My decision to write one sentence a day got me writing again. There was more to it than that, but breaking down the large (or at least, to me large-seeming) task of Regular Writing into very small pieces was an important part of the process. On August 28, 2009 I wrote my first Daily Sentence, which became the trick I pulled to lure me back to the workshop, and posted it on a Google Site I called (no surprise here) The Life Literary. I shared the site with a small group of confidantes to give my decision some oomph.
I started a Daily Sentence in that first The Life Literary, looking for a way to make a public commitment to write (even a little bit) daily. My goal was to give myself a forum to write one good sentence a day and it worked. I only had to write one sentence a day. I could have written a paragraph, an essay, or even a novel if I’d wanted. All I promised myself, however, was a sentence. And, the extent of the public I invited to read these sentences was my immediate family and a handful of nephews: friendly but real accountability.
It’s one thing to say, “Yeah, I’d like to write something,” and another to actually do it. I suggest a Daily Sentence as a way to get started. Just one sentence and you’re done. It’s a potentially easy way to add a bit of active literary living to your life.
That Google site, by the way, has become a valued word storage facility. Shelves stacked with a year and a half’s worth of fresh sentences, paragraphs, essays, poems and story ideas. It also became the central place I kept anything I wrote in the past. It’s nice to have somewhere I can go to pull items off the shelf to publish here either fully formed or as just the germ of an idea. I also still use it for new things I’m writing now,that are not quite ready for worldwide release.
