It has been entirely too long since
I’ve written a post. I can whine and complain about how complicated my life has
been, but the reality is that writing is like exercise – difficult to get
motivated about starting, but surprisingly cathartic once I’ve taken the
plunge.
Recently I was at a seminar where one
of the round-table discussions centered around writing strategies. Most
interesting to me were the strategies people use to convince themselves to
write. One lady always stopped writing in the middle of a sentence, so that
she’d have a thought to begin with the next time. The man beside me said he
always goes somewhere across town to write – a coffee shop or a park – because
once he’s there he can tell himself he has to keep writing to make the trip
worthwhile. The woman leading the session rewarded herself for writing by
bribing herself with Solitaire games – for every page or so written she’d allow
herself to play three games.
It’s interesting, I think, that we
must entice ourselves to write. I don’t hear people talk of strategies to get
started with reading, or ways to manage reading a book so you’ll pick it up the
next time. Even when you’re reading for an assignment, it’s much easier than
writing one. Is it because it’s a type of Breathing Out
that requires us to actively produce thought rather than merely absorb
another’s ideas?
At any rate, I’m going to work at
playing games with myself to be a more active writer. One idea I liked from the
round-table discussion was not writing every day – maybe just every other day,
the ones with the letter T in them. I’ll promise myself that I only need to
write one paragraph, and if I write more then that’s just icing on the cake.
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