A Slight Delay

Discipline is never an end itself, only a means to an end. –Robert Fripp

Last week’s assignment, for those of you scoring at home, was to write three paragraphs a day, every day. Like jogging, biking, or any other kind of exercise, you may have found yourself–and/or may yet find yourself–aching in places you didn’t know could ache as you get around to exercising stuff that’s lain dormant for a while.

The whole idea here is to build a routine, and to turn writing into a habit. It’s hard to write if you haven’t done it in a while; making excuses not to write is a heck of a lot easier than staring at a blank page or screen, and figuring out what you’re going to fill it with. As with jogging, though, it gets easier the more often you do it. And at some point it stops being exercise or a chore; it’s something you look forward to, a rush of adrenaline or endorphins, if you will. (more…)

Last week’s assignment was to write something awful. Not merely bad, mind you. I’m talking truly horrid. In case you’ve spent the last week fretting over the point of that little exercise (I know you weren’t; play along for a bit), here’s why I put it out there:

Anyone that takes writing even remotely seriously wants to do it well. And anyone–at least of the writers I know–that wants to do it well is convinced that their writing is pretty awful. Now, I’ll grant you that there are some pretty bad writers out there. But if you tried this exercise, you probably found that it took some effort to come up with something bad. (more…)