I will gladly admit that I completely underestimated the difficulty I would have in making myself write for fifteen minutes a day. First, I began to doubt my skills. In fact, I almost decided to give up before I started. I thought that there was no way anyone would ever want to read my writing, because I'm just not that witty. I'm not that good, I don't have that many aha moments, and my life is boring.
Then I realized that it doesn't have to be about my life. It doesn't have to be a step-by-step account of my day, or inciteful all the time, or funny all the time. It can just be writing. Making the effort is the point right now. So, I sat down last night with a notebook and pen and just wrote whatever I thought of regarding a particular childhood memory. Granted, it was in an effort to get a jump on a poem I should have written a few days ago for class, but it was a good fifteen minutes of just writing. Tonight I've spent an hour and a half turning those notes into a relatively good first draft of a poem. Tomorrow I'll tweak it some more before submitting it for class review. I know it's not the best thing ever written, but my classmates and professor will help me find how to fix it, and I have to remember that it is the first time I've written poetry in years. I'm more the short-story and blog type writer, so I'll have to go back through it to make sure what I've got is an actual poem and not a story, but that's what waking up early tomorrow is for. Besides, this whole class/process is about improving my overall quality of writing, so exercising something that's not comfortable for me right now is a good thing.
It will get easier, and it will get better.
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