The One Hour Experiment
In my ongoing struggle to make peace with time, I’ve hit a brick wall. I’m having a very difficult time coming to terms with the amount of time I have to write; the way my illness and my children’s needs impacts my writing time; and what I achieve in the time I have.
In order to see if I can get a little break through, my life-coach Jena Strong has given me the assignment of only writing one hour day for the next two weeks. (Well, one week and then we’ll re-evaluate and see if we should keep it up another week.) I’m having a good migraine week right now, so I’m nervous that I’ll be well during these 1-hour weeks, then sick again when I’m free to write as many hours as I want. But, I’m curious to see if I can surprise myself about what I can get done in a short, focused amount of time.
That being said, there may be fewer written posts on Magpie Girl, although I’m thinking of trying my hand at more non-verbals, so stay tuned. I’m also planning on feeding my insights regarding this experiment into my new obsession with Twitter. If you’re interested in how this one-hour restriction affects the creative process, I’ll be channeling my thoughts into a daily update there (just 140 characters, so it will only take a sec.) You can track me here.
See you on the flip side!
p.s. Today I wrote this plus half a chapter (1,400 words) in an hour!
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August 22nd, 2008 at 6:10 am
That’s HUGE! I haven’t been living up to my 10 minutes again, I can’t imagine an hour. Way to go on such a great commitment to the writer in you. You inspire me. Maybe I should give it another shot. I look forward to hearing more about this development and seeing you on Twitter.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:08 am
I just realized reading this post that the one hour is, in a way, the “container” for your writing. Here’s to experimenting!
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:04 am
My problem is that I seem to have wide swathes of time, but little discipline. Even though I generally see the world as many shades of lovely grey, when it comes to my own work, I’m a black and white, all or nothing kind of gal. I guess that’s fueled by fear and perfectionism. But I think I’ll try this time limit approach and see what happens. Over and over again, I come back to the theme of freedom within structure. (Hmm, seems to be an essay or a blog post in there somewhere….)
August 31st, 2008 at 8:35 am
This is so timely – I run into the same time problem – my big problem is I fill up the calendar with lots of time for others and don’t reserve time for myself – for writing and for my music.
When a time block does arrive – I often squander it with trivial things, not working on my writing or music – and sometimes trivial is ok, but leaving my art up to random appearing blocks of time without any plan or discipline is squandering the gift I’ve been given. Ack…. I’m being very hard on myself.
Big kudos for reserving a block for yourself – I’m going to try something like this as well I think.
Cheers…
…Allen
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 am
[...] of the One Hour Experiment, Magpie Girl has been a little quiet lately. But I’ve been writing away at other places on [...]