Just Write

It's been a while since my last post. I'm supposed to write thoughts, ideas, or anything here, but I've got so busy with my work and college. Those two are the most time-consuming activities in my daily life. In weekends I usually do homework and practicum reports. And there are many other things that seek my attention. I got no time write until semester break comes.

Not really. I just lost my desire to write, somehow. However, I always had many thoughts that came to mind. Maybe if I had the chance to cultivate those thoughts into something worthy of a blog post, then I would post them. In the end, I just keep them in my Evernote and never thought about making a blog post.

There is also one thing that holds me from writing: being a perfectionist. I knew I had this kind of personality long ago. You might wonder "What's the problem with it? Isn't perfect a good thing?". Well, it is very useful in certain situations because it could deliver "the best" of you. But on the other side, it consumes so much time and energy to achieve "perfection".

Let me quote from a lonerwolf's post:

Being a perfectionist is crippling. There is nothing as excruciating in the creative world as being a person bursting with passion, potential and ideas, but not being able to express this with unbridled freedom. The same goes for the rest of life: perfectionism cripples us in every arena, whether it be academic, artistic, scientific, personal or interpersonal.

Basically, I have the raw material, but to compose something from it takes a large amount of my own arguments. I want it to be perfect and flawless with zero-error tolerance (notice the hyperbolic here), right from the start till the end of the process. Allow me to quote from the same lonerwolf's post again in case you don't get what I mean:

The only problem was that whenever I began writing I would instantly stop after one sentence, read through it, re-read through it, delete it, write it again, re-write it again, delete it again, re-write it again … you get the picture.

With that being said, I would, sometime, thought to myself: "Just write! Just write like nobody cares. Nobody's gonna read it anyway.". Not that I expect people to read my posts (but if you are reading this, thank you), I just want to write for myself so that I can remember. And I also want to observe how I chain thoughts into words, how the creative process in the brain works, and how can I improve it. Thoughts run too fast before my lips could articulate them. Sometime I find it hard to express them verbally without losing context and meaning. There would be a little to no time to rephrase what you said in a verbal conversation. Thus by writing, I hope that I can formulate these thoughts into the exacts words I need. In fact, this post has been edited several times since it was published.

During my absence in blogging with Blogger, I discovered other blogging platforms that are more beautiful and powerful: Jekyll, Ghost and Buffalo. I did some experiments using the first two, but I have yet to decide which platform to use. Blogger is good, but not sophisticated enough. I didn't think of WordPress because it's more than just a blogging platform. It's a CMS with all the clutter-ness. Despite all of that, I do realize that I should give more focus on the writing rather than the look and feel. Content is as much important as the writing tool.

So, just write.

Photo credit: Luis Llerena