How to write every day

To get myself started writing of an evening, I will usually just start writing any old nonsense until I see enough things to string together which could become coherent enough to keep writing about.

In a twist of the meta, that’s the theme of todays entry in my 30 day writing challenge: how to start writing something when it’s the last thing you feel like doing some times.

Neil Gaimen, author known to many and for good reason, has a brilliant trick to writing. He says to himself ‘you can either write, or you can not write — but you cannot do anything else’.

So, I sit at the computer, curser flashing at me in Word and I write. I write nonsense if I have to but I write. The alternative is I sit here and stare blankly at a blank page.

Write anything, any prompt, any garbage that comes into your head and eventually you come up with something after several lines. For example — here is some of the raw nonsense that came into my head before I settled on the topic:

Has everyone seen the rains down in Africa? Or was it just Toto?

Spelling bee’s are a weird thing to televise.

I want a flannel shirt that’s not checkered but then it wouldn’t be ‘flannel’ to me anymore.

Why do we call them ‘hot water heaters’ when they are in fact ‘cold water heaters’?

Anything is a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying things

Then I wrote “how do I start these again? It’s been nearly a full day and I forgot.”

Bam. 7th or 8th prompt and I got to an idea worth talking about.

With that, that’s the piece for today. The trick to doing something daily is you start doing it and, you know your first few goes at anything will be bad.