How Atomic Essays Finally Made Me A Consistent Writer

Why Atomic Writing Is The One Medium Every New Creator Needs To Master

Ev Chapman
6 min readJul 9, 2022

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Photo by Nayanika Mukherjee on Unsplash

28th March 2021 was the day I really started writing seriously online. I had dabbled before that for 10 years on various projects from blogs to vlogs, podcasts & everything in between.

Looking back, I’ve always had an innate desire to output creatively in the world.

Except I was never able to stick with any of them. Every time I started a new project I would be excited at first and then either run out of steam or get bored and give up — discarding the project to the familiar graveyard of my other creative projects.

But in 2021 I found a new medium and everything changed.

January 2021 I was knee-deep in a brand new blog project that was not going well already. One day while I was scrolling on Twitter I started seeing these small image-based essays. They were a simple screenshot of a few hundred words and they felt like they were EVERYWHERE (thankyou Twitter algorithm).

I consumed one and then another and another. They were practical, useful and really easy to read. And I eventually followed the trail of essays back to a guy called Dickie Bush.

And that is the story of how I joined ship30for30 and everything changed from that moment on as I started to write these atomic essays every day.

Like everyone who joined up, I committed to 30 days of essays and by the end of that first 30 days, I was hooked. Why were these essays so breezily easy to write compared to the blogs I laboured over that literally only my Aunty & a few dear friends were reading?

Fast forward a year and I’ve written more than 300 of these ‘little yellow essays’ and they form the basis for everything I create online. Every article, every product, all my courses, workshops and even this book that I’m stubbornly trying to write all found its seed in a simple yellow essay of no more than 300 words.

They can be a powerful medium not only for growing your audience, building confidence & consistency but for testing out ideas fast.

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Ev Chapman

I help modern workers build digital systems for productivity, knowledge & creativity that take care of the busy work. So they can do the human work ✨