baby steps

Some five years ago I blogged on here about a stressful time at work and how it was impacting my creative process, and my writing habit. Reading over that blog post this morning I easily remember the anxiety of that period, and how it bled into every area of my life. Anxiety and stress are like poisons that seep through the blood, affecting every part of the body, as well as the brain.

The solution I found, back then, for my inability to write anything, was an eight minute daily exercise. I'd sit down each day and write for eight minutes. It would seem that hardly anything could be achieved in such a short amount of time, and if a daily word-count is all important then that might be true, but beyond the matter of a word tally was the not inconsequential matter of confidence regained. Over time, an eight minute a day habit worked wonders for that. And I also found that those manageable eight minutes could easily stretch into ten, fifteen, twenty, often without any effort at all. But the point was that there was no pressure to do anything beyond the given target.

Recently, I found myself trying to work through a similar period of anxiety. Again, it affected all areas of my life, but one of the first casualties was the ability to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and write. Weeks crawled by and nothing got written. I'd have welcomed a page full of drivel and poorly constructed sentences, but what I got was nothing. So I picked up a notebook and started writing for just eight minutes each morning. What I got, at first, was drivel, and poorly constructed sentences, but gradually some good ideas, and some fine adjectives, wove their way into my sentences. And, here and there, a solid gold simile. And this progress has helped to lift my mood a little. Over time, I've been building a story, one brick at a time, eight minutes a day. It's not much, but it's not nothing.