An Experiment in Writing to Write

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

I’m gonna try something new. For no real reason, other than I’m interested in what will happen with it. What I plan here is to write just to write. And I’m going to be sharing it here on Medium.

There won’t be any real purpose or theme behind what I write — at least not for this “series.” Instead, it’s just going to be exercises of me attempting to be able to write about pretty much whatever I feel like writing about, with little to no concern about the results.

See, the problem with being a writer is you always tend to start looking for reasons to write.

You want readers.

You want to sell books.

You want to be remembered.

You want to make a difference.

You want a gigantic check.

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want some or all of those things. I’d even be lying if I said that this little exercise I’ll be embarking on isn’t still motivated somehow by all of that. It’s nearly impossible to rid yourself of influences. They can live so deep beneath the surface sometimes that you don’t even realize they’re there — but they are.

But this whole series, this isn’t the goal. The real goal I have here is to simply see what happens when I write about whatever I feel like writing about.

This won’t be a blog or a diary or a journey to find my inner self or peace or anything like that. But it also won’t be a series of essays.

Instead, it’s going to be things like this, what you’re reading right now. This little article is about writing to write, and the fact that I’m even mentioning that right now is so meta that I feel weird even writing about it.

As for what to expect going forward? My goal is honesty. I’d like to say “writing without fear” but that’s a pretty cliche thing to say, and if you know me, you know I hate to be a cliche. So I’m not going to say it.

Still, my egotistical desire to seem cooler than I am aside, this is a lot of the point of this.

I want to write things that aren’t focused on keywords and market research and proper formatting for SEO purposes and findability. Sometimes you just have to write to write, and that’s what’s…