Recently, I talked with a friend who asked if I write because I love the craft of writing or simply because I have a message I feel compelled to share. You might find it surprising what I told him.
While I have come to enjoy the art of writing, I did not start because I felt highly gifted in it. Nor did I have an insatiable love for literature. I hated school—especially English. I was homeschooled. My older sister used to help me with English and tried teaching me the difference between adjectives and adverbs and how to know when a noun is being used as a direct object or indirect object. I would get so mad that one time I yanked my sisters veiling off (which made her mad!).
No, I didn’t start writing because of the craft! But neither was it because I had a specific message to share.
When I was sixteen years old (2007), I went through a fairly deep depression. One of my heroes has always been Jim Elliot who was a missionary to the Auca Indians in Ecuador and killed attempting to reach them. Jim was the first man I had heard about who kept a journal, so as a way of sorting through what I was feeling as an awkward, depressed sixteen year-old (and a way of conversing with God when my mouth wouldn’t engage with my heart) I started journaling.
After a few months I began sharing bits and pieces of my journal online (remember Xanga?) and discovered people connected with what I wrote. I guarantee you the actual writing was awful! But it resonated and people understood what I said.
That’s when writing became something more than a homework assignment for me.
I kept writing publicly and soon friends would say “You should write a book,” and I’d chuckle and awkwardly disclaim that I didn’t know what I’d write about. Deep down inside, though, an absurd idea began sprouting: I should write a book.
When I get to the place of “I should” about something, I don’t sit on it for long. So I soon began planning my first book project. Unfortunately, that book has yet to be written because the story was still in process. But in catching the vision to write a book, I continued writing regularly on my blog.
In the following years, I developed an increasing passion for excellent communicating. Specifically, in writing. The written word is one of the most powerful forms of influence. If you doubt me, stop and think about how many issues you think differently about than what you used to, and I guarantee most often it comes back to a book, a note written by a teacher, parent, or close friend, a line or two quoted on Facebook—the different ways written communication impacts your life is endless.
But here’s what caught me: I couldn’t think of any man I knew at the time who actively wrote.
I don’t mean who could write, I mean who was actually doing it. I don’t mean who wrote a book because they had something to share, I mean who was continually writing books because they wanted to grow in their craft.
I’m not that good of a writer. My wife and each of my family members write better than I do. I really believe that! And I don’t say it as a passive/aggressive way of getting compliments. I say it to make a point.
Writing well is not a gift.
The gift may be enjoying the process and knowing how to join words eloquently together so they paint an outstanding picture, but few people I know with that gift are actually writing.
Writing well comes through disciplined practice. That is why I am a writer. I simply practice.
Anyone—absolutely anyone—can learn to write well if they practice consistently. And when anyone—absolutely anyone—practices consistently over an extended period of time, and if their content is meaningful to others, people begin to listen.
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I have come to enjoy writing, but first I learned to practice well. I have messages on my heart I feel compelled to share, but first I caught a vision for why I should share them in the first place: no one else is doing it. At least in churches I’m familiar with.
Not everyone is a writer; but my guess is many of you are, you just don’t know it yet.
Either you’ve never taken the time to try or you don’t know where to start. You see writing as something done by really gifted wordsmiths (or those who enjoyed school). But as I’ve already told you, that’s not what defines whether or not someone becomes a writer.
What defines writers from non-writers is that writers are constantly practicing their craft. They don’t wait for inspiration, they simply practice with what they have right now and let the inspiration follow.
A few years ago I signed up for an online writing challenge a big-named author was doing. He challenged us to write 500 words a day for 31 days. He said by the end of it we would be in the habit of writing daily.
So I wrote—Five. Hundred. Words. A. Day.
That seemed like an overwhelming amount at first, but in reality it only took 20-30 minutes. And yes, by the end of the month I had developed the habit of writing daily. I even missed several days here and there. The point wasn’t in getting 15,500 words written, the point was learning to put one word after another word every time I had the time to do so.
Too often we wait of inspiration before we write, but that’s not how it works. Inspiration flows with practice. Practice comes first, and as we practice inspiration fills us more and more regularly.
We need more excellent writers. But we won’t get any unless we start practicing.
That’s why I’m introducing my own writing challenge. I’ve taken the one I did several years ago and modified it for you.
If you want to test the waters of writing, or if you already are a writer and want to take it to the next level, I challenge you to take a few minutes every day for two weeks straight and write five-hundred words.
This isn’t school. You don’t have to spell your words correctly—you won’t even need to have correct sentence structure. The goal is simply to develop the habit of writing.
Write 500 words. That’s it. If you can do that each day for two weeks, I guarantee you will be a much better writer than you were at first.
By the way, did I mention there will be a giveaway at the end?
I’ll do a drawing of all qualifying participants and one lucky person will win a free copy of their choice between Donald Miller’s latest book Scary Close or Shauna Niequist’s newest release, Present Over Perfect. All you have to do is join the challenge and participate.
If you’re interested in taking on the challenge, click this link and ask to join the exclusive Write 500 Words Facebook group where we’ll share with each other and encourage one another in the challenge. Each day I’ll give a writing prompt which you by no means need to follow, it’s simply there to help you get going.
If you’re not on Facebook, you can sign up for the writing challenge via email by filling out the form below and receive the writing prompts to your inbox.
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Go ahead and sign up then stay tuned. The challenge starts on Friday with an intro post of further guidelines and instructions. Until then, share this with your friends. Let’s see how many of us can start writing 500 words every single day.
