Write Every Day

Last year, I set myself a goal. I wanted to write something every single day of 2013.

I failed. I'll admit that openly. I failed in August, and I stopped writing for a while. I hit a slump. Whether it was emotional, or physical, the exhaustion that overtook me then kept me from writing on a regular basis for a long time. I almost recovered it last month, but then I really was too tired to turn on my laptop at the end of the day.

This year, I want to make up for that.

I'm giving myself that very same goal, to write every day this year. However, I'm being a little more direct about it. I want to be putting out material on particular days, which will require me to write particular things on particular days each week. I won't just be writing a blog post every day and saying that's that. I won't just be writing bad poetry and thinking it's enough. I'm going to write something specific every day, and a lot of what I write is going online very shortly after it's written.

This is my goal, this is my resolution. I know it's possible, and I know I can do it. I suspect that the realisation that I wouldn't be returning to college had something to do with what happened in 2013, but this year I'm off the hook. Life is what it is, right now, and I can handle it quite effectively.

I'm not going to release a publication schedule, because things will probably be changing every now and then as time goes by, but for now I'm using my  FiloFax to help organise and plan what I'll be writing this year.

Of course, between all the different poems and stories and articles I'll be writing for various sites I run, I'll also be writing books. This is the big challenge: to keep up with both my online presence and to produce the books I want to write, and to the deadlines I've set myself. This is all while also working on a book I want to submit to an agent or publisher in the near future. By this day next year, I want to be able to say that I tried.

That's the point of New Year's Resolutions, really: that we try. We try to change our habits, change our diets and our lifestyles. We try. Sometimes we succeed. It's great when we do, but it's not the whole point. The attempt to change is the big thing. It's why I always ask people what their New Year's Resolution is, because I like to see who wants to make a change in their lives.

For me, it's about finishing what I set out to do last year. I want to be able to go the whole writing without missing a day of writing. I want to be able to make it a habit, and one I purposely set out to do. I want to be able to say that in 2014, I tried to write a lot, I tried to become successful with my online publishing (I have my own definition of successful), and I tried to get a book that I love published and on its way into bookshops.

At the end of the day, and at the end of the year, the very least we can do is try.

So, what are your New Year's Resolutions? What are you going to try in 2014?

A Clear and Certain Plan

Later this month, I plan on announcing my publishing plans for 2014. I don't normally do that, but then I don't normally have the time to dedicate to writing from the offset.

Last January was an anomaly. I was lucky to get home early almost every night while on teaching placement. This gave me time to make tea in the comfort of my own home, work at my own desk and at my own pace, and free myself from the distractions that arise from the wonderful people I call my friends. (I would want to talk to them all the time - it's just easier to blame them for being so distracting than it is to accept that it's actually just my own fault. This doesn't count as a confession because it's in brackets. Obviously.)

With all of that in mind, I was able to write a book in the evenings, after I had my lessons planned for the next day. That book would become Planning Before Writing. I did not know when I started writing it that I would be able to publish it in March.

This December, I've already begun planning my publishing schedule. There are a couple of things I need to work on doing, still, and a couple of books that - when I announce the schedule - will be untitled, but overall I have a plan of what I'll be doing next year. This is unheard of for me.

What's changed? I'm not in college. I don't have exams to dread in May. I don't have essays due in throughout the year. I don't have teaching placement in January. Unless things change drastically for me, I'm looking at working only three and a half days a week on average - two in the bookshop, the remainder of the time minding my niece.

Effectively, my time is freed up completely at the time of the year when I'm most able to focus: January. It's been a need to develop that for the past few years, and last year I had the added bonus of creating a New Year's Resolution that would keep me writing consistently for a long time.

But let's just be clear on something: I didn't stick to it this year. There are days that I didn't write anything. By the time I'd written a poem every day for two months and blogged every day for that amount of time, too, I just ran out of things to say. Okay, not entirely true. I actually just hit a slump one week, and it took a while to get the ball rolling again. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, there.

What's different this time around is that I'm not just planning on writing every day. I'm not giving myself a big list of options to work from. I'm focusing entirely on one project at a time. It'll make more sense, soon, but effectively I'm giving myself assignments like I'd have in college, and using my time to create whatever book or article it is that I'm supposed to do.

This is my self-made work. It's all things I'm passionate about, things I've been wanting to do for a long time, now, and just never got around to doing. I'm approaching 2014 with a clear plan in mind, and I'm going to make sure that I actually stick to it. It's not just a hobby any more. This is work. This is business.

The Effect of Poetry

Since the New Year started (with its grand importance and suitable capitalisation), I took to writing poetry a lot more often. Because I wanted to write every day this year, it was necessary to force myself to do something before going to sleep. Easier said than done, especially if you're tired and/or intoxicated. (But that only really happened once...)

However, turning on my laptop late at night isn't generally considered a good idea. From experience I know that I would end up awake a couple of hours after I had planned to go to sleep, probably with an early start the next day, and it's possible that in those two hours I wouldn't write a single word (beyond looking things up on YouTube...). Often, I can't even be bothered to take out my tablet and keyboard and write a blog post (though that has happened in the past), so I turn to the only other option: I pick up a notepad and a pen, and I force myself to write a poem.

Two or three years ago, this wouldn't have produced much. More recently, it's helped me explore some thoughts and feelings that I had refused to deal with for months. Rather than insisting on bottling things up for the sake of it, only for it all to come out in one big burst of emotion, I've been letting myself lash out through poetry, ranting and raving (and moaning...sometimes...) about the things that are bothering me, and masking it all in metaphor...because poetry.

