A writer I know, Dwayne P., has a deep desire to write fiction, but such a busy life that he has not found the time. Recently, he was telling our writers’ group about this and what he had realized: He could write for ten minutes each day. Simple. Clear. Doable. “I may not be able to write a novel or even a short story very quickly,” he mused. “But I can write for ten minutes each day, and soon enough, there’ll be a book.” He read three of his ten-minute fictions to us: Lovely, concise stories a few paragraphs long. Any one of the three could be expanded into a full piece of fiction.
One of my many shortcomings as a writer is that I have started this blog and promised a new post every couple of weeks, but I haven’t kept that promise faithfully. For some periods, I post regularly. But then spaces of time pass when I don’t. Often, it’s because I’m absorbed in my current work-in-progress, and don’t make time for the blog. Other times, it’s that I feel at a loss for a meaningful subject to write about. This strikes me as odd—dozens of topics related to Psyche, Spirit, Story interest me. So why do I dry up when pondering a blog post? I suspect the answer is that it takes too long to do justice to those ideas—or so I thought, until Dwayne changed my mind with his simple idea: Write for ten minutes.
If I take ten minutes out of each writing day, I’d be able to create five or more blog posts each week. And writing for ten minutes is a cinch. Take this post: So far, I’ve been writing for nine minutes and seventeen seconds.
So here’s my experiment: Like Dwayne, I am going to write for ten minutes each day on a topic related to this blog. I’ll post once a week. Next week, I’ll post about a problem I was having with a scene in my work-in-progress and how I solved it (I already wrote the post, in ten minutes and four seconds!).
And I’d like to ask you, dear reader, to send me your comments about how this experiment works for you. Ten minutes. See you next week.