Why you should write online

I’ve been trying to pick up writing recently. It’s been a challenging yet intellectually stimulating exercise. I’ve been reading books like On Writing by Stephen King, taking courses like the Write of Passage by David Perell, and reading “how to write” blogs.

I wanted to share a few of my early lessons of this process with the goal of encouraging you to try writing online.

1) Inspiration for writing comes through in-person conversations. 

The process of writing does not occur in solitude waiting for inspiration to strike. It happens through engaging with people, listening to their ideas, sharing your own, and seeing what piques your interest. 

From there you can create a feedback loop of what appears to be good ideas. This can be done through conversations, sharing your ideas on social media, and emails like this. You can then see what sticks, and use that as the inspiration for the topic you write about.

2) Writing helps you become a clearer thinker. 

Writing out your ideas helps to organize your thinking. As ideas swirl around in your head they stay fairly incoherent. The act of putting them down on paper helps your brain organize your thinking into cohesive ideas. 

I’ll think I understand an idea my head and through conversation, then try to write it down and struggle. That gives me clarity that I may not understand my ideas as well as I thought I did.

An example of this was thinking through the insecurities that came from getting a new job that I wrote about a few weeks ago. I felt an odd feeling from the news, but could not articulate why I felt that way. Through chats with my roommates and then sitting down in front of my laptop trying to work through those ideas, I was able to structure my thoughts and articulate how I was feeling.

Going through the exercise of writing helps you understand the ideas in your head, and leads to clearer thinking. 

3) Writing is great for building relationships.

As I've started writing, readers have been graciously sharing their own thoughts on the content. People have shared feedback on the writing itself and most importantly, shared their own personal stories that the writing reminded them of.

This is my favorite one below which was a follow up from the Talking To Strangers On Planes blog a few months ago.

 Pretty cool eh!? I’m a big believer in your ability to create serendipity. Put yourself out there, put your thoughts out there, and even if one person connects with them it’s a win.

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