Monday, August 5, 2013

Day 1 of 365: Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Rule #1 of Writing: Just write. Stop thinking. Stop planning. Just write.


Once upon a time, I read an article about a writing professor forcing his students to wrote a blog entry every day for 90 days. The first week was filled with poignant observations, fiction snippets, etc. The next two to three weeks were filled with entries that essentially said, "I have nothing to write about." Some even bemoaned that they didn't know why they were trying to be writers in the first place.


And then, something pretty stellar happened: around the end of the month, students began writing like they never had before, about things that they hadn't written about before. The need to be a perfectionist was gone and they could just write.


For those who don't know me via Trial & Error Creativity, I fancy myself as a bit of a writer. I have two manuscripts (one completed miraculously during NaNoWriMo, more of less) that have been waiting in the wings for years. I did the joyous agency hunt with my first manuscript (which resulted in a lot of bites, but no catches), and I'm now (slowly but surely) editing my second manuscript. I'm also in the process of writing Manuscript #3.


I'm also an unemployed teacher. As I've touched upon on my crafts blog (and more in depth in an Article on Thought Catalogue, I retired from the teaching profession and have been finding my footing ever since. Ideally, I'd just spend all that time writing. But, more and more, I found myself sitting down to my computer to write, only to get a paragraph out, at best.


So I decided to take the writing professor's idea and take it one step further. My goal? A blog post every day for an entire year. I can write whatever I want to write about, for however long I have to write about. The only rule is that it has to be at least three paragraphs long (on top of being a daily occurrence).


So...let's see how this pans out. This might turn out to be the best idea I ever had. This might turn out to be the be worst. Only time will tell. But regardless, this is Day One. Of three hundred, sixty five. And welcome to my blog project.

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