Why do I write?
Don’t worry about getting an
audience. Just write. Writing is the
best way to learn. It forces me to capture my thinking in a more logical way; it
allows me to create spaces between the actual life experience and how I make
sense of it; it gives me a sense of accomplishment as writing is probably the
only tangible intelligent product that I can produce.
The more I write, the better I
will get. Writing is the best way to
learn life lessons and to engineer serendipity.
I write for my own sanity and
learning. I do not write for
attracting millions of audiences or users.
But whoever stumble on my writing should find my writing fun and
useful. I do not like dry textbooks, so does my own
writing. It should be story telling with
life being the master hero.
What do I write and what for?
I like the way ‘The hard thing
about hard thing’s been written. It is a
series of short stories with insightful learnings. It requires me to pay a lot of attention at
work and make sense of it. My writing
should be all centered around my work as this is ultimately for improving my
professional life.
What is the goal?
A bit of research into the minimum
daily word counts (http://jenniferellis.ca/minimum-daily-word-counts),
it seems like a minimum 500 words is common and 1000 is the average. Hemingway wrote between 500 and 1000 words a
day.
One might say if you want to count
your words then that’s not exactly writing.
It’s better to make the words count instead. However, quantity triumphs quality for me and
for most occasions. Writing and thinking
is a creative process, it can only get better if you force yourself do the
actual work, which is writing.
For a prolific writer, the slowest
writing session is about 465 words an hour, and 1000 words during the most
productive hour.
My goals are:
1.
One-hour writing session per weekday
a.
4 writing sessions per weekday
b.
1 writing session (Wed) for reviewing and revising
2.
500 words per hour, which is 2,000 words per week, 5 hours a
week.
I am confident that as my daily
word count increases, the quality of my writing would increase.
How to conduct the writing
session?
1)
Sit at the screen at the same time
every weekday.
This is a common technique to
build any habit. Having a set writing
schedule at the same time everyday means that I arrive the screen ready to
write.
My most productive time is in the
AM. Other than Wednesday, I can almost
fit in an hour or an hour and a half writing session as 1st thing to
my work schedule. I should protect and
make most of it.
2)
Have an outline or a few keywords
to start off with
I should spend at least the first
10 minutes or so to outline the story or key words before I start to write the
whole sessions.
3)
Focus on weekly goals instead of
daily goals.
Sometime daily goals can be too
constraining. I should be flexible
enough to adjust my schedule if I cannot meet my daily goals. But I should absolutely honor weekly goals.
4)
Make sure none of my writings are
boring
I found my previous writing blogs
(only a couple a years ago) so boring that I myself never go back and read it
myself. It’s more like that a particular
topic I don’t like, but feel it is important for me to write it. Well, if the topic bores me, why should I
even write it at the first place? It
will bore other people to death. I need
to re-imagine it so that it is exciting enough to interest me in writing it.
5)
Feedback loop - review and revise
Getting feedback is quite
important. And I am yet to find an
effective way. My first priority is
“just write”, no matter how bad it is.
Let me start to be a writer and the
rest will take care of it.
