The big thing I thought about in the transition from 7 to 8 was why I failed. There were a number of factors that contributed to the slow decline and eventual failure to write. For a while I didn’t have much to say. I eeked out a few hundred words a night if lucky. I didn’t have a coherent thought maybe two or three times in a week. That is not a good state for a writer to be in at any hour. Yet, those days were days when I did do good things earlier in the day or expended a great deal of energy teaching and so on. What was it about blogging for ten minutes that was so very taxing? Perhaps the answer to that is the same as the answer to why people find it so hard to write. The expectation.
I want this space to be meaningful, but if I am going through it–if I am not of sound mind–then I cannot be meaningful in the words I put on a page. Often I wish for direct translation. I wish I could stir my emotions into words in real time, and let that feeling be my guide in my writing. I’ve constructed, after a fashion, a way to do that in novels. I have intense emotional sections throughout the outline and if I am feeling that, I write that. However, with this blog I wanted to do things in a regular way. Friday is fiction (fail). Tuesday I look back to the past (sometimes) Wednesday I look at sports (because it is the day of the waiver wire in the fantasy football league). All of these blocks don’t let me be free to write what I feel. Often I overlooked them, but largely I thought about them as guardrails on my thinking.
As we move to the new iteration I will focus on writing what I feel. I will endeavor to lock in for these ten minutes and let my mind and mood connect with the page in an unscripted fashion. I will be looking to the page as a form of catharsis. The days of my life are filled with all kinds of madness and strangeness. The blog is an opportunity to share a bit of my insight with the world on a daily basis and, through that, get you locked into how to be better writers. Understanding how I write may be helpful to others down the road (so long as this thing exists).
That is the charge. That is the goal and the hope moving forward for this 8th iteration of the Ten Minute rule. I will be better this time. I will take these ten minutes seriously and vitally. I may not hit 500 or 300 or even 100 each time, but I will make sure that what I do say comes from the heart and soul. That is why I started this process publicly and that is the main reason to keep going. Anyone can do ten minutes a day and come up with heartfelt content. I’m here to prove that.