It’s been a very long while since I contributed to this blog, and it’s not because I don’t care or have nothing to say. It takes time to write something and I just haven’t had the time. It’s my intention to start posting more frequently however, especially after the New Year, so if you’ve enjoyed this blog when it was good, look forward to more soon.
Seed that info away in a small crevice of your mind and return from time to time. 😀
Writing is a hard thing to do all the time, even if you have been as I have doing it professionally on and off for over 30 years. Remembering to do it every day if it’s not the way you earn your living at the moment is hard, but you MUST, and that’s why I’m returning to this blog; I desperately need to keep my hand in.
It’s not that I don’t have any ideas, I actually have too many and that’s part of the problem. Mashalling your ideas into a project you can actually finish is very important. So I have a few impromptu tips, mostly for your benefit, but also to remind myself to take my own medicine from time to time.
- Write every day
- make notes
- do one thing
WRITE EVERY DAY
This is the hard one but this is helped by tip 3. The secret to writing every day is to write SOMETHING, ANYTHING. Write a three line poem. Write a phrase. Shit, write a shopping list, it’s doesn’t matter. Just flippin well write something down and keep it somewhere so you can read it. I usually have a nice notebook and a pen handy. I write notes (tip 2) and fragments of writing (tip 1 and 3) which I may or may not develop later. At least I can say I wrote something and I can point to it if anyone asks.
MAKE NOTES
Capture EVERY idea you have no matter how nonsensical or worthless. You can’t develop any ideas if you forget them and you WILL forget them. You may pride yourself on having a good memory. Well, bully for you. You are actually delusional if you think you can retain a half assed creative thought for more than 5-6 mins without it morphing into something else or getting blasted out of your brain by an interruption. Write your ideas down IMMEDIATELY if you want to keep them. Lock it or lose it.
DO ONE THING
I recently copped hold of a powerful concept: if you want to learn or develop or do something more often, a skill or a pastime or a project, just DO ONE THING. If you want to write, then write something. Anything. Write a sentence. In a week you’ll have written 7 sentences and in a month 30 sentences.
If you want to make scale models then just glue one part to another part. That’s all you have to do. Do this every day and at the end of the week (even if you’ve had no time) you’ve glued 7 parts together. In a month you’ll have glued a minimum of 30 parts and it took zero time out of your day.
See the theme? But here’s the trick. I started out this blog intending (if nothing else) to write one sentence. But like as not you’ll write five or six. Look back at how many sentences this intention of one actualy turned into.
It’s a mind trick, but it’s a damn clever one.
Going Down Writing 