500 Words

So this morning, while I was getting ready for work, I came across a picture on my Instagram feed that struck a chord in me. It had nine words, but it was soooo powerful for me!

Get up early.
Write five hundred words.
Every day.

Now, one of the reasons this really hit a note was because one of my resolutions this year was to write more. Whether it was blogging, letters, stories, poems, anything that was associated with writing. And, like so often happens with New Year's resolutions, it hasn't exactly panned out the way that had hoped it would.

Three blog posts, maybe a handful of really long Facebook status posts, and three letters. Some would argue that it's a lot, but it's nowhere near the amount that I wanted to be writing.

And five hundred words a day, with all the ideas that I've got bouncing around my head, is not an impossible task by any means. (In fact, I'm pretty positive that I've written Sean longer messages!)

Challenging myself like this, forcing five hundred words a day, it's about getting over the excuses, pushing through the wall, not letting the writer's block control the flow of magic. It's about the chicken scratch on the paper, the flow of the written script, the letters that are scratched out or emboldened because I've gone over the words more than once to correct them. It's about the ink that bleeds through because I pushed too hard on the paper while hesitating, trying to gather my thoughts mid-sentence. It's about the ink splatter, and clean paper being given a character and a story and a mess that leads to all sorts of adventures that wouldn't otherwise happen.

What a beautiful mess I could make with just five hundred words in a single day!