On daily writing…

I really didn’t mean to, but I just realized that I took an inadvertent week off of writing my blog (after taking an intentional week off a couple of weeks ago).

Last Thursday and Friday was our denomination’s district conference, and I was pretty involved, so I didn’t write. Monday and Tuesday I was in Seattle with some friends and I purposefully left my computer behind to focus on the relationships instead of work. Again, no writing. Then yesterday I was slammed catching up from all the action of the past week.

Before you know it, my son has a birthday (today), my kids get a day off of school (tomorrow), and then it’s the weekend again.

My personal commitment to keep writing every day has hit a snag.

On one hand I think that’s OK. For the last few months I’ve learned what it is like to engage the discipline of writing every day whether I felt like it or not; and whether I had something profound to say or not, too. I’ve heard that is the tenacity required of an author: You sit down, and then you don’t get up until you have something written. In my pursuit of growing as a writer, this has been a great practice. Write every day. It doesn’t have to be the blog, but that’s been a good start. Once I had learned this pattern I had fully intended to ease off the daily blog and press into working on my first book.

On the other hand, I don’t like how this snag has come about. It has happened because I got busy and distracted. I forgot to write. I hit a lazy day. Whatever. If I was to cut back my blogging to once a week now, I would simply blog every seven or eight or ten days without the accompanying daily discipline of writing. I don’t like where that might take me.

So I’m going to make a public challenge to myself right here (right in front of all 10 people who read this blog). I’m going to keep writing every day, Monday through Friday. Sometimes it will be on the blog, sometimes I will be working on other projects. But always I’ll write.

Because it’s good for me. Because I think I have something to say. Because I find when I form and share ideas I end up having even more ideas, but when I bottle up ideas new ones don’t come so quickly—and in fact they dry up.

And mostly, because I really love to write, and I want to learn to be more than a casual writer, I want to learn to work hard on the craft.