I have another blog. It’s called Andrea Reads America, and it chronicles my reading tour of the United States. Until yesterday, I had abandoned it.
I didn’t like spending time there anymore. The blog’s theme was outdated, the look was stale, and the thought of overhauling the site overwhelmed me. I finished reading the state of Iowa in March — five months ago — but I felt so blah about Andrea Reads America‘s look, I didn’t even want to visit the site, much less write for it. I was uninspired to publish an Iowa writeup.
Which means I also stopped my reading project.
It’s funny how invisible obstacles build up in your psyche like that. I wasn’t conscious of the fact that my site’s look blocked me from continuing my reading tour of the US. But as the Iowa book summaries gathered dust in my composition book, without making progress towards the keyboard and the screen, I wandered away from reading America.
I’ve read a couple of excellent books in the interim — it has not been a complete loss to have abandoned the project. But after finishing a few good books outside of Andrea Reads America, I started wandering aimlessly in my reading. I’ve become indecisive about selecting novels. I’ll pick something up, and put it down. Pick something else up, put it down.
A couple of days ago, I started missing my reading project. I needed direction. And after reading a few sailing books, I longed for land: for the prairies of the central US.
I didn’t feel good about starting with Kansas while the Iowa writeup still lingered, though. And I didn’t feel good about publishing the Iowa writeup with my site looking the way it did. So Friday night, I finally overhauled Andrea Reads America. I gave it a new theme, Libretto.
It’s simple. I like it.
Yesterday, after giving Andrea Reads America a makeover, I took my laptop and my dusty notes to my chair under the dogwood tree, and I unblocked myself. I wrote my Iowa post.
And now? I’m on the prairies, reading Kansas.
Also of note: I discovered when I was writing the Iowa post that we have wifi under the tree!
For Christmas one year, when I was 9 or 10, or maybe 11 or 12, my aunt and uncle gave me a packet of stationery. They always gave unique, interesting gifts, and I remember how that packet of heavy-weight ivory paper, embroidered on the edges with cornflower blue flowers, filled me with promise: empty paper, special paper. It had so much potential.
I wrote letters on that stationery: letters to my Grandma on St. Simon’s Island, letters home to my mom and dad from Girl Scout camp. I loved that stationery. My own smooth paper with envelopes to match. Each time I pulled it out and ran my hand across it, I delighted in its prettiness. Its existance, and that it belonged to me, both inspired and encouraged me to write. It gave me a reason to get out a pen and ink words on paper.
I still prefer to write in ink. My 1o minute writes would turn to blog posts much more quickly if I typed directly into the WordPress app on my desktop. But like vinyl records, I love the physical objects of paper and pen, my thoughts in ink, undeletable, scratched in my handwriting, on a page. Personal thoughts flow more easily with a pen in my hand.
I would love to have stationery again. I use cheap composition books for my free writes, which serve their purpose fine. I coudn’t afford expensive paper for writing practice; we’d go broke.
But when I want to send a card or a letter, I am always blocked by the paper I have to write on. I don’t want to write on an ugly piece of ordinary, bleached white printer paper. So I end up not sending notes, or if I do, the process makes me sad.
Sometimes we receive pretty notes from Brian’s grandma, handwritten in ink on stationery. They feel warm and alive, and her handwriting reminds me of her voice.
The special paper, decorated with her thoughts, fills me up.
For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
I remember in grade school we would sometimes get puzzles or logic problems to work on. My favorites were rebuses, the pictograms that represented a word or phrase. For some reason, this one always stuck with me:
I think it stuck with me because though I solved the puzzle — Read between the lines — I didn’t understand the expression. I knew what it meant at an academic level, but I had never experienced reading between the lines before. I didn’t know how to do it or when it was necessary.
It wasn’t until much later in life, when I started reading Hemingway, that I finally felt the Aha! moment of picking up on allusions, of filling in the blanks the author leaves empty, of understanding what the author is telling you without telling you.
Hemingway is a master of this. His words tell one story — a story that often seems simplistic and superficial when the lines are the only thing you’re reading. It’s the words he leaves out that tell a deeper, more complex, more human story, as in the frustrated love between Jake and Brett in The Sun Also Rises, or the unspoken story behind the dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants.”
