I am always meaning to write more. It's in my to-do list to spend a little bit of time writing every 3-4 weeks or so. I know many writers (the ones with a capital W) actually challenge themselves to write something every day, no matter how good or bad. I like to write about the goings-on in my life and the feelings I have when the ons are going. I give myself a few weeks for things to happen and for feelings to develop about those things.
Unfortunately, lately, the goings-on have been pretty mundane. I can't go anywhere or do anything worth chatting about. I spend most of my days in a pretty same-y routine; wake up, work, go for a walk, do some yoga, begrudgingly complete a trx workout so when I go back to the gym I can tell my trainer that I did things, read internet articles and cross chore-type things off my to-do list, watch some streaming serials, fall asleep to the sound of a headspace sleep story followed by white noise. It's been this way since Christmas...and probably before Christmas.
I'm not looking to change it up. I'm pretty comfortable in my routine. I'd love to be able to break it up with visits with friends and family, but I'm not going to bemoan our current situation any more than this one point: it doesn't make for good writing...at least not in the way that I write.
ANYWAY...One of those articles included 52 creative writing prompts. Normally, I would read through such an article, deposit the gems in my mind palace to collect dust, and delete the tab forever. But this time I saved it. I thought that, given the current climate and the very likely likelihood that my routine is going to be pretty much the same as I described above, the pre-selected prompts might give me the opportunity to search my mind palace for dusty items I could reflect upon.
The first handful of prompts were fairly lacklustre, although I am using one right now, so perhaps they're not as bad as I'm making them out to be. The one I chose was about releasing resolutions; I was supposed to write about a resolution I did not reach. I looked back in my blog history to find a New Year's Resolution-type entry. I could not find one in the last five years. This is not to say that I haven't made resolutions, nor is it to say that I have reached all the resolutions I've made. I recall resolving to learn to play the guitar some ten years ago. Turns out, the unprecedented times of 2020 provided exactly the environment that would allow me to finally make some headway on that resolution. I'm not campfire-good yet (which is to say, I'm not very good at all), but I can string a few chords together and my husband can sort of tell what I'm playing. I found an app through an(other) article I was reading that broke it down in a way I could understand and internalize. I find that habits are made when intention and environment meet serendipity. Possibly more on that later.
But back to the writing. When I first started blogging, I had a small cult following. They were mainly friends and frenemies engaging in a certain degree of schadenfreude as my main focus at the time was to turn my sometimes disastrous navigation of the single life of my mid-twenties into comedy. A few months after I started writing, I moved to a new city to start a student work experience placement. I recall, sometime in June, receiving a message from a friend/fan looking for my next entry...it had been weeks (WEEKS!) and surely my next one was due soon. What I knew and know, both then and now, was that you can't force your particular art. I couldn't make my life, which at that time was a combination of learning-to-be-a-professional by day and trying-not-to-die-of-boredom-in-a-strange-town-with-no-car-and-no-money by night, into something prose-worthy.
I guess, with the writing prompts and the scheduled writing time, I'm trying to go against what I know. That I can't force good prose about my life when my life is on hold due to a worldwide pandemic. I read another article (I found it in a dusty room of my mind palace just now) about setting intentions for 2021 instead of resolutions. I'm not going to link the article because it described intentions as mini-goals to set for yourself on the road to completing a major goal, which might be useful for many people, but when I read the article's title I had thought of intention in the more woo-woo meditation/yoga sense and that turned a light bulb on for me.
Instead of setting a resolution to write more, I'm setting an intention to write more. And in the woo-woo meditation/yoga tradition, I'm going to go about my intention without judgment of the outcome. Sometimes my mind palace will be empty. Sometimes the thing I find and dust off might actually be kind of junk. The point is just to try to write more.
