Pedaling the read and write cycle
All days are for reading, all days are for writing. It took me some time to realise this. I wasted so much time waiting for the perfect time to write, the ideal book to read.
As a reader, it can be quite pitiful how reading habits tend to slip. After spending years “in the zone”, building up a beloved library, life interfered, and by the time I recovered, the last read was more than a year before. It happens to all readers at some point. The key is to snap out of it, get back into the zone and reconnect to that past life. It can be a magazine article, an online article, a chapter of a novel, a section of a self-help book, a topic of a non-fiction read—anything fills the daily reading quota. The problem is fitting the material to your energy level. Sometimes, I am in all-day marathon mode, gobbling up a book from sunrise to sunset. At such times the only issue is the selection of the book. At other times, my attention span doesn’t last beyond a page. The good thing is, one page still counts. You just have to find stuff worth reading that is only a page long, and there you have it: your daily dose.
Some may ask, is this reading for the sake of reading? I say, all reading is for the sake of your own self. You immerse yourself in the language and ideas of another mind and come out a different person. Depending on what you read, you may learn something useful. Your imagination may be sparked. Or, let’s just get straight to it, you get entertained.
If you’re not picky about reading on a screen, you can find good picks at “Freshly Pressed”, the top blog posts on wordpress (http://wordpress.com/fresh/), “Medium Top 100", the top 100 posts on Medium for the month (https://medium.com/top-100/), or check out stumbleupon.com and select the literary options.
There is something cathartic about writing that you miss when you are out of touch with it. It is energising to get back to writing, whether it is for an audience or for your own eyes only. Still, it is easier to neglect writing than it is to neglect reading, because reading is a passive activity and writing requires active participation of all your faculties. It takes more discipline to write regularly if you only do it privately. Writing even a line or two and putting it out into the public eye can be a thrill, whether it is something as inconsequential as a tweet or a Facebook update. For some, blogging is their thing, but I find it to be more like dropping pebbles into a well. I prefer community blogging on medium.com, where you don’t have a separate blog as such, but everyone blogs into the communal pool of the medium platform. It can still feel like dropping pebbles, but those pebbles can be submitted to “collections” hosted by other medium users (or yourself) where you feel like your piece made it somewhere. At the end of the day, having your writing arranged chronologically online somewhere, or compiled into a diary, or scattered across all sorts of notebooks or MS Word files, is interesting because you can go back and find snapshots of your thought process at different points in the past. Reconnecting with old perspectives from a new angle is an interesting form of self discovery.
One way of motivating yourself to write is the Inkygirl Wordcount Challenge, where you pledge to write 250, 500, 1000 or your own choice of word count per day or 5-6 days of the week. You can find the challenge at http://inkygirl.com/inkygirl-wordcount-challenge/.
If you aspire to achieve a outstanding standard of writing every time you write, you will never get down to it at all. The key is to push forward, “mind dump” instead of “over-think”, then put on your editing cap and clean it up later. Or not. After all, it’s your writing.
It’s your writing, your reading, your little investments into yourself, that set you apart from a robot. Being sucked into an artificial routine is not fun. Keep yourself alive, and you will thrive.