I remember the sensation of it all clicking for me when I picked up on the unwritten story in a book. I don’t recall the book — it may have been Life of Pi — but I remember thinking, “This is what it means to read between the lines.” It was one of those moments when your scalp prickles and you get a rush of heat in your chest. And when it all clicked, when I finally understood, I thought of that pictogram from grade school, as I still do whenever I think of reading between the lines.
The bigger mystery to me now is how does a writer achieve this phenomenon, of creating a story behind the words? It requires deliberate, precise choices: this act of omission, this art of leaving negative space. It is a rare and precious skill.
I’m a reader – reading is possibly my favorite past time. But I have to admit that with my focus on reading instead of writing this year, I miss my composition books. I miss my blog.
A friend asked, “What about your 10 minutes per day?” when I told him my blog was sad and lonely. Those minutes are going to consuming instead of producing these days.
But today I’m up early (as always). It’s another snow day and everyone else is sleeping. A cat purrs at my knee, snow clicks against the window, and I hear the tappity-tap of my keyboard and the quiet tick of the clock.
The funny thing is that part of the reason I’m not writing is because everyone else is. January and February are our biggest months in support at WordPress.com as folks follow through on New Year’s resolutions to start blogging. I love that, that we see such a huge spike as people dedicate themselves to publishing online. It’s an extraordinarily busy time, though, and one that I don’t squeeze time in for my own writing.
This morning though, I did. I opted to write instead of emptying the dishwasher.
Another busy day is about to begin, but for now my world is still and silent. I wrote my Andrea Reads America post, and I dusted off this blog as well. It feels good to be here, if just for a moment.
For those of you who missed it live, the video of my WordCamp US presentation, “Publish in 10 Minutes Per Day,” is now available. The transcript of the talk is here. Enjoy!
You’re an awesome blogger, right? You never run out of ideas, you work your full time job, exercise daily, manage your household, and still publish regularly on your blog. You post exciting content every day and can sustain your level of blogging forever and ever, amiright?
Yeah. Me neither.
Sad blogger.
Days go by, and then weeks. You think about how good posting would feel: to write, to publish, to get those likes and comments. But you don’t actually do anything about it. The longer your blog sits untouched, the more pressure you feel to make your next post AWESOME to make up for being a slacker. Which of course means you now have writer’s block, because really, who can write under the pressure of having to write something amazing? So you don’t post. Your visitors leave. Your views trickle down to zero. You feel like a terrible blogger and you go cry in a corner.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I found a way to make time for your blog so that you can not only fit it into your life, but so that you have something to write about every time you put fingers to keyboard.
My name is Andrea Badgley and I’ve been blogging for four years on my personal site here at andreabadgley.com. When I first started my blog, I was a stay-at-home mom and published multiple times a week. I had a decent following, and was gaining more online friends every day.
But when I started working full time, I no longer had time or focus for my blog. I stopped publishing regularly. My views and followers dwindled. I felt bad about myself for neglecting the blog that I had not only grown to love, but that helped me find my career path with WordPress.com.
Blockers
Abandoning my blog was not okay with me. So I tried to figure out what was keeping me from blogging. I determined that I had two blockers:
Time
Topics
During my blogging drought, I’d think, I don’t have time for my blog anymore, or if I made time, I’d sit down with my pen and paper only to be blocked by, I don’t have anything interesting to say. So I came up with a way to make time, and I devised a tool that ensured I’d never run out of topics.
First, let’s talk about time.
Carve out 10 minutes per day
I was once a member of a group who met weekly to write together. We often did what’s called a free-write: we’d set a timer, write for 10 minutes without lifting our pens from the page, and when the timer dinged, we put our pens down and read what we wrote.
Timer
To make time in my life for blogging, I iterated on the idea of the free-write and decided to carve 10 minutes out of my day, every day, to write.
Ten minutes is so little. You can do it after a 6AM workout, when an early morning run has gotten your creative juices flowing. Or you can do it as soon as you wake, when you’re still in a dream state. Or you can do it on lunch, or with a cocktail. Or in bed when you realize, oh crap, I haven’t written yet today.
The main thing to remember is that ten minutes can be squeezed in anywhere in the day.
Pro-tip
Use an alarm to remind yourself to write
To really make this work, here’s a pro-tip: Create a trigger. Carve out a specific time of day and create a cue for your writing time so that you will make a habit of it. Set an alarm for when you want to write, and give yourself a reward for following through: a peaceful house in the early morning, or an afternoon cup of coffee to go with your writing time. Pairing a trigger, like an alarm, with a reward, like coffee, will help you build a habit of writing every day.
