My Daily Page (A New Year's Resolution)

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It’s January again and it looks like we all survived the Mayan Prophesy.  So I figured that I would work on my resolutions for the upcoming year.  I have a mediocre track record with my resolutions, but it doesn’t stop me from making them every year.  While I will build upon some of the ones that I have made before – ranging from the inane (wearing sunglasses as often as possible) to the meaningful (going to the gym regularly), I’m adding one more to the list: writing a page a day.

I always wanted to be an author and have a book published that people want to read, but I haven’t really put “pen to paper” and written that book, yet.  So the goal of this resolution is to ask myself daily to type out a page. Hopefully it will be a page about the story I want to write into a novel, but if not, as long as it’s an exercise in getting myself to write habitually and daily, I will consider that a success.  

I simply open Microsoft Word to start a new document and I type out my words, my thoughts, my story or my tale onto the page until I hit a page break. For me this page averages somewhere between 500 and 800 words, depending on the density of my paragraphs, my use of dialogue or the inclusion of quotes.  I don’t have to stop when I get to the page break, I can continue on if I have the thoughts and the energy, especially when my story carries me along. Yet, I can’t stop my writing for the day until I get to that page break.  I can take recesses or work on the page in the middle of other tasks, but I can’t end my day without typing those 500 to 800 words.

It gives me freedom and structure. Maybe I can’t write about my story one day, so I can take a break and write about anything else.  However there are two caveats, I can’t use a blog entry to stand in for my exercise and I can’t rework something and have it take credit for writing my daily page.

As of this post, I haven’t worked on my sixth day’s entry, but I have written over five pages for my novel and one page for future use.  I’m embracing creativity by working it out each day. 

In the meantime, I’ll return to Around the World in a Pot and my other thematic blog posts.  Oh, yea, I resolve to post at least fifty times this year.

Happy New Year and Happy Epiphany.

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