Today’s prompt from www.reverb10.com: What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
My best answer to what I do each day that doesn’t contribute to my writing is to write. I write comments on student essays. I write emails. I write discussion board replies. I write, write, write in ways that I don’t think of as writing. That kind of stuff I would label as functioning, not creating.
I do a job, in other words. My job consumes all of my time. There is nothing I can do about that. I have no back up plan, no alternative, to doing a job.
My only alternative is to make better use of limited time. I am already putting all of the time I have into writing each day, but I’m doing it all for the blog. I want to focus more on poetry, and/or I want to focus more on writing “meaningful” pieces for the blog. I think I give the blog a lot of toss-aways. I want to do better. Maybe that means I need a plan for what I will write about. Maybe spending this month writing to prompts will help me formulate a plan.
I also think I’d like to do more of my writing earlier in the day. I usually write in the evenings, often as the last thing I do before I go to bed. By that time I’m tired and mentally drained. My prime thinking time is in the morning, and I’m mostly spending my mornings taking care of mechanical procedures that don’t necessarily require much thought on my part.
Once school is out for the break, I hope to devote some morning time to working on poetry. It would be nice to think I could write poetry every morning, but I just don’t live in a world that operates that way. School breaks and Saturdays are my only hope.
My other goal is to combine activities so that more of what I’m already doing more directly contributes to my writing. Reading contributes. Photography contributes. Most everything I do leads to writing in one fashion or another. However, I could do more to make it all work together. I could read more to write and write more about what I’m reading. I could seek out more photographs for use as writing prompts.
More photo excursions of a writerly bent definitely tops my list of goals for 2011.
More camera. More poetry. More off-blog focused writing. More focused blog writing. This is where I hope I’m headed for 2011. And all of that on the same 20 minutes a day I’ve been putting into the blog all along.
I must really be good if I can set all of those goals based on so little reality. Somebody save me from myself.
I think you need to start somewhere and having these ideas about what you want to change is at least a place to start. Making those ideas into concrete action is a whole other project but maybe this Reverb month will help you figure out which part to focus on and how to take that focus and act on your goals.
The writing I do for my job gets in the way of my ‘real’ writing too. It’s just so much easier to write about the things my clients want written than to strike out on my own. That isn’t my biggest obstacle at the moment though. The thing blocking me is my inability to accept that my writing is important enough to put into my schedule. Clearly something for me to work on.
Good luck with your plans!
Good luck with your plans too, and thanks for the encouragement. I’m glad I found Reverb. I think this will be an interesting month.