Disciplined Writing for Fun

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

What If I Could Write 250 Words a Day?

Around 20 years ago, a girlfriend who knew I was a frustrated-would-be-aspiring writer gave me a gift of a book called *20 Lines a Day*. It advocated writing just 20 lines a day to exercise my writing muscles.

Today, via Facebook, which I had just dissed as the lazy way out of full-on blogging, Jeff Nishball, a writer who was published in “The New York Times” last week, kindly sent me a message, encouraging me and suggesting that I’m not any lazier than most writers for not having wanted to blog, but that I’d be well-served if I tried writing just 250 words a day. He said that it was essentially just a page’s worth of writing. Of course, now, I’m compelled to check the word-count to see if Jeff meant double-spaced or single. Off I go…. 137 so far, so happily, Jeff must have meant double-spaced!

My cat Phoebe just hopped onto my lap and then onto my work-notebook next to my laptop. Her tail is doing something unusual: Just the tip is in motion; it’s like a periscope and she’s using it to decide her next move.

That girlfriend was among the most creative people I ever knew, and she still is, though we’re married to other women. I thought of her when I finally watched the viral “Gangnam Style” video on YouTube yesterday. When I was in India on assignment in 2007, I posted a link to a YouTube video I had discovered, featuring Silky Kumar. She said she loved it. I wasn’t surprised. It’s better than the Gangnam one, or at least as good, @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpFftFeIkt0.

I'm Hungry...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

To Recover My Creativity

I want to write about the Cat Show at Madison Square Garden or the Economy or "Saturday Night Live," but I'm feeling too self-conscious.

Today, I decided to give myself the gift of focusing exclusively on my writing, rather than cramming it in around everything else I'm doing. That's turning out to be self-consciousness-producing.

Too bad. It's important to express myself, even if I'm listening too hard to each syllable as my fingertips slowly press it out.

Healthy Pressure

The artists support group I go to on Monday nights has agreed to devote on Monday a month to an Action Plan meeting.

That Monday is tomorrow night. Oy! The Plan will require each of us to declare and commit to what we'll do in a particular period of time to further our art. What I'd rather do today and forever is focus on petting the purring kitty, who's lying in my lap.

It's unnerving to try to figure out more than I'm doing via the blogging. In fact, my blog is far more than I ever did pre-blog to express my voice broadly. I started talking to one of my friends about the concept of the Action Plan and got the sense that committing further to my blog might not qualify as an OK Plan. It seemed that I needed to be paid for my writing, or at least published by someone else, rather than myself (via the blog).

What Would I Wish to Have Published?

That's the problem: I don't feel drawn to write anything that's commercially appealing. At dinner with a friend the other night, he said, "There's definitely a market for memoirs, but they have to be ironic, like David Sedaris' or Augusten Burrough's, and you probably don't want to write like that."

~Giant sneeze and Phoebe, the kitty, claws through my sweatpants as she springs off my lap in fear.~

In 2000, I completed a 180-page, coming-of-age memoir, but have had no desire to continue revising and editing it to make it commercially viable. The blog appeals to me so much because the only sort of writing that interests me in my free-time features my reflections on what I hear and see and experience around me.

If someone were willing to publish the best of my blog entries as a book, that would be wonderful. I just want the writing to be pure pleasure, and not laborious. Chutpah, I know.

Phoebe is back.