Tuesday, 07 July 2009

Just Keep Writing

Writing fifteen minutes a day on my blog turns out to be harder than I expected. I'm not entirely sorry that I can't move on to the next stage of this enchanted fifteen thing. If I didn't think I needed to be at home to make it work, I'd move on despite whatever I felt. As it is, I don't object to a bit more time to master this concept.

Writing for fifteen minutes a day is pretty easy. I almost do that without trying. If you were to count the things I compose in my head, but don't take any further, I'd do even better. Writing for fifteen minutes every day for my blog is much more difficult. Sometimes I feel like writing something different. Or I think that there are better ways to write blog entries (which there probably are, but I seriously doubt that there are any I could keep up consistently). That's when it becomes a real challenge.

The even greater challenge is the bit about not editing. I pretty much fail at that. I edit a lot less than I used to - a lot less than I used to. I just change the structure of my sentences occasionally, or maybe erase a couple of words. For a girl who was taking eight minutes to write nothing, that's pretty good going, I think. Even though I deleted the whole sentence that was going to go here.

I have a long way to go with this fifteen minutes thing, but I think it's good for me. I'm pretty sure I can already write a better blog post in fifteen minutes than I could in half an hour before I started. Part of that, I'm sure, is because I'm getting used to writing posts with a bit of substance to them. (At least, I think they've got a bit of substance to them.) A good deal of it, though, is that on the whole my writing doesn't need to be edited all that badly. So writing solidly means I actually get my thoughts onto (digital) paper in a vaguely presentable form, rather than losing track of what I'm actually saying because I go back to make miniscule changes.

Writing without editing (much) is good, although there's still much more thought, structure and fiddling in my blog posts than there is in my journal entries!

2 comments:

  1. Hey Charli--glad to see you struggling through.

    I think I can clarify some things for you. Some people are using the 15 minutes to write blog posts, but you can also just use it as a free writing exercise before you write a blog post, to clear your mind.

    And though 15 minutes is the starting point you can take (and probably should) more time to edit later if it is something you wish to publish.

    I think it is very helpful though to separate the process of editing from writing. Flow is very important.

    And everyone is coming from a different place. It sounds like you've not had a problem with writing consistently or flow, since you write out of habit almost every day anyway. For some writing at all is the battle. For others, like you, you are struggling between raw content and form. You are on the "write" track if you are beginning to think of them as separate processes.

    Keep writing!

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  2. Thanks, blog nerd! I think the biggest learning point for me is flow vs editing which, I think, is linked to content vs form. I've never made a point of separating the two before, so I guess I'll have to feel my way around it, but just figuring out that it's there is enough of a discovery for now.

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