I have been thinking that having a blog related to writing would be a good idea. To be clear, I am talking about a blog that is about my writing not a blog about how to be a writer. I am not a professional writer. I am not really even an amateur writer. Since I write in spits and spats, it is hard to claim I am in any shape or form a writer. Except, I think that I want to be a writer, and I have been making very slow progress toward that.

When I was younger, practically in another life, I was in the U. S. Navy. I was in a program that required extensive technical training before you were allowed to stand watch. This meant that you weren’t really all that useful until you had completed all of your qualifications.

One of the things that you had to do to qualify to stand watch was to get signoffs from qualified people to say that you knew enough to stand the watch. I was always terrified of that part. I didn’t like to feel like I didn’t know something. During one of my quals, the person I was being tested by got angry and told me that I ‘knew too much’. Of course, I didn’t know ‘too much’, but his point was that I had delayed my qualification in order to have a higher confidence that I wouldn’t seem like I didn’t know anything. Instead, I should have been attempting to get qualified faster so that I could be a useful contributor and help out the watch rotation.

Some of you (maybe even all 3 of you) that are reading this, will assume I am trying to make myself look smart. That isn’t the case, but rather I am trying to point out something important. If you wait until you have all the answers, you are not going to be very productive. You aren’t very productive or useful until you start doing something productive and useful. Stop studying up so that you can one day do something useful. Get started doing something productive, and work on improving it as you go.

Some have said “you can’t improve perfection”. That may be true. But you also can’t improve on something that you never create.