Write every day? With constraints?

A lot of people seem to be talking about writing; more often, more thoughtfully, more purposefully. Jeremy Keith rounded up quite a few of them earlier today which, in their several ways, make the point that writing regularly is a habit, that it may help others but mostly helps yourself and that you should write whatever you want. All good and true. None of the people Jeremy singled out says much about setting constraints, except perhaps for Patrick Rhone's plea that anything over 280 characters should be "on a blog that you own". Recently, however, I have seen other people remark on the value of a set constraint, usually a number of words. The morning brain dump folks set a minimum of 750 words, and no maximum. Others like a set number of words, no more, no fewer. And that reminded me that ages ago, when blogging was still new and exciting, I took part in a little challenge.

I tagged my entries 50 x 100 x 50. Fifty posts of exactly 100 words on 50 consecutive days. Of course I passed these over when bringing old stuff into the new CMS, because they're quite fiddly to repurpose. But now, I think there may be merit in bringing them back to life. Not one at a time, though. That does seem like hard work. Maybe five at a time. Or ten.

There will definitely be difficulties in tracking down some of the decade-old links that those posts included. Could be fun though too. I discovered that I copied the idea from Blue Girl in a Red State, and that she got it from Out of Context whose Blogspot, I now discover, is by invitation only. Hey ho.

Here, for fun, is the first of those posts.

This could be the start of something

Originally published 10-03-2008

Little and often has such appeal. Write 500 words a day and you'll have a decent sized book, with revisions, in under a year. With weekends off. Scan 10 slides an evening and before you know it those giant boxes of unsorted images are sitting up on Flickr just itching to be ignored. But life gets in the way. Always. Miss just one day and you're done for. This time it is going to be different, not least because I refuse to announce my intentions. Blue Girl knows. And maybe OOC, whose friend is a contraction. Not me.

Flickr photograph by horizontal.integra tion