My "Write Half and Hour/Day" Challenge - Day 1
Oh Twitter, you wonderful world of inspiration.
I was on Twitter and Sarah Dessen kept retweeting L Halse Anderson's posts about her Write Fifteen Minutes a Day challenge. Normally my eyes skip right over retweets, so I'm surprised I actually caught this. But when I did, I was left feeling a little...strange.
It was an odd reaction to a completely harmless tweet. But I was left unsettled by it, and it was only this morning on the way to university that I realized why.
I realized that what bothered me was the 15 minutes part. My instant reaction to that was this: "Fifteen minutes? But surely that's not enough. That's a crazy short time to write anything let alone anything that you want to become something and what happens if you start writing for fifteen minutes and you want to keep going do you just stop like what are you actually supposed to do I don't get it OH MY GOD MY MIND!!!!!"
The thing is, writing is my first love, and I realized that the discomfort I felt with that post is that I LOVE IT TOO MUCH AND FIFTEEN MINUTES JUST ISN'T ENOUGH FOR ME!! So I upped it to half an hour.
Yeah, that's right, I went there. The thing is, I'm actually trying to write a novel. Well, trying to right...that's always what I say first off, but if I'm being honest and not modest and brave I should say that I AM writing a novel. I am writing a novel.
And a novel takes a lot of TIME. Precious time, time that I've been feeling anxious about because I feel like I have so little of it. I mean, first of all I only started this novel in the last month of summer vacation before returning to my third year of university. Then I went on a ten-day-turned-eleven-day-because-our-flight-got-cancelled trip to Florida that prevented me from writing at all. Immediately afterwards I had two long days of work followed by the start of school and I felt SO MISERABLE because I was absolutely certain this precious novel of mine would be lost in the dust.
But then I saw those retweets and I thought, Hey. I could do that. But I need to do MORE than that.
So I am challenging myself to write for at least a half hour a day, every day, until this novel is done. I know it doesn't sound like a huge deal. There's no prize at the end of it, unless of course you count a great amount of satisfaction and self-confidence and the potential to get it published as a prize, which I am more than happy to do.
The thing is, this is going to truly be a challenge for me for a couple of reasons. First of all, I am in university doing a double major in English and History. This involves a lot of reading and writing and I often feel defeated at the end of the day and exhausted and not at all wanting to look at any more words. On top of that, I am having wrist surgery this week where a cyst will be removed and damaged ligaments will be repaired, so even typing will be painful and tiring. When I have recovered from that, I will return to work. (I work at McDonald's. I am not proud of this, but they pay me. As of yet, nobody is paying me to write, so this half hour a day thing is PURELY OUT OF MY UNDYING LOVE FOR IT.)
When I got this Tumblr it was so that I could talk about my writing journey and connect with other people on the same path. So far that has been unsuccessful, but I'm hoping this will catch people's eye. I'd love to know that I am not going this alone, that other people want to take up the challenge and simply write. For a half hour. Every day.
At the start of this I am at:
Let's see where I can get.
