I’ve discovered that I need a lot more structure than I would like to admit. For a long time, I couldn’t even sit down at the keyboard unless someone told me what to write and when it was due. That worked well until I graduated; now I have to kick my own ass. After months of trying to write, and thinking about writing, and wishing I was writing, I publicly pledged to write 1,667 words a day for thirty days straight. It’s amazing. As the kind folks from National Novel Writing Month say, “The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.”
It’s working so well, I tried to give myself a daily photo challenge as well.
Unfortunately, I got out there today and had zero inspiration. The light was all wrong, I didn’t have enough time, and everything around me looked boring. I couldn’t make myself take a single photograph. This has happened before, countless times, but today the face of my crazy old drawing teacher appeared. I remembered him looking at a stack of my lifeless drawings and saying, “I think you’re going to need to take off your glasses. The way you’re looking at things is interfering with the way you are seeing.” Say what?
Well, I wasn’t about to take off my glasses today. I’m blind, blind, blind, and the last thing I wanted to do was run into a tree with my camera or trip over a car. So, I threw that contraption out of focus instead. While I’m not completely sold on any of the resulting images, the process was transformed. The world was boiled down into geometry and light, and suddenly I wanted come out and play.
“publicly pledged to write 1,667 words a day for thirty days straight.” Now that ‘s an interesting pledge to make .
I very recently made a similar one. Just didn’t make it public. Scared of the public humiliation.
http://fluidwords.wordpress.com/
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The daily word goal comes from trying to hit 50,000 words in 30 days. Thankfully, I’m not putting all of the 1,667 out into the cyber-public. Just an excerpt now and then. After all, I didn’t promise 1,667 well-written ones. What makes it feel like a healthy dose of peer pressure is that people are constantly asking about my word count. I’m up to 17,632, and that feels pretty damn great. Best of luck on your pledge.
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