write

well… sorta’ getting easier. been reading some advice from published writers. one thing is clear- all the writers suggest to “show up”. show up everyday in front of that page and see what happens. some days are crappy and some days productive but in the end it’s the showing up that get’s you started and keeps you going.
(or it helps decide maybe that writing is not it for you) :-)

Hard to write regulary when you have to figure out yourself what to write. Plus there’s all those good books out there and I’m reading some great ones thinking how I wish I could write like that… I’m still trying to establish a productive writing routine.

Good advice from “yebw” and I took it and it works. I just started to write even if it felt “crappy” from the first sentence. I persevered anyway and got all the crap out. :-) Yeah that worked because it freed me up to write the next thing which wasn’t too bad. Practice, practice and more practice. Good thing I enjoy writing.

It’s not that I’ve got writer’s block. But I have hit a roadblock on my 28 days to the daily creative writing habit. AAAAGHHHH! I was doing well for about a week and then my drive fizzled. My imagination deflated like a punctured balloon. I haven’t been setting aside my 30 minutes to write consciously so in the end the day draws to a close and I find that I haven’t written anything more than the journal entry. Time to get past the roadblock. I do still have 2 and a half hours before this day ends… off I go to write! The cheer helps!

finished my thirty minutes of creative writing way before midnight so I am feeling pretty confident about establishing this habit and getting past a “shitty first draft”. it does seem like it’s getting easier to get words down on paper. i’m sure that writing well is another matter. i’ve read that it takes about 28 days to establish a habit so i won’t even think about writing well until i’ve succeeded at writing everyday.

Enfin! An hour before midnight and I finally complete my daily 30 minutes of creative writing. You would think that my love for writing would have me doing this exercise first thing in the morning after I bound out of bed. My perfectionism is a factor that halts me from committing my thoughts onto the page. Finally I just set a timer for 30 minutes and just wrote- what Anne Lamott describes in her book Bird by Bird as- a shitty first draft. Well we all gotta’ start somewhere.

So far I have been writing at least one to three pages daily in a journal. After a year of that now (in April, I think) I finally got started writing poetry regulary- but not everyday. I write when I have a quite moment and inspiration. I am trying to write short stories or a novel- but I’m still at the early stages of struggling to write everyday creatively (not the journal) and get ideas down.
I am working on getting that time to write at least 30 minutes each day outside of journal-writing and making it a habit!