A Very Good Place to Start

Since graduating with a degree in English literature almost a year and a half ago, I've struggled to maintain discipline in my writing. And by "I've struggled" I mean I've failed miserably. I'm no Annie Dillard or Henry David Thoreau, who hide themselves away from the world and tinker and strain with words for hours and days and weeks on end. First of all, I'm an extreme extrovert, so seclusion for even one day depresses me. Secondly, I am easily distracted, and, let's be honest, writing takes a serious amount of dedication and focus and editing and editing and editing. As a result, I have two, maybe three, small-ish writing projects to show for the last sixteen months of my life (one of which is a collaborative story about a little brown duck named Reggie. Awesome, right?).

Graduation from college means freedom from assignments, but that freedom, at least for a writer, means you have to come up with your own structure and discipline. Thus, a blog.

I've actually toyed for months with the idea of writing one: "Maybe I should write a blog... No, I won't write a blog. Everyone is writing a blog! How would mine be different than anyone else's? What if people don't read it? What if people do read it? And what in the world would I write about anyway?"

You see my reluctance. I realized recently, though, that whether or not people read it, I need something that will help me to write regularly. (That is, write regularly without having to be alone in a cabin in the woods for weeks on end.) Ultimately, it doesn't matter if no one reads my writing. Don't get me wrong, reader -- whoever you are, I want to serve you well. I hope I entertain you and challenge you too. But I think this will be a challenge for me more than anything else. Writing is easy. Writing with consistency and excellence for God's glory is not. And that is what I'll be straining to do, no matter who reads it.

So I'm not too worried about those months that I didn't write. I'm writing now.