Write More This Year

Last year I resolved to write more this year.  I ran across the idea of Morning Pages and found a writing site and some tools that helped me no matter where I was.  In this post I’ll talk about what this has meant and done for me and encourage you to spend some time writing in 2012 ’cause I think it is dope.

I write first thing in the morning and then intentionally at lunch a few days during the week or I jot down notes as the day passes over me.  I just write anything.  Sometimes it’s in the form of a 13 year old girl’s diary in that I dump my emotions on the page and other times its intentional work towards a blog post.  More often it’s simply noting patterns, entertaining myself, and processing whatever is in me.

Most of the writing that I do is not published – it is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.  I started writing in 2002 after graduating college and being really bored in my first job.  I wrote it on a Movable Type blog that had a password on it – a personal pay-wall of sorts to ensures that only I read it.  Write for yourself first.

Why spend time writing?

If you don’t intend to ever pursue writing as a career or serious hobby why would you spend time writing?  I mean don’t you have Facebook stalking to do and fart apps to download?

Well let’s start with a list of small to medium-size benefits:

1. If you work for a small business you can easily use your writing skills to establish a culture, public voice, and internal attitude for your company.
2. It doesn’t matter what your job is – if you can clearly convey an idea over email, the phone, text message, smoke signal etc. you are going to be better at your job. It is a natural prejudice but a positive one: if you can clearly communicate people think you are much better at other things.  Software developers with clearly-written blogs are thought to be great programmers even if it isn’t so.
3. Writing gets you in touch with yourself – what is in you comes out with stream of consciousness writing.  It reveals your prejudices, in-the-moment emotions, and things that you can’t process without “talking about it”.
4. Archived writing is stored state of mind.  I go back and read stuff I wrote when we had our first child in 2007 and it is fascinating and beautiful just because it takes me back there better than music or photos.
5. Writing is an effective break during work – you clear your head in the same way that reading does while keeping your mind more active.
6. Writing gets new ideas out of your head and new ideas are stuck behind old ideas.

On to the bigger benefits:

Writing helps you learn to create

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

Resolve to write

Anyway, my unsolicited advice: write something this year.  No excuses.