30 Days of Writing

So here I am on day 12 of writing every day for a month. It doesn't feel like that big of an accomplishment, but today I'm realizing something. As I went through my day today, I've realized that writing has become a habit. It's just another thing I do every day, along with brushing my teeth and taking a shower. I can't believe how easily this habit formed in less than twelve days.

So what does this mean? I do actually write quite a bit, but writing an assigned piece for a class or writing a structured piece to meet a purpose is just not the same as writing whatever I feel like writing, no strings attached. What's more, I'm finding that knowing I will be writing each day, I'm viewing my life differently. Just a simple 15 minutes of writing a day has dramatically changed the way I view the world. It's crazy. When it comes to time write, I usually already know what I'm going to write about, because whether consciously or not, I've already begun formulating the piece in my head.

This has great implications for me. Whatever the purpose, I really want to develop my Facebook status updates from my school year last year into more developed vignettes while I still remember the details. Writing every day is giving me time to do this, and again has changed the way I view my day. A few days ago I was in Barnes and Noble, and I just dropped by the writing section. A book captured my attention. I don't remember the title or the author, but while flipping through it, I realized what it was I felt like my stories from the classroom were missing. Basically, I'm writing a memoir, and I'm concerned that the stories, while meaningful for me, are boring for someone else to read. I felt like the stories are important to me, but they were missing something.

To get the gist of what I read, the author said something like, "Most aspiring authors make the same mistake when writing their memoirs: They write in small snippets, like an autobiography. A great memoir has a theme underneath that connects the small pieces together." I just read Winter Dance by Gary Paulsen a few weeks ago. This book immediately came to mind. Each chapter in his book is the next segment of time, but each segment purposefully adds to the theme of preparing for the Iditarod. In the end, while racing the Iditarod, the information presented in earlier in the book comes back into play.

So I will keep writing every day, and as I do, I will continue living life as a writer.