My mission for 2025: Helping to tell the stories that truly matter

I started blogging in 1999 but have been writing an email newsletter since 1997 or 1998. 

There are about 850 original, long-form blog posts or newsletter issues on my website, along with almost 650 pieces published in various magazines and news sites, such as WIRED, VentureBeat, Business 2.0, Technology Review, and InfoWorld. I’ve also posted several hundred short-form notes. 

This is hardly everything. Many of the articles I wrote for other publications didn’t seem worth saving there, and a lot of my work for clients has never appeared on this site.

I look back over this work and find there’s quite a lot I’m proud of: The long feature about the Clock of the Long Now. Columns I wrote at VentureBeat about the importance and business benefits of diversity. A piece I wrote for Popula in 2019 about how I stopped drinking. My father's obituary and a series of posts written shortly after that, during the height of the pandemic: Grief and gratitude, Either way, you get your pet back, Walking through a shitstorm, and I have heard the toadfish singing.

The beginning of a new year seems like the perfect time to look back at a career spanning 30 years and reflect on what I need to do with whatever time is left. Is that a decade or two? Who knows?

No one ever knows how much time they have, or what kind of time. So I come to the question of “What’s next?” with a sense of quiet urgency. My choices matter, and how I spend my time over the next year (assuming I have even that much) will be significant.

What's next

My mission for the next while, however long it lasts, is clearer than ever: to share my work boldly.

I’m done segregating my “creative” work from my “work” work. I’d be a hypocrite if I stood here on my virtual soapbox telling you about how the best writing is truthful, full of life, and invites connection, and I didn’t demonstrate those qualities myself. 

That means I will be braver about sharing more of my creative essays, haibun, and haiku here. I’m going to share more rough drafts and scribbly bits.

I’m determined to keep sharing with the kind of honesty and commitment that brought forth my “grief and gratitude” series. 

The sense of creative freedom I received at the turning of the year demands expression. I hope that sharing that gift here will also help light some sparks of creative freedom in you.

That's because my mission is also to help you learn the power of writing for self-discovery, inquiry, and deep thinking.

This is consistent with what I've been doing here for the past year: helping people understand how to find and write better stories.

I want to pass along whatever useful things I’ve learned over my career. I will be very happy if I can inspire, edit, encourage, and help launch others’ writing careers.

If I've learned nothing else in 25+ years and more than 2,000 published posts and articles, it's this:

Writing is a tool for discovery, for figuring out what we really think, and for crafting better stories about who we are.

I will consider my mission accomplished if I can help others learn to use the written word that way.

This is especially urgent given the twin trends of a collapsing journalism market and the explosion of AI-generated content. There’s no longer a reliable pipeline for training young writers in how to write fast, well, and true. At the same time, GenAI language models are creating vast quantities of junk that looks impressive and seems “good enough” to many people but is actually soulless and empty.

If a new generation of people doesn't get excited about learning how to read and write with truth and beauty, we’ll drown in an unbroken sea of mediocre content.

So I will keep writing about how to write.

And I hope that this work is helpful to you.

Coming up in 2025

My book on how to write more effectively for and with other people is nearly finished, and I look forward to publishing it in 2025. Stay tuned for more!

I will continue offering Zoom-based writing circles in partnership with Foster. In these 90-minute sessions, a small group of writers gather to check in, set our intentions, write for an hour, and then check out with one another at the end. 

As part of that, I'm hosting a private writing circle on Fridays twice a month. If you’re interested in joining that small community, please email me and let me know a bit about your writing work.

I’ll also offer occasional public writing get-togethers, starting with my next free writing circle on Monday, January 13, at 8am Pacific. (Click that link to register!)

And I’d like to start doing in-person writing circles in San Francisco. More to come on that soon.

May you be well, safe, and happy. And may you be free.

Thanks for being there,

Dylan

p.s. I hope you'll subscribe to this brand-new newsletter here on LinkedIn. It will feature a selection of highlights from my main newsletter/blog. If you want to check out the full feed, please visit dylan.tweney.com.