I decided to set myself a challenge: write
7 blog articles in 7 days. One per day.
The reason for this challenge was to get
myself going with writing again. Writing is something I love doing, I have
ideas for blog pieces running around in my head every day and yet, the last
blog I wrote was two years ago… 2 years ago!
Its funny how quickly you can get out of a
habit and stay out of it.
After publishing my book, Courage to Lead (Jacana 2014), I seem to have just stopped writing. As any
author will know, writing a book is a gruelling exercise. The deadlines,
revisions, rethinking what you want to say and going over every sentence at
least ten times before its given the final okay takes time, energy and
commitment. In the process you lose loads of sleep and somewhere down the line
you can lose enthusiasm for writing and lose some of the passion for your
message. In fact, I have a confession to make. I haven’t read my book in its
entirety after the final go-ahead to print. It’s something I have really wanted
to do but I’ve just lost the energy. With the birth of my book, the launch, the
PR, the excitement and sense of achievement something got lost in that I just
stopped writing. No blogs, no articles. Just silence…
I’ve been thinking about this over the last
months and wondering how to get started again. What will give me that kickstart
to launch back into the writing habit?
And two things happened.
Thing 1
I read an article about writing, by Martha
Beck, who said that her first draft is always really, really bad. In fact, to
get herself going on an article (usually with a deadline) she gives herself the
challenge and permission to write the crappiest first draft ever, as long as she
puts pen to paper. I decided to use this idea and give myself the challenge and
permission to write really bad first drafts, as long as it gets me writing
again.
With multiple revisions, you can always fix
it, change it, reduce it – but just getting the first draft done is the most powerful
step to getting going.
Thing 2
I started having ideas of what to write
about rolling around in my head and I began writing down my blog titles, as
these ideas came up. The excitement to write began to awaken within me as I
realised that each article didn’t need to be very long. It could be a short
comment about something that I had noticed in my day or an idea that I wanted
to share. A blog piece found its way into my inbox and I decided to do a word
count on it. 400 words – that’s how short it was. That’s pretty doable.
But I still wasn’t writing…
This is where the idea of 7 blogs in 7 days
came to me. First, it reminded me of the Sting song ‘7 brides for 7 brothers’ and Sting’s music makes me happy. Second,
to get a blog article written every day, you have to know that you will only
manage really bad first drafts and nothing more. The aim was to spill the ideas
on to the page and get my mind working in the direction of writing.
The 7-day challenge was not about posting
the blogs. In fact, they would not
be ready for posting after 7 days. And there are advantages to this approach
besides unblocking my writer’s block. If I wrote 7 blogs and posted one per
week, I would have 7 weeks of material taken care of and could continue to
write at a much less frenetic pace with a buffer in place. It would get me out
of the stuckness and back into the arena. The blogs don’t need to be perfect,
just really bad first drafts. I could work on the revisions when I was ready to
post them. And finally, a great advantage would be even more material since I’m
already planning my 7th blog which will be what I learnt from the
experience.
So here goes… This is Day 1 of 7 blogs in 7 days. Blog 1 is now written. In fact all 7 are written and are filed away as really bad first drafts so stay tuned as I unleash them one at a time.
Now, over to you…
What habit have you let go of that you
would like to revive?
How can you create your own 7 xxx (fill in
the blank) in 7 days to get you going?
Remember the principles:
1.
Give yourself permission to do
a really bad job as a starting point
2.
Just get started – keep it
short, keep it simple
3.
Do this really badly for 7 days
4.
See what happens… what needs
revision, fixing, publishing, more commitment?
5.
Share your journey in the comments
below – I’d love to hear
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