Starting daily writing sprint

What is a writing sprint?

It’s what I’m starting as of today. I’ll be spending 30 minutes on writing about a topic that I want to write about. I’ll be doing it in a “freewriting style” (ie. Focus on writing what comes to my mind rather than focusing on editing, not worrying about grammar or spelling). I will actually time it with a timer and will drop the pen when the alarm buzzes.

Once the alarm goes off, I’ll move on to edit and publish mode. The edit will be very minimal and with the publishing process and edit combined, it will be done within 10 minutes.

Why am I doing this?

Because I want go for quantity and freqyency. There’s no doubt that if I want to become great at something, I have to keep doing it. I’ll also have to log a certain amount of time (eg. 10,000 hours theory) to be considered as reached mastery of that subject.

I want to be great at writing. As I wrote about it in my first blog post, I wasn’t born and raised in the United States and English is my second language. I have to say I came a long way when it comes to my English communication through endless practice of speech and writing, trial and error that still embarrasses me when I think about them even now, and immersing myself in English media all the time.

My biggest roadblock is second-guessing and the perfectionist trait. I can spend all day mulling over what I wrote, revising and editing over and over again worrying about what the readers would think of my writing.

Then one day, there was an epiphany — actually there aren’t that many people who read my blog posts! Increasing readership of my blog isn’t my goal in the first place, but when I see the stats in the WordPress dashboard, there’s usually only three or five readers per each post, most of them having come from search engine randomly stumble upon my blog posts.

It was actually liberating. I still want to post my thoughts publicly (vs. keeping a private journal) because there’s definitely something about sending my messages out to the world. Each post feels like a message in a bottle, not knowing who needs to hear it and who will read it but sending it out anyways.

I will keep on posting in my blog, and now with more frequency and tenacity. I’ll be posting everyday, so I doubt these daily posts will be well-thoughtout pieces. They’re more like tweets that can be amassed and edited into long-form write-ups later when I have time.

I also want to mention this great source of motivation that got me to start this new ritual. I was reading this book from Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I see. In this book this sentence truly resonated with my heart — “The brain is perhaps the greatest example one can imagine of the maxim that, at a large scale, quantity has a qualityy all its own“ (Page 93).

I believe that’s how we learn to become a fully-functioning human when we grow up — babbling endlessly before finally being able to speak, falling endlessly before finally being able to walk. My writing sprint is my “babbling and falling”, the necessary steps to be great at writing.

What’s next

Looking at my Apple Watch timer, I see there’s only 5 minutes left so I will wrap up (it just became 4 minutes lol)

I will post a quick thought piece like today’s post every day, and like I mentioned above it will be 30 minutes of freewriting and 10 minutes of editing + publishing.

The biggest challenge will be about what topics to choose. I’ll have to start a backlog for writing topics.

I truly believe in a large quantity having a quality of its own. I will prove that right.

Finished it 1 minute early. Yay!