#5minsofwriting

A juicy and loving Writing Practice is a marathon of love. It’s not something that happens overnight and I know that through years and years of love and labour, I can get to my computer and sit down for a short amount of time and just pump out the words, but there are days where I find the idea of sitting down and writing something akin to sitting in the dentist chair (it’s been almost 3 years since my last trip…shhh) and it’s perfectly normal to have these days.

Even I struggle with days where the thought of putting my fingers onto the keypad is excruciating and I would much rather binge on Netflix or scroll around on YouTube. There is this precarious balance that needs to happen when it comes to a writing practice.

But why does a Writing Practice have to take an hour? Two hours? A whole day?

What rule says that there we need an extensive period of time to write?

If fact, I feel like the more time we have the hard it is to sit down and write and when our Writing Practice is hard we get frustrated, because we don’t always have the time or the mental capacity to show. We don’t have the patience or the motivation to get it done, but what if we changed the way thought about what we approached our Writing Practice? What is all we had was five minutes?

Just.

Five.

Minutes.

It’s small, right? It’s a song and half, it’s a a cup of tea waiting to cool down, it’s waiting for your order to be filled at your food place of choice, it’s the warm up for the real exercise, the list can go on and on. It’s a small sliver of time and we don’t even think twice when we’re in the moment and doing these every day things but when we think about writing, time seems to slow down. Why? Why do we keep leaving it on the back burner? Why does it seem like it’s such a hard thing to do? What makes sitting down and cementing our Writing Practice so hard?

We put too much thought into a Writing Practice; we think it through, we overthink it, we write lists on top of lists, we set timers, but we never sit down and do the work.

What would happen if you actually sat down and did your writing, every day with ease and joy?

Can you imagine what it would feel like?

Can you imagine what it would feel like in your body?

The sweet release of getting words down a on page and the time spent, suspended in your alternative reality, where nothing and no one can hurt you.

No bullying, no attacks, no chores, no kids to deal with, nothing.

Nothing but bliss.

Are you tempted?

Do you want the kind of joy that leaves you happy in every area of your life?

Starting a Writing Practice doesn’t take a long. And the beauty of this is that you can get there with ease. All it takes is starting with five minutes.

Here’s how to do it:

• Grab your writing instrument
• Sit somewhere comfortable
• Open up your chose writing platform
• Set a timer for five minutes (Howler is great, but it’s mac only)
• And just write. Don’t think, just write.

When the time is up take a step back and count it up. How awesome is that? You’ve just done five minutes of writing and gotten somewhere between 200-450 words, look at you go!

Now try again tomorrow and the day after that, and the one after that. If you can consistently steal five minutes out of your day to write, you’ll be well on your way to getting yourself a Writing Practice that started with #5minsofwriting.

If five minutes is too short, set the timer again, and do it all over again. Keep doing that until you feel like you feel comfortable bumping up to ten minutes and so on. It only takes three weeks to create a habit and another three to cement it. And by the time you’ve done that, it’s snuck into the crevices of your life and you’ve made it apart of your every day life.

Let’s just get real for a bit five minutes of writing is not much to ask any writer, mother, sister, brother, partner.

It’s achievable, it’s easy, it’s not even that much time out of your busy day.

Nix the should, coulds, woulds, needs and sit down and do the damn work. Do it because you want to and you love it. And not any other reason.

If you come to your computer with that attitude you’ll be able to get anything done and you won’t feel like you have to get through so much.

So sit down, commit to just five minutes and let yourself see where it goes, you can do it, I know you can, because it’s my secrte weapin and it’s the secret weapon I give out to clients, it helps them switch their mindset to be, it’s only 5 minutes, that’s easy to fit in. Because five turns into ten and ten turned into fifteen and so on, it builds because you’re out of that mentality of shoulding and woulding. You’re in the moment, you’re writing.

And nothing else matters.

I’m a big lover of instagram and I want to help you get your Writing Practice going, so grab the graphic above and using the hashtag #5minsofwriting I want to see your words, I repost all mentions on my instagram feed because I love supporting and raising up writers.