It’s Writing Monday…
More on the gloomy voices that plague writers and anyone involved in any creative process:
Gloomy Voice #5 – When the time is right, the schedule is clear, I win the lottery, and I feel moved, I will write.
The truth: If you truly want to write, you will find the time. It’s a matter of priorities.
You should write every day.
Write something.
Write anything.
To be able to write, you have to build your muscle: the writing muscle.
If you want that muscle to do much for you, then you’ve got to give it a workout regularly and build it up so that it’s strong when you are ready to give it a full workout.
How do you do that when you’re a new parent with small children, who also has to work outside the home, clean your own house, finish your degree, and take care of aging parents?
Sorry, but you still have time to write, if even for just five minutes a day.
What can you do in five minutes?
Here are just four random ideas:
1. Write the first sentence that comes to your head, then spend five minutes seeing how many ways you can tweak, revise and add excitement or drama or sadness or humor to that one sentence.
2. Select a book and randomly pick a page. Determine what you would tweak to make it better. Spot any useless adjectives? Too much tell and not enough show? Can you punch up the dialogue?
3. Make a grocery list. Instead of saying “large box of Cascade,” build an analogy between its size and a well-known object. Or, you want sweet cereal? Exactly how sweet do you want it? Hot sauce? How hot? The point is to challenge your descriptive powers.
4. Write poetry. I don’t think there is any better way to learn to write tight and light. In poetry, every word must fight for its right to be on the page. What better training ground could there be to develop a command of words?!
Five minutes? Will that really help?
Yes! If you waited until your children were in college before lifting your arm over your head, you probably wouldn’t be able to do it. But, because you’ve used that muscle for at least five minutes per day (washing your hair and pulling on a shirt), you will be able to pick up that dumbbell years from now and build up to more intense exercises. (Please note that I encourage a LOT more exercise than that, but you get the point.)
Likewise, if you use your writing muscle for five minutes a day, then when the children are grown, that muscle will be stronger and ready for endurance testing by way of an article or book.
If putting pen to paper still daunts you, given your schedule, then do other writing efforts: read how-to books on writing, collect examples of good writing, jot any creative thoughts you have and toss them in a file, join a writer’s group and ask the spouse to watch the kids for that two-hour timeframe.
But these efforts are so scattered, you say?
Bear in mind that Solomon (purported by both religious leaders and secular historians to be the wisest man who ever lived…umm, with the exception of Christ, of course) wrote in Ecclesiastes about the cycles of life, each with its own work to do. He said that there is a time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
Now may be your time to scatter by way of random writing efforts here and there. The kind you can do in five minutes.
You can gather those stones together in another season.
Happy writing!
Next Week: Gloomy Voice #6 – You waste too much time thinking about what to write.
Historical intrigue interwoven with modern-day suspense and a touch of the mysterious.
Contemporary romantic suspense.
Coming-of-age sagas.
Great post, Deb! I’ll be putting some of these ideas into practice. I look forward to next week’s post. 🙂