Planning Is Not For Everybody. Nor Are Writing Tips.

What if you’re a chaotic thinker?

Photo by Bianca Ackermann on Unsplash

By the end of Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze pronounces a famous catchphrase: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”. The meaning is clear, nothing should prevent you from participating in an activity you enjoy.
Reasonable inference: corners are no cozy place.

While I am no writer, I do write for a living. I’m a postdoc researcher at university and a lawyer. I draft lectures, edit academic papers, and write writs of summons. All of them rely on the interpretation of law, doctrines, and sentences. People can resist my arguments, but not truly judge them.

I opened a profile on Medium as an act of courage. I’ve always feared people’s judgment on anything that’s intimate. Once I subscribed to membership, my dashboard was filled with stories about writing.

Writing tips, title tips, curation tips, starting tips, earning tips.

I read these contents for a whole day. They got me into overthinking and doubting anything I was planning on writing. I chickened out.

I had no interest in writing about writing and no insights to share. By reading writing tips, I started perceiving some aspects of my job as traits of a creative process. And it struck me that my beliefs…