I was look­ing through some archived email last night, and stum­bled upon an image that I sent myself last summer.

It really made me think about one of the ele­ments of my Oper­a­tion Twenty12 project — writ­ing more. Of late, I have been post­ing (or curat­ing con­tent, if the action needs to be dressed up a bit), but I have not been writ­ing. While I am more than happy to share my book­marks posts and inter­est­ing info­graph­ics that I find online, I still feel the pang to write.

The chal­lenge, which I sus­pect is not all that uncom­mon, is fig­ur­ing out just what to write about. I don’t know if I would call what I’m feel­ing writer’s block. It feels more like writer’s noise. I usu­ally have a mil­lion things run­ning through my head, and I am hav­ing a hard time silenc­ing the mul­ti­tude of thoughts and focus­ing on just one thing. I am frus­trated that I can not always put together a stel­lar long-form essay/blog piece. Per­haps, that’s it. Maybe it is sim­ply that I am hold­ing myself to the pres­sure of cre­at­ing long-form pieces. (That may have some­thing to do with my back­ground thoughts of becom­ing a novelist.)

Addi­tion­ally, I must admit that I have found myself wor­ry­ing about some­thing that prob­a­bly causes angst for many writ­ers. Peter…?

I know that I need to let go of this feel­ing. If peo­ple are inter­ested, they will read what I write. I don’t want to fall into the trap of obsess­ing over page views and the of com­ments I receive. Most of the time, my posts don’t receive com­ments. For­tu­nately, my pride is not that frag­ile. I make peace with the lack of com­ments by ratio­nal­iz­ing that I am writ­ing about stuff that inter­ests me, and merely I hope that it may res­onate with oth­ers. I do notice the big ‘0 Com­ments’ on top of blog posts, though. To be com­pletely can­did, I have come —>this<— close to ask­ing peo­ple what they like me to write about. Fan­cy­ing myself as some type of rela­tion­ship colum­nist, field­ing ques­tions for the trou­bled and/or curi­ous masses.

I think that I sim­ply need to sit in a quiet space, and see what comes to me. Maybe I need to carry an idea book around with me, or pos­si­bly send notes to myself on Ever­note.

How about this? Instead of ask­ing for your thoughts on what to write, I would appre­ci­ate some feed­back from those of you that write. What do you write about? How do you orga­nize your writ­ing? Where do you write? Do you strug­gle with fil­ter­ing a mil­lion thoughts and rumi­na­tions? How do you fil­ter? I am open to your thoughts, because I really want to explore how to bet­ter, and more reg­u­larly, express myself in writing.

Thank you!