365 Days of Writing Challenge

This challenge is simple and personal. I am challenging myself to write something, anything, every day for a year. They say that if you do something every day for a week it is much easier to continue doing it. We will see how this experiment goes.

My goal is a whole year, three hundred and sixty-five days, of writing. I always have a ton of ideas floating around in my head, but it seems that I never end up putting them down anywhere. I also seem to always get interrupted by things going on in life. My new goal in dealing with this is I'm going to blog about it. So, not only are you going to get works of literature and writings about my ideas you will also end up getting writings about my everyday life.

The Rain

I'd always loved the rain growing up. In California it was always soothing. We'd know about the weather two or three days before it got to us in the north end of the state. The same storm fronts would go through Alaska, Canada, Washington, Oregon, and then they'd finally get to us. The worst thing that could happen was it could become a thunder storm. As long as you weren't stupid and hung around tall metal poles or didn't try to find cover no one ever got hit.

Procrastination

I wish I could say that my lack of a post yesterday meant that I was doing something else productive. The truth of the matter is that I was watching television. It was mindless and it just was. I didn't really mean to spend the whole day doing it. We can let ourselves get caught up in things and then the next thing we know there goes all of our time. I had decided to watch a couple of really old DVR recording and then next thing I knew I was cleaning it out.

I was procrastinating. I was going to just watch a couple shows, then it became a couple more, then I needed to finish that series, and then the day had passed me by. I can do this with books as well. I start reading and then the next thing I know I've finished a whole book (or series) and spent the whole day doing it.

Perspective

While attention to details is necessary for any piece of involved writing an intentional lack of details might be necessary as well. The best writers always view their writing as their characters. Don't write it as if you were watching someone else's life on a television show; write instead as if you were writing a journal entry in your own personal diary. There are so many things that we do automatically when we view our surroundings that most people don't even think about. When looking at other people we automatically start to scrutinize them. We take in the basics (height, weight, age, etc.) but we also take in the more complex things (attitude, facial expressions, body posture, etc.). All of these things we put together to gauge people. We pick how to react to them from a complex mixture of how they act and what they look like.

Description Exercise

My homework assignment that I assigned myself was to create a description. I kept this really broad on purpose, my plan is to just let the words flow. Without further ado, here we go!

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I remember in school we were asked what our favorite things were. Our favorite color, our favorite song, our favorite season, etc. Some were simpler to answer than others. For me the hardest of those three was easily what my favorite season was because I enjoyed them all. I was the kid that would ask why we had to choose a season. Why can't we love all the seasons equally? They each have their special moments and memories that stay with us for the rest of our lives. I remember being torn as I sat trying to decide between the things that I liked about each season and struggling to come up with something for the paper we were required to write on it. If I were to write about what I love most about the seasons there would be pages and pages of information to go through. I had to keep it short and sweet so that wouldn't work very well. I finally decided that I would just start writing and decide when it all came out what my favorite season was. The result didn't help me decide, but it gave me an idea. Why not right about my favorite thing about each season? The result pleased me, but I'm not sure that my teacher was quite as thrilled as I was since I was given a C for "not following directions". The comments on the paper itself were encouraging so I figured I would share.