Taking Time Away From the Writing Journey

Don't you just hate it when something comes along to interrupt your writing journey? Everything is scheduled out, deadlines are set, motivation to rush full steam ahead is not a problem- then the unthinkable happens. You go on vacation (maybe not such a bad thing), work requires a lot of overtime, you have a family emergency, you get the Flu, or some other reason life takes a sidetrack that wasn't expected, or something that's just down right inconvenient for your writing journey. It makes you groan deep within, because you know you'll have to put your writing aside for a time in order to put your full focus onto the interruption.

The Amazing Benefits of Freewriting

There are many tools in a writer's toolbox, but none is as helpful as the simple practice of freewriting. It's something that I picked up in my writing journey, which I used- but never fully appreciated- until I learned how powerful it could really be. This happened after reading the book How to Be a Writer by Barbara Baig. Nearly all her exercises, in the 265 page book, uses different variations of simple freewrite and focused freewriting. After doing several of the exercises, I found that all the freewriting I’d done up to that point was really just a warm-up. I never took it to the next level, because I hadn’t realized I wasn’t doing freewriting nearly enough (it should be done everyday), or even asking the right questions to do focused freewriting.

Publication: Why the rush?

There are two kinds of writers; the ones who are published and the ones who are not. The ones that are published are constantly looking for new things to write about and launch into the world (they make it look so easy). Then you have the writers who aren’t published, looking at the published authors and saying, “that’s what I want.” So these unpublished or newly published writers race to break into the field, because it’s what's expected of them. 

Goals in 2012

It’s January 1^st once again and like the years before I want to reassess my goals and where I would like to go on my writing journey. After a Year in Review, I have come up with some things I want to accomplish in 2012 to better the craft of my writing. 

Read

The best way to get better at any craft is to study those who have gone before in the field you wish to know about. So if you want to learn to write what better way than by reading what others have written? Reading something every day is my goal, even if it’s as simple as a blog post. 

Write

How can a person get better at something when you don’t practice? You can’t, so that’s my next goal to write every day. A good friend of mine once told me that it takes approximately 10,000 hours working at something to really be good at it. Looks like I’ve got a ways to go. My plan is to put a decent sized dent in that 10,000 hour mark.