writing

The following is a partial re-post of last Novemeber's NaNoWriMo blog.

This one encourages a writer's schedule.  

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The greatest gift of writing is being able to communicate truth from the depths of your heart.  It’s why cavemen chiseled on walls; why the spiritual songs were written.  The Bible had to be written by a man’s hand to communicate the greatest truths and the heart of God.  Soldiers took up pens and precious paper  in trenches to declare the deepest love for their families back home - love that survived even the most horrific events of war.

We write to be understood, to cry out primordially from the depths of our soul.

NaNoWriMo is all about fiction- it requires a writer to shape out a novel (or a first draft) in one month. Want to try?  The first thing you need to do is write.  Writing takes time and is best done without interruption.

Most successful writers have a routine.

• In his book On Writing, Stephen King says that he writes 10 pages a day, even on holidays.  250 words is one page.  This means the King-meister writes 2500 words per day.  He also says he “reads a lot,” gaining patterns in prose with good structure and form.  
• Ernest Hemingway said he wrote 500 words a day, waking early to write to avoid the heat and to write in peace and quiet. Hemingway, famous for his alcoholism, said he never wrote while drunk.  He also wrote in longhand, a feat of note for all that he wrote.  
• Franz Kafka, who wrote all of his classics like The Trial and The Castle believed that a writer should not give up his day job.  He worked constantly in an insurance office in Prague, and wrote on the side.  Never use your work as an excuse not to write.  
  
  
  
  

Today as you write, dear writer, let the heart of the God who created you come out, voicing the pain and anguish; the joy and the exhilaration; the sorrow and the pity of all that is in the world.  Focus on one thing and write.

If you are serious about writing, find a place, a position, a chair, a time that is conducive to writing.  If you write one page a day, that's better than you did the day before.  Try to develop the habit of writing and don't stop until you have reached your goal.  

Time is the thief that will try to steal this from you.  Saying that you don't have time to write is like saying you don't have time to bathe - You have time if it's a priority.