#writeeveryday Continued
During Lent I challenged myself to give up ignoring my writing talent by writing every day. I didn’t write every day, but I wrote more days than I didn’t. It felt good and it created a habit in my mind to be thinking about my writing each day. I wrote about a lot of different things and in a lot of different styles, but I was writing.
The next step is to get myself consistently writing on one project. I tend to start things with a flourish, grand plans, amazing ideas…and then. Well, and then. You know what happens, or in this case, I don’t know what happens next so I move on to another project or go back to one that has been in a holding pattern. So like many of my sewing projects, my writing projects sit looking half awesome but wholly unfinished. The excitement fizzles and like a warm, flat soda, I just can’t make myself finish. As a teacher, this is where I tell my students, “Just keep at it. Just keep puking something out on to the paper. We can clean it up later.”
Needless to say, I am terrible at taking my own advice. So here I am challenging myself further though Lent is over. I am going to continue my #writeeveryday challenge to myself, but I am also going to write a short piece from beginning to end. Whether I am working on other things simultaneously, I am going to work consistently on the same piece each day until it is complete. I am going to write it even when I hate it. I am going to write it even when think I can’t. I am going to write it on the days I don’t want to write a word.
I’ve read enough about writing to know that this is what writers do. I’m not saying anything that other writers out there haven’t heard. But I am saying it, in writing, so that I will do it.
If you’re playing mind games with yourself, you’re either crazy or you’re a writer. I’m a writer.
