Give Me Five Minutes and I'll Give You A Novel

When I first started creating small, time-bound goals, I had a weekly item for "Journal - 15 minutes" to force myself to write an entry in this here blog once a week.  It's been hit or miss.  As is common among most people who start a blog, I have a hard time maintaining it with consistency.

What's unusual in my case, though, is I'm not usually someone who has an aversion to writing.  At work, I have no problems writing documentation or bantering back and forth on email about a particular topic until a requirement fits into place.  The act of writing feels much like puzzle solving in my brain - I like when I hit on a particular phrase that seems to clarify my point.

This seems to be tougher to do via blogging though, for some reason.  Perhaps, this is because when I have to write an email for work, I already have a topic in mind, so the words are simply the medium for expressing that topic.  In the case of a blog, even when themed - which this blog struggles to be, I'm responsible for producing a topic, and finding a topic I want to write about on a given day can be challenging.  I'll often have a topic in mind for days expecting to crank out two or three thousand words and realize, come the time of putting virtual pen to ethereal paper, that I can scarcely put two words together.  Other times, a topic I expect to take up a paragraph's worth of space will lead to several posts.

A blog by its very nature also navigates tricky emotional ground.  It's essentially a diary, but open to the public.  As such, I can be opinionated, but don't want to wind up being too opinionated, in case someone who has control of my livelihood crosses it and vehemently disagrees with what I say and subsequently affects my livelihood.  Because it's a public forum, I also have to determine exactly how emotionally open I want to be.  I'm typically a private person and am not likely to divulge my vulnerabilities to an anonymous (or pseudo-anonymous) audience regardless of how small that audience actually is.  This, by the way, is the same problem I have with writing fiction.  I want to write fiction, but in order to write good fiction, one must invest a lot of one's emotional infrastructure into a story that others will be able to criticize, and that prospect is scary.

I've since changed my weekly goal to "Creative Writing - 5 minutes" four times per week.  Creative writing is now a loose term - writing a blog post, writing down a recipe, writing a review, etc.  However, I'm striving to be more ambitious in order to keep my writing muscles engaged.  With that in mind, I have three possibilities for moving this blog forward with expediency:

• Use my five minutes to free associate and/or write a short story in five minutes.
• Use my time to begin constructing a story and place my work here.
• Use my time to research a topic and write it in installments/drafts/notes here.  This is similar to the papers I had to write on a specific topic in school when I was younger.  It'd be interesting to see what pops loose when I actually want to do the research.

I may wind up doing all three or none, but I'll probably give all three a shot and see how it works.  Also, in case you're curious, I expected to blot down a few words about the above bullet points here and have this post cranked out in about five minutes.  It took me about 35.