When I was originally asked the question about how much I write, I thought it was an odd question. My initial inclination was to say that I’m always writing, but that doesn’t actually address the merits of the question.

Writing me

I do write a lot, but not all of it is what I’ll call creative writing, which encompasses writing my blogs, writing blogs for others, writing my articles for marketing and promotion purposes, working on my books, writing for webpages, sometimes writing before creating videos, etc. When I think about it though, most of it is. I thought I’d talk about it a little bit, just so y’all can see what I do with myself most of my days, and hopefully you’ll pick up a nugget or two.

Let’s start with my own blogs. I don’t write as much on them as I used to. The first full year of this blog I wrote 300 posts, and 3 months into my 4th year I hit 1,000 articles; ouch!. Not all of them were good articles, but I was writing daily. The same kind of thing happened with my business blog, only it took 7 1/2 years to hit 1,000 there, once again without many being very good.

Over the course of time, my blogging got better and more refined, to the extent that I kept creating new blogs and expanding on what I was writing about. You have to keep writing to start showing improvement, even if you’ve been writing for many years; sometimes it takes a while to find your true writing voice and style.

I used to write two newsletters, one on general business and leadership issues, the other on health care billing issues. I wrote both of them for 10 years. They started out weekly until I started traveling for work, at which point it became a monthly newsletter. Each one was a minimum of 800 words, often getting near 1,500 words each. By the time I stopped writing both of them I had more than 400 articles in total; whew!

I write blog articles for other people here and there. At one point I was writing for 4 other blogs at a time. Blog gigs came and went; the topics were… weird and wild sometimes. lol Some articles were very short because that’s what the owners wanted; some more comprehensive because I knew they’d work better.

One of those blogs I wrote for just over 2 years; it was a wedding blog. I learned a lot about wedding dresses and a lot of other things concerning weddings in general. Most of that took a lot of research; when you write about things you don’t experience, research has to be a big part of it and it’ll take a lot of time to do.

I’ve been writing articles for others for over 2 decades. Not all of them were for blogs; many have ended up in magazines. My latest is on a health care topic that none of y’all will be interested in, but I’m linking to it anyway because I wrote it!

I’ve mentioned writing for marketing and promotional purposes. I do that often on LinkedIn. You can write both articles or posts, but I’ve found posts work better for publicity. Oddly enough they’re shorter, but they take longer to write because of the need to edit to stay under the character count allowed for posts. You find that you get better at communicating with others when you’re forced to be more direct and to the point, and you can only do that if you’re writing a lot.

I write a lot of outlines and write a lot of notes. Some have turned into books; some have turned into presentations. Some I do before I create videos. You have to be ready to write if you’re looking to accomplish things.

You want to know about how much writing one sometimes has to do? By the time you see this article I’ll have written it 2 or 3 weeks ago. I’ve had to try to put together content to sustain my blogs while I’m recovering from shoulder surgery; testing showed me that I won’t be able to do a lot of writing while my arm’s in a padded sling; sigh…

Is it fair to say that writing is my life? How do I get it all done? Some days I plan it out, and other days I just wing it. I’m not sure if this is planned since I’m doing it weeks ahead of it going public. I’m winging it because I came up with a topic I didn’t have to research to write about. What I will say is that at times it’s pretty hard work to write so much. I’m glad I like it enough to keep doing it, and I’m also glad I’ve never had writer’s block.

I encourage anyone who feels like they have something to say or something they want to share with others to write. Heck, even if you want to write for yourself, go out and buy a journal and start writing. Writing can be therapeutic; writing can make you money.

I didn’t cover everything I write or write about. There’s a lot of writing I do that I can’t remember it all. Sometimes I get paid for it; most of the time I don’t. I’ve written well over 6,000 articles since 1999; not bad if you ask me.

Writing can do lots of things for you and others; just write… that’s all I’ve got.