Blogging every day is going well for me so far. At least, I haven’t missed a day yet so that should count for something. There are days when my posts come naturally, and there are days when they don’t. Days when I spend far too long staring at the blank text box hoping for something to happen. But each day, I push through the blocks and get on with it anyway. And I’m proud of this. In the past I’ve been a chronic procrastinator, who struggles to find the motivation to get as far as the title for my work, let alone the rest of the writing.
My aim now is to carry this habit through to other forms of writing. I’m thinking about starting to keep a journal again, something that in the past I’ve only managed for a few days at a time. They say that we all have a novel inside us; maybe now is the time for me to find mine. I don’t need to explain why cultivating a writing habit like this will be useful during the next year of my degree. Especially with my disseration coming up so soon. (Scary thought! If you have any tips that helped you to get through yours, please let me know. I’m terrified of it.)
I’m already writing more than I did before, in ways that I didn’t expect. I have a notebook that is steadily filling with quotes, ideas, disjointed thoughts that needed a home somewhere. There are sticky notes on my wall with more. Each morning, I’ve started to sit with a pen and paper and just brainstorm. It doesn’t matter what ideas happen in those moments, but they’re written and preserved for the time I decide to use them. As a side note, that’s an exercise that I would thoroughly recommend. Grab a scrap of paper and the nearest thing to write with and just think. Let the ideas happen. It’s therapeutic as anything, and if you’re struggling with a problem, it might be then that you manage to solve it.
The last real barrier that I have in writing is how to write for a prompt that isn’t on my mind. You might describe my blogs as freeform; I start with a thought and follow it through. I definitely didn’t plan this part, if you needed any proof. But I have a whole list of other ideas that I think would make good posts on here that I’d like to work through eventually. And it’s definitely a useful skill to be able to write to a brief or within constraints. I have a plan to tackle it though. It’s early stages yet, so I’m still in the honeymoon stage of motivation. You know, the stage before I’ve actually started doing anything for it but it seems like a fun idea. I’ll let you know how it works out. This exercise is definitely helping me to trust myself and my ideas, if nothing else.
Hooks, Books, and Funny Looks 