As soon as my word buffer got high enough, I skipped a day.

I can see I'm too aimless at writing. That's because I'm treating it like exercise. Like oh, writing's healthy for you, for your mind, so just let me write. But that's not how it works. Or, rather, it can work this way, but I can't say this and also hope to turn my writing into something more complex. Sorry, rambling, let me explain.

My goal here is writing itself, which is too vague. It's the same as drawing with the goal "to draw". There should always be the second part to this question - to draw (or write) *what*? For some reason it's easier to think about this idea in terms of drawing. There are paintings in the classical styles, there is digital art, there are comics and manga and storytelling, there is fanart, there is architecture, there is pixel art and animation. Some parts are the same - yes. But most are extremely different. The writing I'm doing now feels like when I wanted to do some exercises in drawing - I would learn a bit about colors and try to draw something and color it. The next day I would learn about placing characters in a scene and try that. Then I would switch to things that are complete exercises - like that round face one from the book a friend recommended.

Exercising is good, too, but having a goal is the most important. That's also one of the things that friend was talking to me about. How one great way to improve at art is to find an artist you like, and try to copy what they do. Not trace, not plagiarize. And if plagiarize, then just for practice, without presenting it as a piece you did. But try to recreate what you see using your own techniques. For example, if their poses are dynamic, try drawing a dynamic pose. If you don't know how, try drawing the same poses they've drawn and see what's common between them. If they're good at composition, try composing "like them". It's easier than trying to compose a picture "well", because you have a foothold, you don't have to do it from scratch, you don't have to invent art from scratch.

Now, to translate it back to writing. The main inspiration for me to start writing a few days ago was Patrick McKenzie. But I haven't read much of what he'd written, except the twitter threads and a couple famous posts. He talks about technical writing and also about articles. Something useful, not just a journal like the one here. Or, if a journal, then one with some substance. It's the useful kind of writing, and certainly one of the things I'm trying to do. But as I'm doing these writing days lately, I'm realizing it's not "it" for me. It's not the thing that clicks and feels good and useful. Of course, many useful things don't feel good or (initially) useful, and you just suck it up and do them anyway, but for now I want it to be useful and fun. Like my Japanese reading - I didn't pick up a textbook, I picked up a really good web novel, and that's what made reading so much fun and let me read so much in such a short span of time.

What I'm trying to say here, is I need to make writing fun. The journal is somewhat fun, but it's also not "it". Making big plans for my cool markdown wiki is fun, but that's just plans.

My current idea is to treat the writing project as a project instead of as exercise. Instead of saying "I should write 500 words per day on average, and if I need direction, there are things A, B, C that I could write", I want to start saying "For my Cool Writing Project I need things A, B, C to be written, and every day I'm going to write 500 words on average to bring the Cool Writing Project closer to completion".

Making these daily challenges finite is extremely important for them to feel doable. Making it about finishing One Cool Goal is also important. When reading The Silent Witch my goal wasn't to get better at Japanese or to pass N2. It was to finish the book. Same here - my goal shouldn't be to get better at writing, it should be to finish a project. I will trick myself into getting better at writing as a side effect.

That said, a project needs planning. I guess. And I also wanted to try Basecamp, another productivity/organization app/platform/thing. Sounds like a nice opportunity to try it? Though planning the wiki in the wiki itself also sounds nice, we'll see.