The hardest thing I ever had to do was get back in the routine of writing daily. That may sound odd considering how I’ve talked previously about how much I *need* to write, how it’s the process through which I work out my thoughts and the easiest way for me to express myself. But it’s true.

A big part of the reason I shut down Movie Marketing Madness back at the end of 2011 was because my work schedule was just too intense for me to put the muscle behind MMM I wanted to. So I shuttered that for almost four years. In that time I also neglected, much to my chagrin, writing for this site on any sort of regular basis. I contributed sporadically to the Voce and Porter Novelli blogs, but that was about it.

In the second half of 2015, as I was considering reviving MMM (which, of course, has now morphed into Cinematic Slant) what really had me going was the notion of doing my own writing on a daily basis again. I wanted to let me loose again, for want of a better way of putting it. That was somewhat harder than I anticipated and only part of it was because of other commitments.

See I was still treating this personal site as a side thing, a hobby to be attended to only when there wasn’t anything more interesting to do. There was no plan, no focus. That was a problem and it was getting in the way.

It was only when I realized I needed to give it the same attention I would give any client’s content marketing program that I got back into a groove. I created an editorial calendar for the blog, set goals for traffic and so on and got to executing. While the ed cal was one of my own creation and I was answerable only to myself, I worked to approach it as if it were set by someone else. A missed or shifted post here and there was alright, but I needed to hit those damn deadlines because if not then someone was going to be upset and the goals were thrown into doubt.

That gave me the structure I needed to get back into a routine with writing every day. It wasn’t overnight, but eventually it got easier. The pain of writing something every day lessened over time. I felt less and less like I was trying to swim against the current. In other words, the more I did it the easier it became.

Writing for me, as I said, is essential. When I get an idea of something I want to write it will spin around in my mind, festering and growing until I finally get it out. Writing is release, whether it’s a post here or something I’m writing for a freelance project. There are times I suffer from writer’s block like everyone else and there are certainly instances where, for whatever reason, the words just aren’t coming and this very much feels like a chore. Putting in the work and changing my mindset, though, helped me find the approach I needed to write every day, no matter the circumstances.