And why I’m happy to be a writer.

Eric S Burdon

Aug 25, 2018·8 min read

I am happy to call myself a writer.

For the past three — approaching four — years, I’ve been committed to developing my craft. I’ll admit at the beginning of my career there was next to no growth.

I was focused on writing with very little care as to how I wrote or what I wrote. So long as it was either about self improvement or improving my life.

But this was the first year that I seriously got into writing and was hellbent on improving. Little would I expect that some of the little revelations and things I did in the first two years helped me grow as a writer and as a person.

Motivations For Writing

But before we jump in, though, I think it’s important to know one question:

Why do you write?

This is important because it puts into context what I’ve learned. When you understand someone’s motivations, you can better understand where they are coming from. Not to mention, the more you understand them, the more you can better connect with them.

Like a person giving advice, the reason they are giving that advice is because they can connect with it. The quality of the advice varies from person to person of course, but we can’t deny there is a connection.

Just the same, there is a connection between a person who writes consistently and what is driving them to write.

For me, that motivation comes from a deep rooted desire to help other people.

For all my teenage years, I have been stuck emotionally and it took all of my early 20s to get over the hurdle.

What compelled me to write was the desire to share my story. I’ll admit some of it was for attention, but the more that I wrote and focused on writing, the more I fell in love with writing about myself.

This in turn bloomed into my desire to share my growth story. Every step of the way I want to be documenting the hurdles and my innermost thoughts.

My motivation for writing is for the one person who happens to read my work and walks away with a little more hope and a little bit wiser.

From this deep-rooted desire, it drove me to write on a daily basis. It’s to the point that this is something I do automatically without much thinking. Here is what I learned from it.

Identified Core Values

One thing of note from the story above is how my desires shifted over time. I went from simply practicing writing to having a desire to help others. This was further solidified when I was introduced to both Medium, as well as the Tribe Builders Group set up by Frank McKinley. That was in July 2017.

This helped me to grow further as a writer because it helped me to identify my core values as a writer. It got me to the point where I seriously thought about why I wanted to write.

But also what compelled me to write every single day.

Even before I met the group, I was writing every day. But there wasn’t much method behind it. What I wrote in the past is drastically different to how I write now.

But the group indirectly influenced why I take time out of my day to write daily and to write in general.

The reason for this is because there weren’t many people who wrote every single day in the group. In fact when I starting out, I felt like I was the only one who was writing and publishing content every single day.

This wasn’t a reason to distance myself from the group. Rather it prompted me to look at my values.

I had this innate curiosity as to why writers weren’t constantly working. I felt like a child who asked such an innocent question.

Why aren’t writers writing daily?

Whatever the reason can be chalked up to life, family, other commitments and more. However what was more important was to understand why I was “the odd one out.”

Why was I writing every day when clearly not every writer in the group was spewing out content day in and day out?

The answer to that question is what created my core values as a writer. It’s for the one person who might read, get inspired, or have a new perspective to their lives.

It’s these values that keep me motivated still to be writing every day.

At the end of the day, you don’t need to go through something super transformative like I did. Regardless, you want to be able to answer why are you writing to begin with and why are you writing at the level you are at.

Sure the reason may be as simple as time constraints, but why is that?

I think it’s important to find these core values of a writer as quickly as possible. These core values define how you are writing and what sort of areas you are prone to focus on.

This isn’t a bad thing as each person has their own unique style. However it’s important to recognize and be comfortable with that style. If you don’t like it, work to change it little by little.

Introduced Me To Storytelling

When I first started to write, I wrote a lot of technical and factual writing. I focused less on myself and more on information that I read. Mind you, I didn’t do a great job at it when I look at some of my older work, I still gave myself a chance later on.

In fact, I tried my hand this year at writing technical work through a writing challenge. This challenge went from April all through to June. Here’s the start of that series.

But while I was doing that series, I was quick to realize how unnatural the writing style felt to me. When I first started, I was quickly moving toward talking about myself and my day.

I had a similar experience to the writing challenge. While I had topics lined up, it felt unnatural for me to write like that. I soon shifted back to being more personal.

And while my first stories at the beginning lacked structure, flow, and more, that started to change when I became part of the Tribe Builders Group. I started to look after my voice and learn a little more about writing by writing.

This isn’t to say that I never do research or read books. A lot of what I write is based on what I have read or what I’ve learned.

But I want to be more reliant on my story telling, which is why I am working on getting out more. I want to spend more time away from a desk and more outside.

This I believe is an important part to writing and writing daily. After all, writing every single day can be difficult and that’s where you learn new tricks for story telling. Tom Kuegler said it best when it comes to writing ideas:

“Think about the conversations that you’ve had with people or questions that you get from emails. Our conversations have many points that we could expand and write about.”

I’d like to expand on that idea. True these conversations can identify a topic worth talking about. However, conversations can also help in expanding the story telling experience.

How did that conversation come to be?

What compelled you to start that conversation?

I believe in some cases this can help us in understanding ourselves and contributing a growth story to our audience.

As for why I wanted to write about what I’ve learned from writing daily I have to thank Tom Kuegler and one of our brief conversations we had on Twitter a while back.

However there is more to it than that and I could talk about why we had that conversation and why it’s meaningful to me. But that’s another story.

In the end, story telling is a powerful tool for us as writers. It’s way for us to better connect with our audience and provide something that we can talk about.

We all have different experiences and opinions of many different things. So by telling a story — like I did at the beginning — we can understand people on a deeper level.

Pushes Me To Further Myself

But one of the biggest things I’ve learned as a writer is that it pushes me to go further with myself.

As I mentioned above I want to be telling stories. That being said, I haven’t had the most remarkable life. There have been days where I’ve been focused primarily on my writing and work that I don’t even get outside.

I have typical days where I’m in my room all day and I hardly come out. But I will say days like that are less and less as I continue to grow.

I’ve been working hard in turning my writing into something lucrative for myself. I’ve been making steps toward that for the past year and a bit now to do that.

It’s also urged me to try other tactics and things that I haven’t done before either. For one, it’s gotten me to take video making more seriously.

It’s also gotten me to get out of my comfort zone and walk away with some thrilling experiences. Like going through a wooden obstacle course.

I’ve even been putting an effort to be more engaging in groups and in communities.

All with the express purpose of growing so I can better help other people.

Writing has a unique way of looking into our lives. In a sense, writing has a way of revealing to us what we value. For me, I value experiences. It’s why I’d like to travel more and see places.

I’m not the type of writer who wants to be stuck in a single place and write all the time, while you may prefer that sort of lifestyle.

Either way, it’s important to let writing reveal what sort of writer you are. From your style, views of writing, and even what you’d like to get out of writing.

What Has Writing Done For You?

Through the experiences of writing, many stories are born and those stories have changed people forever. Whether you are someone who writes and publishes every day or you are someone who writes every day or not, writing has changed you one way or another.

To your growth!

Eric S Burdon