Writing every day

I have been writing this blog for well over half a year now, which may or may not sound like a long time, depending on how you look at it. I've written a lot of things, several of which I've touched on multiple times, and I'd like to think I've improved in my writing, as small of an improvement as that may be. But I have done my best to write every day, just as I set out to do. I haven't exactly made a habit out of it yet, but it's near constantly in my head now, and it becomes increasingly difficult to get to the end of the day and have completely forgotten about writing. Which, again, may not sound like much, but for me is pretty good.

But writing over 200 pieces of varying content and genre does tend to take its toll. I've talked a number of times about the difficulty of trying to choose what to write, and how easy it can be to hit a mental roadblock. Lately I have found my biggest difficulty is remembering what I have already written. The past few days especially, I have gone to write about a topic and, just to be sure, gone back through the archives to find that I have already written exactly that, and frequently in much the same way as I am about to write it over again. One in particular, by coincidence, I had begun to write the first sentence and it was almost word for word the exact same as what I had written months earlier.

I'm not necessarily opposed to writing on the same topic a second time. I've done it a few times now, but when I do it, I want to have new things to say, or new ways to portray the thoughts which may not have themselves changed. But sometimes, those advances simply have not yet occurred, so to try and write anew on that topic seems like cheating to me. This is similar to why, upon setting out on this writing venture, I elected to impose a minimum word count on myself, so as not to write a shitty haiku and call it a day.

In theory, these are things that I shouldn't be worrying about. I'm not writing this blog to make money. I'm not writing it to advertise myself or my stories. I'm not even writing it to make stories. I'm writing it to try and improve as a writer, and learn my strengths and weaknesses, and learn how to better utilize my words to get my points across. In some ways, I am teaching myself all the keys of language that I need to know in order to write, as ineffective as that may be. So, there shouldn't necessarily be a problem with writing on things that I have written on before.

The problem is that without making a concerted effort to take what I had previously written and make it better, I am going to end up writing the same thing all over again. Perhaps it will be slightly improved, and perhaps it will be slightly weakened, but in essence little will have changed. And I'm not ok with letting myself fall into that trap. Unfortunately, the more I write, the easier it will be to fall into that trap, but that's a risk that I have to take. I just have to try to be aware of what I am doing, and what I have done.

If only my memory was better than it is.