I used to write 3 posts every week (on my Italian blog). Then she joined our lives and everything changed, from priorities to free time. Exactly a year later, so happy first birthday my love, I decided that it’s time to get back to that experiment.

Yes, it was an experiment. Thanks to my friend Weronika Łabaj, a little less than 3 years ago I started reading “Everybody Writes”. Highly suggested, by the way. The book starts by analyzing how an occasional writer behaves:

  • They sit down
  • Look for inspiration
  • Fail
  • Try a couple more times
  • Conclude writing is not for them

The author suggests that you can train yourself in such a way that your brain starts to continuously generate writing ideas, scripts and plots. It’s mostly, if not only, a matter of training. Mind, this doesn’t mean anyone can become the new best selling author by simply training, that’s another story. Training enables something we could call “on demand creativity and inspiration”.

One of the suggested exercises, to begin with, is very simple: just write. Sit down and write. Set a schedule, sit down and write. Set a schedule, a time slot, sit down and write. Do not write when inspiration comes, but stick to the set schedule. So I did it:

I reserved 40 minutes, every other working day, in my calendar to write a blog post.

In the beginning it was absolutely hard. Near to impossible. I didn’t have ideas; When I had, writing them down in an understandable shape was impossible; Keeping them short and concise, and sticking to the schedule was very hard.

Then, suddenly, something happened. After a couple of months, and 29 mediocre (in retrospective) posts, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel:

Ideas started to form, the script was crystal clear, and the resulting post was very easy to write. I was a kind of volcano of ideas, and honestly, the set schedule was not enough. I could have written a post very single day without affecting my backlog of ideas.

The moral of the story is not that I’m a good writer. The moral of the story is that:

training, sometimes very hard training, is the foundation of everything.

It’s time to challenge train again

Writing in Italian was kinda doable, it’s my native language. After 282 posts in Italian it’s now time to switch to my primary work language: English.

I set the schedule. Every week, on Wednesdays. Let’s see what happens.