It’s Day 28 of 31 Days of Writing Tips, and today’s writing prompt is: TEST
Each of the posts in this series has been written in five minutes flat as part of 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes.
Find more posts in this series HERE.
I have a confession to make: I’ve been thinking about experimenting with essay writing for several months but kept putting it off.
I would mull themes and ideas over in my mind, but never actually started writing.
I think I was too scared I would mess it up.
I confessed these fears recently to a writing friend, and she encouraged me to just start. She told me about how she has been writing in a journal each day for just five or ten minutes. Maybe I could start there, too? Just five or ten minutes — that didn’t sound too bad. After all, isn’t that what I’ve been preaching through Five Minute Friday all these years?
Then this same friend offered to swap essays with me in about six weeks. Her offer was just the accountability I needed to get going. So I started.
I have no idea what will come of it (if anything) and I’m still not sure I’m doing it “right,” but I’m writing. And it feels so good.
Every morning after reading my Bible I set my timer for five minutes before turning on the Wi-Fi on my computer. And I write.
Maybe five minutes could work fo you, too? At this point I’m just testing it out to see where it goes.
At a writing conference I attended this past weekend, I talked with a published author who is working on a manuscript for her next book. The last time I saw her about a month ago, she confessed that she’s been feeling stuck and hadn’t made much progress for weeks. This time when I asked her how the writing was going, she told me that she has started writing longhand with a pen and paper — and for now, it’s working for her. It helped her get unstuck.
Test out different methods, approaches, and writing styles. You never know what might happen.
