing

Since finishing University in 2003 I’ve had my friends and colleagues mention to me that I should be teaching others and that did stick me for many years, it wasn’t until after I achieved my Chartership that I turned around to myself and said “OK, now what?”.

That was in 2017 and it took me a while to decide what to do next, along with the difficulties I’ll mention below, but the thought keep coming back to me about sharing what I have learnt form Engineering from the point of view of being an active Engineer and not giving you what’s been researched from books but what has been implemented and struggled through.

I also wanted to give back to the community and I started to do this via volunteering which you can see I did get stuck into several projects if you follow that link to the page that discusses what I’ve got involved with.

So, in 2019 after a friend retired who helped me achieve the CEng, I sat down and started writing a book! And so far that book is 40,000 words and 104 – A4 pages thick, but I was struggling with the immensity of the task, I knew the topics I wanted to cover and most of them I had experience in, but researching and putting in content was difficult since I’m naturally a quiet person and didn’t network or reach out to others who I could learn from.

After a video from Ali Abdaal on the Austin Kleon book series, I had the idea and the motivation to blog, which has turned out well since I can write 1000 word blogs which over time will become the book I wanted to write (don’t forget if you want to do something there’s always many routes to take!).

2. Early Challenges and Struggles

Traffic-

What was difficult and still is in this early stage is driving traffic to my blog posts, since dealing with Google takes it’s time and you need to learn a small amount of SEO to get started on ranking, then there’s the others who are doing the same thing as you so finding your niche is critical in my opinion.

Next there’s social media, while they’re not as smart as Google’s algorithm, they are getting better and you do have to put the effort in to getting started (same everywhere), but sites like Pinterest are visual search engines and there’s so much help in the form of guides on the web you really can’t start wrong, but start slow as I did find myself checking each day to see if my follower count went up…forget that and get into the content.

Where to start-

Setting up a website was the easy part for me and I would recommend the guide from Thomas Frank found on his website College info geek 

Topics-

At first and I guess still at the moment, I only wanted to post a new blog each month and I guess that comes from not scheduling my time effectively plus being a Dad I still need to beat my son’s on Mario kart every week for bragging rights!.

But the other issue I had was what to write about and getting content into that, that’s well researched and written. Here was a big show stopper for me that took a while for me to find a means to generate what I wanted to teach/talk about even on a monthly level. Long story short those topics come from the interesting conversations I have at work, after one discussion has ended and I feel there was a lesson there I grab my phone and go onto my OneNote app and type up a title and a quick breakdown outline for it.

Imposter syndrome-

Ok, here’s the black sheep. This one is difficult to overcome and in my case it’s a question of time getting used to showing my work and answering questions people have to show my experience to others, but more so for myself. If you read ‘Show your work’ by again Austin Kleon, you get to understand you don’t have to be the expert, just show your level of understanding and open the floor for feedback from others to help develop you and others who read the post, be open to being the learner and sharing what you have. Like the Feynman technique (which I enjoy using), I look for the gaps in my knowledge and go back to the books/lessons and mentors to find those questions, each post I make at the end asks for feedback.

3. Habits That Have Supported My Writing

Reading-

About 5 years ago I had a change in my life that forced me to rethink where I was headed, and several colleagues at work supported me through this time. One in particular said “Now focus on yourself and develop” – so I did, and what I started to do was collect books and read them. They covered a handful of topics – Self-help, Engineering, Productivity, Science and Sci-fi. From that I now read 30 books a year with the help of Audible, and this has allowed me to expand my knowledge, open me up to new ideas and reject ones I thought true, what else help was to develop a way of taking notes.

OneNote-

Well, I tried Google and Evernote and ending up with OneNote (oh I tried Notion as well), but after a video by Xelplus I was able to get more out of OneNote and record my learning, thoughts and books notes in one place, I have to try several ways of organising my notes and now I have 10 notebooks of all sorts of topics that I used – even cooking notes/ buying things and personal. I recommend to anyone to try a online notebook app – it doesn’t replace my physical note book as that’s great to note and draw up ideas, OneNote is for typing up so that I can access my library from anywhere, however I haven’t tested this on holiday as yet!

Fast typing-

Typing.com, what a great site. It took me from a beginner’s level up to advance in over a year later and this was practising for 15 mins each day (check out my daily morning work routine), and I have to say that even though I still make mistakes (ten fingers is hard) it has enabled me to get thoughts/ideas and words onto these blogs faster. This has been one of the best skills I’ve developed in the last 3 years (I did learn to juggle in lock down which was on my bucket list).

4. Overcoming Creative Blocks

Tailwind-

I’ve only just started using this application and I’ve found that their AI bot is very useful in prompting me with suggestions for what to write about and the content that I should add based on internet trends, this is actually where this article came from. After starting Tailwind and going through their tutorial the plan suggested that I should write some ‘behind the scenes’ type of blog posts to help bring people to my site, so here we are and thank you for joining me.

Discussions and events at work-

This has always been a rich area for topics of discussions, I have found over the years that the amount of topics randomly discussed at work has a scale for meaningfulness and depth, it the ones that score high that I discuss here on my site. I find it best for these discussions because in most cases the people who you work with have similar background (technical) and interests but as I mention in my blog on the Socratic method, your colleagues can challenge your assumptions and understanding to test your logic. The end results being what I write about.

5. Maintaining Motivation

YouTube channels like Thomas Frank and Ali Abdaal-

These two individuals I owe a lot to, watching their videos has inspired me to get out of my comfort zone and put myself ‘out there’ for others like you to discover me and read what I have to say. Like books and other forms of media they are like distance mentors offering help and advice that I can watch again to help me gain motivation to continue, yes I’m aware a lot of endeavours fail, but at least I can count myself as one who tried and push my boundaries.

Conclusion:

After this first year, my journey as a writer has been an incredible learning experience. The lessons I’ve learned along the way have helped to inform my process and made me a better writer. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had and I hope to continue writing and inspiring others to do the same.

Share your writing journey or the stories of inspiring writers in the comment section below!

Channels mention –

• Ali Abdaal
• Thomas Frank

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