Advanced Access Blog

It seems that I am somehow immersed in a community (literal and online) of writers. Sure we’re all writers to some degree, but I mean actual writers; people aspiring to be novelists, songwriters, etc.

I have one friend (and co-worker) who is doing NaNoWriMo (spending November writing a 175-page novel kamikaze style) this year and is using his blog to “gear up” and practice. He says in a blog comment,

Part of my reason for blogging is that it lets me do my ‘writing practice’, which is often just 10-20 minutes a day, and keep track of it. I can look at the calendar on the right and see how much of a slacker I am.

He never writes things that aren’t good… so this isn’t about him. It’s not fair. hmph.

This post is about the rest of us who wonder, could I do that? Could I write something that people want to read? What should we do? Well, exactly what he’s doing… writing!

The NaNoWriMo site says,

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

So are you willing to just take 20-30 min each day (gosh, even each week) to get anything down on “paper”? If you can do that, think of the kind of content you can begin to develop for your website and for your blog. Just write about what’s relevant to you and don’t over-censor yourself. Then pull the bits and pieces out that you need.

And just in case you’re still unsure of what you have, run it by a friend… or just post it on your blog, people will comment, just have an open dialogue.

So, if you’re writing for business or recreation, hopefully you can remember - just write it anyway!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Blogging, Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Digg this