#28daysofwriting - it starts with one
A confession: our team at NoTosh has had blog guilt for years, and we keep having tense conversations about why we can't better share the amazing work the team and our clients get up to.
We developed a new website two years ago, with a flurry of writing, but haven't updated it half as much as we'd want to. We all have our own individual blogs which we update when... we have a holiday. If our time is not spent in the high energy, high adrenalin of engaging with thousands of teachers at an event, or the intensity of one business leader over the table, it is in the deep troughs of loneliness and boredom that come with sitting on planes for hours, or facing off the computer screen at the home office.
Well, I know one thing: a good idea never came out of a computer. Great ideas come out of people's heads, and they come from experiences that have provoked them, jarred them, annoyed them, made them laugh or made them cry. The most vibrant of these experiences are not found on our Facebook walls; they are in the world around us.
My colleague Tom, who came up with this idea of 28 minutes of uninterrupted writing over each of February's 28 days, has kicked off what might become a kind of 'writers' anonymous' (indeed, I've fallen off the wagon twice already in this paragraph, helping my daughter work out how to programme her Dash and Dot). A group of fellow bloggers - writers who share their stuff straightaway - who can provide the mutual kick up the backside that no-one else is going to give you.
What do I plan to do with my 28 days? I have no plan at all. Most of my writing is planned - my 60,000 words of book writing was planned. Most of it is to deadlines - while I wrote my book I underestimated the effort it would take to also write 50,000 words of a new Masters course. A large chunk of my writing just needs done (if you've had an email from me this past week, that's you).
But my 28 days of writing, no matter how much arse-kicking my fellow blogging travellers give me, does not need done, and this is no doubt what will compel me to thump out my 28 minutes, every day, without fail.
My only foreseeable challenge with this 'writers' anonymous'? My writing is akin to an alcoholic's drinking - I go cold turkey for weeks on end, but once I start, I find it hard to stop. Keeping to just one 28 minute stint a day will be the challenge.
Here endeth the lesson / the first 28 minutes.
It is nice to write because you want to, not because you have to. Looking forward to it and reading more! #28daysofwriting
Posted by: Chris Harte | February 01, 2015 at 10:08 AM
What a good idea... I need to write more (as opposed to getting out more, which I do far too often)
Posted by: Chris | February 01, 2015 at 01:29 PM
"Great ideas come out of people's heads, and they come from experiences that have provoked them, jarred them, annoyed them, made them laugh or made them cry" - this is what I'm looking forward to just as much as the writing side of #28daysofwriting... #28daysofreading challenging, interesting blog posts from fellow bloggers all over the world and having my own ideas jarred and rattled.
Looking forward to reading more of your "creative shit" over the coming month!
Posted by: Matt Ives | February 01, 2015 at 06:13 PM
My blogging fell away as my comment numbers plummeted. These days I'm more likely to tweet a blog author than actually take the time to comment on something they've written. As a writer I miss reading comments. Perhaps alongside a 28 days of writing we need 31 days of commenting?
Posted by: Stephanie | February 02, 2015 at 02:33 PM