I’ve set myself a ‘challenge’ to write something every day. I put ‘challenge’ in quote marks because I’m not great at keeping up with mandated instructions, even if I was the one to mandate them. No one tells me what to do. Not even me.
So the aim is, write something every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s long, short, good, bad, work related or not, part of a WIP or something completely new.
Just something. It can be on my blog, in my phone notes, in my physical journal or anywhere else.
The longer I’d been writing for a living, the less I seemed to want to write for myself. I think this is understandable; the builder never finishes their own home and all that.
But as I move away from writing for a living, the more I feel drawn back to writing for me.
I hesitate to say ‘writing for fun’ or ‘for pleasure’ because, as many writers will know, it’s often just about getting concepts, fears, observations, feelings, imaginary arguments and encounters out of your head, in the form of words.
Painters paint, sculptors sculpt, writers write. All of these creative acts can be done for a living, for a fee and for others – and done well – but art is made where you can’t not give voice to whatever’s rattling around your head.
Can people do both? Create for a living and then go home and create for themselves? Definitely. Can I? Yeah I guess, but I find it hard to write when I’ve written all day, I’d rather cook, or craft.
When I was younger, I wrote all the time. Couldn’t help myself. Just compelled to make sense of the world through words.
Right now, I’m rusty at writing for anything other than work stuff and my particular work stuff was/is persuasive, yes, but technical, pretty dry, and reactive rather than proactive. On top of that, I’ve spent the best part of a decade helping other people write technical, dry, reactive stuff.
A few years ago I read Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ and challenged myself to write something that was almost wholly dialogue. The polar opposite to work writing. That turned into something that I could build into a bigger story and currently languishes on my old laptop as a WIP. Recently I’ve had some ideas about how I can move that WIP forward, and I think that is because I have started writing for me again.
So I’m going to try to write something every day. Start oiling the mental wheels and see what else unlocks.