Keep topics on hand
The ten-minute write takes care of the time issue, but what about topics?
Prompt box
Again, I’ll turn to a writing group strategy. At our gatherings, we placed a silver engraved box filled with folded slips of paper in the middle of the table. At the beginning of each free write, one of us would pull a piece of paper from the box and read the words written on it aloud. We’d then write for ten minutes about whatever the prompt was.
This same strategy works for blogging. To create a prompt box, snip a sheet of paper into about 30 slips. On each slip, write a word or phrase that has meaning to you. Examples of some of mine are thunderstorms, rolling pins, and salt marshes. If you’re writing for a business site, you could seed your box with employee names, materials you use, or anything unique to your business or the way it operates.
Once you’ve written your prompts, fold the slips and place them in a box or some other vessel. Whenever you sit down to write, if you have nothing to say, pull a prompt out and start writing.
Timer + Prompt Box = Writing
To overcome writer’s block and start publishing again, pair the ten-minute free write with the prompt box. During the time you’ve carved out for your writing, grab your timer and your box. Pull a prompt, write for ten minutes, and when the timer dings, stop writing. That’s it.
Does this really work? What about editing?
Case study
The 10-minute write motto
In April 2015, I dedicated to publishing a 10-minute write every day for 30 days. Each morning, beginning March 31, I poured a cup of coffee before my work day started, pulled a slip of paper from my prompt box, started a timer, and wrote until the timer dinged. I did a quick scan for spelling and punctuation errors, tagged the post AprilDaily, then scheduled the post to publish the following morning.
The scheduling delay allowed me to do additional editing if I wanted to, but I rarely did. Why didn’t I edit? Because during that month, I learned to live by this creed:
Perfect is the enemy of Done.
Publishing this way is liberating. Some posts will bomb, but some posts will take off more than you can anticipate. It’s like shooting 100 frames to get the right photograph: every shot isn’t going to be brilliant, but each click of the shutter helps you improve and sets you up for when a prime moment arrives for you to capture it; because you’ve been practicing, and because you’re ready, you’ll capture it beautifully.
Using the prompt box and the timer, I published every day in the month of April. My blog no longer sat empty and neglected. Visitor climbed 26%, and views increased 45% over the previous month, from 3700 in March to 5400 views in April. My blog was active again, and readers loved the spontaneity of it. In fact, they got involved by sending me prompts. When I wrote from a reader’s prompt, I gave credit and linked back to their site, helping build community.
Giving yourself meaningful topics to write about and then carving out the time to write will get you not only practicing, but will get you publishing again. It will make your blog active and will bring visitors to your site.
Starting is the hardest part. Once you start, the writer’s block wall will begin to crumble. By making a habit of writing, and by making sure you always have topics on hand, you’ll be able to reduce that wall to a pile of rubble that you can easily kick out of your way.
Get writing
So how do you get started? Create a prompt box. Make a list of 20 things you love: moss, mountains, bacon, brioche. When you are out in the world, whether eavesdropping in a coffee shop or watching an acorn roll across the sidewalk, make notes of objects or scenes that strike you. Record a voice memo on your phone or ink these ideas on your hand if you have to so you can remember them. When you return home, add those mementos to your prompt box.
Then? Write.
Pro-tips
If you’re really worried about editing, set your timer for 7 minutes to give yourself 3 minutes for edits.
Write every day, but publish every other day. This will allow you to stockpile posts for when you are on vacation or for those days when you don’t want to share what you’ve written.
To mix it up for your readers, keep a handful of photos on hand. A compelling photograph with a well-written caption doesn’t require a long blog post and can take only minutes to craft.
AprilDaily posts, where I published a 10-minute write every day during the month of April
NovemberDaily posts, where I replicated the AprilDaily experiment and had similar results with increases in visitors and and views
If you have questions or decide to try publishing in 10 minutes per day, I’d love to hear about it. Let’s keep the conversation going with the hashtag #10minwri. Have fun!
Special thanks to my writing partners at The Joyful Quill for introducing me to the 10-minute-write, and to Luca Sartoni and GetSpeak.in for the tremendous support helping me prepare for this presentation.
Butterfly Mind 