Canadian designer Lola Landekic was interviewed on The Next Web.com recently, and she makes a statement about drawing that I have heard applied to all creative endeavors.
Article author, Alexander Huls asks her “If you could go back in time and meet your younger self, what advice would you give her?”
She responds:
“Draw every day. Have the strength and the fortitude to allow yourself to draw without an end game. Draw for the sheer joy of it.”
I believe that the same advice applies to the craft of writing. And, to take it further, to sermon creation and blogging. It really doesn’t matter what kind of writing you do—do it daily. Just for the fun of it! As you do a little each day, you begin to gather ideas for future projects, you get into a habit of thinking about what to write, you begin to understand how sentences work.
Typically, for me, this daily writing takes the form of my hand written journal in the early morning. I write down my thoughts and think through the day ahead. This daily practice has helped me tremendously through the years to maintain am edge—even when I may fall off and not write for a while. The practice that I had done before makes it easy to get back to the habit of writing.
A problem many of us have—including me, is not writing simply for the joy of it. We writing when we have a project due. We write when we have the opportunity to write an article, or preach a sermon, or complete a task. We think that since we’ve written before we are skilled enough to do it right every time. This is simply not the case. We must practice our craft. We must develop beyond what we are right now. The only way to do this is to practice. Writing practice comes from writing daily and writing for the joy of it.