Routinely Yours

In my quest for a workable routine I came across a piece of advice that said when you’re setting a daily goal aim low. Start with one sentence a day, make it a good one, and go from there. It reminded me of a little notebook I have that I created for just such a purpose. I even found notebooks like it to give to a few other writer friends.

Inside the front cover of the notebook I printed out the following:
The purpose of this little journal is a challenge of sorts. The idea is to write a single sentence every day for five years. Just random sentences so that you get into the habit of writing every day.

To be honest, I also questioned the point of just one sentence a day, and that five years was a pretty long time to commit to something like that. I even suggested keeping it going for a single year or until I filled the notebook.

So . . . how did I do? I started on June 6, 2014 and it’s now over five years later. I am less than a quarter of the way through the notebook, probably closer to an eighth of the way through. I reached sentence 42 on November 9, 2014 and skipped to October of 2015 for sentences 50, 51, and 52 – I have no idea what happened to sentences 43 through 49. Sentence 53 has no date, sentence 54 was written in November, 2015.

There is only one sentence written for all of 2016, at which point I decided not to number them anymore. There are three sentences for 2017, and only one in 2018. In 2019 I stopped dating them as well, and I have 14 of them so far.

I fully admit to slacking off in the writing department on my quest for a workable routine, but I’m thinking the one sentence a day would be an easy habit to pick up. I read over the sentences I’ve written and there are some interesting images – some could be developed into a story, some could be used in a poem. And if I added that one sentence to a WIP – well, even one sentence a day will start adding up.

So . . . until I get my wordage and timing worked out, I’ll aim for one sentence a day and hope for more.

Prompt of the Week

As you may have noticed, I haven’t exactly been doing much with the prompts lately. So instead of picking one to work on this week, I’m just going to list the generators and let you pick your own. And if I happen to be inspired by a prompt as well, I’ll post it on Saturday. But don’t hold your breath, I have a busy week ahead.

The Story Shack
The Plot Generator
Writing Exercises and Prompts
Springhole
Seventh Sanctum
RanGen