Why I Stopped Blogging After Writing 500+ Stories
I’m one of the writers who ended up empty after churning out too much.
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There’s a flippant answer; got too busy with grad school. I started blogging in 2018, figured out what I was doing in 2019, and had a pretty decent quality level in 2020. Between 2018 and now, I published 550 pieces. You’re reading (lucky?) #551 right now.
Then, for the later part of 2020 onward, I got so busy with grad school that almost everything I posted was just grad school related and wasn’t my usual tone or focus. Nonetheless, this was a big difference in my internal writing processes. I was only writing when I had to, when there was an assignment to debrief on. I wasn’t ideating and writing based on my own thoughts and inspirations.
But then there’s a deeper answer.
If we write too much, we can sometimes stop offering real value.
I feel like I’ve noticed this in a lot of prolific bloggers; they post amazing content for years, but hit a point where if you’ve been following them for a while, you realize that their stories don’t have the same spark. Sometimes, they even get repetitive. I fell into this dilemma quite significantly; I was churning out pieces that were rehashing similar topics. I didn’t have any emotional buy-in to them because I myself was not that interested.
How could I expect anyone else to find my writing interesting, never mind get value out of it, if I myself was bored? It’s a form of burnout that anyone can fall into when you’re trying to keep up with the demands of frequent content creation.
We need to go back into our inner world and explore how our interests grow.
Solitude is a writer’s companion, though I’ve often fought against this fundamental truth. One of the strongest ways to breathe fresh life into your writing is to go back inside yourself — what persistently occupies your thoughts? Is it something you could write about?
