Behind the scenes of writing about Vietnamese-owned coffee businesses

Welcome to my writing anxiety loop.

I go into an anxiety loop for every article I write. More accurately, it’s a sine-looking graph.

Last week, I covered my writing process for reported and researched pieces. The process is much shorter when it’s an essay and/or requires no interviews. The intensity of anxiety varies between articles, but it is never absent.

To illustrate this, I made a graph:

The y-axis is an arbitrary amount that I decided on. Positive numbers express higher confidence levels: I feel good about my work and can write well. The more negative the number, the higher my anxiety: I question my skills, my work, my confidence, and so on. Zero is a neutral mood—resting with no extreme emotions in either direction. As you can see from the graph, the mood swings are large. The writing stage takes a while, so I swing in both directions.