Day 7 - The Project

Image from Michael Holden on Flickr

This evening I attended a Toastmasters meeting where the theme for the meeting was New Beginnings. It seemed appropriate. We are in a new year. The club is meeting in a new location. And on Saturday I got myself a new hairstyle.

The Table Topics question assigned to me was to tell about one of my goals for the new year, an opportunity to describe my 365 Project.  I find that telling someone else about a goal is one of the best ways to ensure that I follow through. Another member responded to her Table Topics question by describing a writers' group she joined that will be meeting through the next month. And a third member described a writing course she is teaching later this month.

Those coincidences made me decide to expand further on my goals for this project. The primary goal is for me to establish the habit of writing every day, but I also hope that others will consider writing more, too. So in addition to writing pieces that may lead up to writing whole stories, I will be sharing the lessons I learn along the way. After less than a week of my Project 365, I already have some to share.

Image from courosa on Flickr

The first lesson is that I am surprised that the experiences I have chosen are related more to my childhood growing up in Minnesota than from the many foreign places I couldn’t wait to travel to when I was still in Minnesota growing up. The experiences easiest to draw from are those I thought were too common, too ordinary, too boring while I was living them. And that made me realize that I should have started writing much, much earlier.

The second lesson is that I have to be willing to be vulnerable when writing about the experiences I know best – my own. It is possible that someone – family member, friend, acquaintance – may recognize something of me or of themselves in what I write. So long as I am unwilling to put onto paper – even this electronic version of paper – something that others may recognize, I will never be able to write believably. It has been harder for me to write fictional pieces than stories I have clearly identified as my own experiences, such as many of the warming up exercises I prepared.

Image from urbanworkbench on Flickr

The third lesson is that I need to let go of thinking that everything I write for this project needs to be a finished, final piece. I know – intellectually at least – that writing includes lots of rewriting and editing and then rewriting again. So if I am unable to write a complete story or even a complete character description each day, I still need to write something – in order to develop the habit.

I have added a widget that includes links to several of the online writing exercises. I added them for myself, but also in the hope that others may be inspired to undertake their own writing project.  I chose 500 words as my target length and every day as the frequency. If you choose some other target length or frequency for your own writing project, and if you are willing to be vulnerable enough to share your goals with me, I’d love to know.