The predictable advice to anyone seeking to improve their writing is to read and write with regularity. Reading is easy to do but writing every day, which is the recommendation to hone your craft, is much more difficult.
There are two problems with this approach, I believe:
- having subject matter to write about each day
- even if you do write every day is there not a possibility of repeating the same mistakes and simply further developing and building bad habits?
Often, too, you will come across a piece of writing which is so good, so tight, so precise and crisp, and so damn good that you lose confidence and are tempted to think, ‘I can’t write like that, I can never write like that..’
But maybe writing like that is not a good goal. Maybe writing in my own voice to communicate with my readers is the goal.
However, to widen my vocabulary and try different things in my writing it is obviously worth trying to write more often-even every day, if possible.
Let’s face it, it is eminently possible to write every day. What’s needed is committment and focus and a determination to show up every single day without exception and write something. Anything.
No matter how long or short or unstructured or inarticulate or poorly written, there must be value in showing up every day and putting words down on paper, whether the ‘paper’ is electronic or physical.
So that’s what I intend to do for the next 30 days: show up and write something here on this blog for 30 consecutive days. This is my committment to myself, my ’30 day challenge’.
Now I am going to do a little research about finding things to write about.
(Today is day 1 of the 30 day challenge).