Lessons from blogging everyday

The most challenging part of this challenge for me was when I finally logged in to the personal laptop, opened Word and tried to write.  I wouldn’t know what to write. Having finally packed and stepped on to the station-you don’t know where you want to go, which train to take!

I tried making a blog calendar-or at least a list of possible topics, but that began to feel too much like work.

And then I complicated it for myself (yeah, I am weird) by self-imposing a minimum word limit of 300. No 55-ers or 100 worders except for the days I was in transit. So, I don’t have time to write, I don’t know what to write and yet I have to do it every day (for 300words).  

I started writing ‘from the top of my head’. Just whatever my hands felt like typing. It was therapeutic. Just the act of letting the words flow, drawing pictures and smudging them out because many times they would not make sense.

I realized the words would start writing themselves after I struggled for good ten-fifteen minutes. Then I would end up writing something which I didn’t even plan to.

Wow! If only I had the time to keep typing till it became a coherent book.

Sometimes I would get multiple ideas, like a string of firecrackers lighting up on Diwai. But by the time I came back from another day at work, my mind would be like an ancient tubelight once again.

Would it be better to stay up one night and keep writing?
But that would defeat the basic theory of building up the discipline to log in every day-no matter what.

I didn’t write very scintillation stuff or anything that could save the planet. Mostly I ended up writing about traffic, juggling tasks and everything I was stressed up. I was just writing about my thoughts and even that was difficult.

It makes me respect regular writers so much more. People who have nothing to prove, but yet write for the joy of it. People who sit and type for an hour two, with military discipline, and people who look at the blank screen and know what to write. Big salute to all of you!