For the Birds: You have enough time to write
swift(-ish) letters for busy people - #6
Thanks for being here, friend!
This week, I’m celebrating three years (!!!) of publishing For the Birds.
That’s three years of long personal essays, creative prompts, spontaneous bird & bug oracles, and weird poetic meandering.
Help me celebrate *and* nurture your creativity for the long-haul: Upgrade your subscription this week and save 22% for life.
You have enough time to write.
Short, frequent instances of contact with your creativity are extremely valuable, now more than ever.
The modern average attention span is 40 seconds. FOUR. FUCKING. ZERO.
Okay then! Write for 40 goddamn seconds. Write for EIGHTY seconds, if you’re feeling really saucy.
Don’t carry expectations of yourself that pretend we aren’t living in doom-scroll times. Treat yourself like the creature of context you are. If you wish you had more time to write, start with anything more than nothing.
Anything more than nothing is good! This advice can be applied to any creative endeavor / most goals.
Take one daily instance of checking social media and instead, open the notes app on your phone and write something down. Anything! Literally!
There is time to write, and you have enough of it.
Nothing bad will happen if you spend five minutes today writing crap.
Doesn’t five minutes sound sooo long after thinking about 40 seconds?
Give yourself the long, generous gift of a full five-minute writing session today. Wow.
You are safe enough to do something (i.e. write) before you know fully what it is that you’re doing. Because that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? All the fretting about what you’ll even do or make or what this thing will become? You think you have to know this stuff in advance in order to earn this creative use of your time, right?
Wrong!!!!
Writing doesn’t need to be earned! Oxygen doesn’t need to be earned!
You would not be tussling with this so often if writing didn’t matter to you at the level of blood and bone, the most primal part of your fundamental existence on this wild earth. You can’t fake that kind of obsession.
Your obsession with writing, with creativity, with making and being in the vicinity of made things is real and beautiful and better than instagram.
It doesn’t even matter what you write. Like I said: CRAP!
It doesn’t even matter if it’s only 5 minutes.
Stop reading this letter! Go write for two stinking minutes. Two terrible, smelly minutes that you can barely get into. It’s okay. If two minutes feels too short, do this: write for two minutes, and then tell yourself that that was too short, and write for two minutes longer, doubling your original task.
Doubling!!
But don’t tell yourself it’s too short to begin with and then proceed to do nothing.
Do you see what I’m saying? Don’t let your concerns stand between you and the writing. Sit down, write for two minutes, and then dare all limitations to show themselves as you stand arm & arm with the page, ready for battle.
Maybe you’ll win; maybe you won’t. But I’m guessing you’ll come away with a stronger sense of which side you’re on, you Joan of Arc, you.
You are safe enough to use the time sitting in front of you, right this very second, for purposeful OR purposeless art. You are safe enough to experiment with a new way of using 5 minutes out of your whole day while *not* feeling responsible for ensuring a “good” “outcome.”
Write something that doesn’t matter and that you’ll never read again: I dare you.
The same amount of time exists no matter how you feel about yourself today. What if you don’t have to feel particularly good about yourself in order to make art??
I’m just asking you to write something crappy anyway. I promise: It does not matter how you feel. The words will exist either way, threatening to bore you to death.
But you’ll live! You’ll yawn and grumble and live, having written despite all the terrible odds.
The odds are already terrible for so many of us. You might as well write! Write and be a tiny bit less miserable for 2-5 minutes.
Let your self-expression be bigger than your misery, you silly queen.
Listen to me: Bad things will not be made worse by 2-5 minutes of writing.
I’m so serious.
I hope your new plan for today is to write for 5 minutes, and that you do it even if it feels scary or stupid.
Write the scary stupid thing before you die! I love you. There’s time, it just happens to be now.
Very, very nice and true! Inspiration can come on the wing, with a mere breath. And not only can one find full expression by writing for short periods of time, writers can find fulfillment by penning a word or sentence! Writing can be an integral part of the fully human creative process and when combined with a walk in the woods, a quiet moment, a cup of tea or coffee or changing the venue to a different location or even different part of one's home, inserting writing to one's day adds richness, fulfillment and joy!
I love the idea of getting some writing done if only for a miute or two. Simply something to get away from the doom scrolling like you mention. That doom scrolling on much of social media is such a time and energy vampire in so many ways.