Writing Every Day 22: Why am I doing this?

Man, on its own that heading looks like a cry for help.

Now that I'm twenty-two (plus extra) entries into this experiment, I thought I'd take a moment to explore why I'm doing this and what I hope to get out of it.

I wish I could say that there was some inspirational inciting incident that made me choose to put up a steady stream of posts on the blog, but there really wasn't. I suppose it is more like how certain sedatives work; the substance builds up in your system until it reaches a critical amount and boom, you're unconscious.

The reason the drug was in my system in the first place harkens back to my college days. Back when I was in art school, I had an incredible teacher who assigned all of his students a high number of life drawing sketches to execute each week. I forget the specific number now, but it was something like fifty pages full of hand studies, fifty pages of face studies, and so on. He told us that these sketches were like an athlete performing short sprints. It was steady exercise that we performed to drill our skills and increase our endurance.

Those assignments have always held the ring of truth to me. Sketches are important to the visual artist. Words are important to the writer. While I don't feel comfortable calling myself a "writer," I do have to respect that writing is what I do for a living. There are people gracious enough to give me a salary to do so. I feel like I owe it to them to practice as much as possible, to run those short sprints.

I could do so in private, building up a massive catalogue of words that won't ever see the light of day. In the past, that's exactly what I have done. The reason I choose to do so in such a public way is because I hope someone out there reads what I'm saying. I do it because having someone like you read this stuff keeps me accountable. At that point I'm not doing it just for me. I'm also doing it for you guys.

There are a small handful of people out there who take a moment of their own day to look over what I'm saying. That holds similar value to me as the people who decide to pay me to write. Your time is valuable. You only have so much of it to go around, and that you'd spend a minute or two to look at the rudderless, rambling text I'm putting out is so, so appreciated.

Presently, the solitary means I have to show my appreciation is to keep writing, both here and at work. So that's what I'll do. I'll keep running my short sprints each (let's be honest, work) day for as long as I can. I hope that at some point, doing so will provide for me the same kind of benefit that those pages of life drawing studies were meant to back in the day.

Again, thank you for the time you've spent on me. A special thanks goes out to the teacher who showed me the value of persistence in pursuing your craft.

This one's for you, Scott.