The Ten-Minute-A-Day Club
Don't think you have the time to write? Do you have ten minutes?
A comment I hear all the time from writers is that they don’t have the time to write. I understand. You have a job, a family, social obligations, church, charitable work. It’s hard to find the time to write.
That is assuming you think about having the time to write as being an hour or more a day of uninterrupted solitude. However, you don’t need hours of free time to write. All you need is a few minutes a day of consistent writing.
A few years ago, I was part of a writer’s accountability group. We discussed this problem and founded the Ten-Minute-A-Day Club. The idea was simple. Write for ten minutes a day every weekday. We could write in one session or in two five-minute sessions or five two-minute sessions. It just had to add up to ten minutes a day.
At first, it felt silly. Some of us take ten minutes just to get started writing. We have to clear off the desk, get our coffee or tea, dust off the keyboard, and get in the mood. However, the discipline was to just sit down and write. It didn’t matter what you were writing or how poorly you were writing or whether or not you were in the mood to write. You just wrote. And if you couldn’t think of anything to say, just sit at the keyboard and stare at the screen for ten minutes. That would bore you into writing.
After a while, though, it got easier. It became a habit. Just opening the laptop was enough to get us ready to write.
We often found ourselves writing for ten minutes, but then discover we had more time than we thought and just kept writing.
“Words are like potato chips. Once you start, you don’t want to stop,” said one of our members.
Even with just ten minutes a day, we saw productivity. Most of us can write 250 words in ten minutes. Those words add up:
1250 words a week - That’s a blog post, a short-short story, a short magazine article
5500 words a month - That’s a couple of short stories or magazine articles, two or three chapters in a book, or half a short nonfiction eBook.
65,000 words in a year. That’s a short novel or nonfiction book, a screenplay, twenty or more short stories, two or three books of poetry, a collection of essays, or a year of blog posts.
All that in just ten minutes a day.
So, you don’t have an hour a day. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure you have at least ten minutes to spare to advance your writing career.
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