175 Posts In and Still Learning to Write

The Forrest Four-Cast: March 23, 2017

One of the highlights of my 2017 SXSW experience was chatting with Dave Pell for a few minutes after his solo presentation on Thursday, March 16. Pell is one of my favorite contributors to Medium. I generally agree with his opinions. But even more so, I love the creativity, originality and innovation with which he expresses his ideas. If I can ever be one-quarter of the writer that he is, then I will be pretty happy with myself.

At approximately 175 posts deep on a project that began last August, I’m very slowly getting better at writing. As with most things in life, the more times one does it . . the more confident one becomes at the task at hand. And the more confident one becomes, the less daunting it becomes to try to create something relatively readable. As I wrote in a previous column about this process, some days are easier than others for creating content.

Writing about SXSW during (and leading up to) the event was a lot of fun because I generated much more traction than ever before. Posts that got the most attention were ones that mentioned particularly intriguing speakers — because those speakers then pushed those columns to their networks. A column I composed highlighting NBC News anchor Katy Tur received more views than anything else I have written since last summer. Cool!

But I’ve always wanted this writing project to cover more than just the somewhat low-hanging fruit of my involvement with SXSW. Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the 2017 event, I want to return to focusing on various other topics. In the coming weeks, look for more posts covering tech trends, books, pop culture and (of course) politics. As various SXSW news happens, I will also continue to cover it in this space.

Hugh Forrest tries to write four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts generally cover technology-related trends. When not attempting to wordsmith or meditating, he serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW in Austin.