(Yes, I am aware that not all poetry requires metaphor, in the same way that not all poetry requires rhyme or rhythm or any of the fun little things teachers are required to have students find in the published poetry of prescribed poets. However, for the simple sake of making things easier on myself emotionally, I use what sense I have left at midnight to create a semblance of a veil over the truth. Raw emotion, at that hour, is bound to result in some sort of trouble. And that one time when I was drunk and writing a poem, I made the inebriated decision to avoid talking about whatever feelings I was experiencing and talk about the fact that I was drunk, instead. To this day I don't know how I managed to even hold the pen, nevermind pen the poem.)

What all of this has done for me, however, goes beyond mere therapy. While I cannot deny that it has helped me to de-stress and to deal with some things that were on my mind, that's not the only thing I've found has been a result of writing poetry in an increasing quantity.

Most notably among the other effects of poetry has been its affect on my sense of language, and the way in which I care to express myself. It has been subtle, but finding words has been easier in the past few months than it has been for a long time. A similar effect takes hold when I write a large amount of fiction in a short period of time, though keeping up the writing of longer fiction while having essays and reflections to write for college on a weekly basis is hard to justify with what little time I am left with at the end of the average day.

To this end, I have avoided writing longer fiction for a while, preferring to focus on short chapters of non-fiction books, blog posts, and poetry, all with the aim of producing something, keeping words fresh in my mind, and exploring new ideas and concepts that writing fiction for years on end did not help with. I don't regret spending so much time writing fiction,  and nor will I stop writing it, but it has been nice to get a change of pace and find new ways of using the words at my disposal. While I can't boast to having the most extensive vocabulary in the world, writing has helped me to at least utilize the words I have in a more coherent and expressive way. Poetry has helped me to play upon my strengths, to pick the words I use with more imagination and consideration, rather than using excessively convoluted language for the mere sake of it.

(It has also helped to realise when I accidentally enter a mode of irony... why I've been using words such as "convoluted" in this post, I do not know, but I personally find it funny that that was the word I chose to use at the time. For the record, it wasn't even a word I thought about until sixth year, when a friend of mine defined a complicated word as "unnecessarily convoluted", to much laughter from the rest of the class. We don't know if he did it for a joke, or if that's just how he thought of the word, but "convoluted" has stuck with me to this day as a result.)

Poetry has also, rather by accident, become the most shared genre of writing in the Feedback Forums at college. This has, consequentially, allowed for many of us to discuss certain things that had been bothering us at one point or another, even if just to highlight their existence. It has brought a group of us closer together, and it has made writing much more communal than it has previously been. There was nothing more exciting in my week than getting to read and listen to poetry with my friends once a week, and that, too, comes as a result of writing poetry more this year than ever before. Most of what I have shared with the group has been written in the past three months, and of late I have brought several entirely new pieces per week, simply because I had an inkling to share them instead of the previous work.

With all of this in mind, I cannot help but recommend that you try it, too, to write poetry before you go to bed, or when you wake up. I don't always have an idea of what I will write, and often just decide to put pen to paper and see what comes out. Sometimes the metaphor exists before I even understand what it is I want to say, and other times I know what I want to say but haven't yet figured out how. It has become easier, during the year, to perform this practice of poetry, and this coming from someone whose production of poetry this year has bested his previous attempts from the previous three years (both in quality and the accumulative quantity of poems). Don't set out to write the next award winning poem. Just write, and see what happens. You might even enjoy it.

How's That New Year Coming?

We're on Day 7 of this great fabrication known as the New Year. Personally, I love it. It's not so much that the concept of a New Year's Resolution is so revolutionary that it shouldn't be ignored, so much as I love the idea of so many people deciding to make a positive change in their lives. Naturally, I join in, and it's one of the few times in my life I will consciously conform to a particular standard (I'm okay with conforming if it happens by accident!).

My aim to write every day is going quite well. It has, so far, produced half of what may well become a short ebook. That, or a section of a longer book. It's all on planning, which fit in nicely with my teaching placement and the need to produce 80 lesson plans in four weeks. Surprise surprise, that's not as much fun as it sounds.

Okay, I jest. I don't mind actually having to do it, and I'd be screwed in class without a lesson plan, but that doesn't mean 80 of them are a lot of fun, when you throw in resources for every lesson, too.

Anyway, back on track. That planning craic. So far, it's five connected articles that need to be drawn together and reworded, but they're essentially half an ebook focusing on some considerations for planning. The other half of the book or section would consist of methods of planning. If there's one thing teaching college has taught me it's that everyone learns and thinks in different ways, so no one method will suit every person who could potentially read the book.

So, there's that. I've also managed to write myself a couple of poems. One has seen the light of day, the other hasn't, but I loved doing them both an awful lot. I consider poetry a project, because every one I've written recently has been accompanied by an image, an audio track and, eventually, a video. This has meant that rather than simply writing the words and posting them online, there's a whole added experience of performance and mood-setting music and the search to find a new means to share an ancient art form.

I don't suppose I will ever grow tired of writing this way. The articles are refreshing every time I come back to them, the poems always requiring a bit more work than just writing, and I've got an unreal amount of fiction to write my way through over the next year.

Would I have done it without the New Year? Possibly, I would have begun. But the social dimension of New Year provides the additional kick everyone needs when tired or busy to ensure they stick to a change in their lives.

Of course, writing isn't the only thing I'm doing. Every day, I keep note of something good that has happened, and writing them on a little piece of paper, I store them in a jar on my bedside locker. Why? Because New Year's Eve has been reserved for false bitterness for far too long, and at least this time I'll have something positive to do: 364 positive messages to look at from things that happened throughout the day.

Could I ask for anything better on New Year's Eve 2013?