A Sentence a Day!

Hi, Steve Barnes here on Labor Day in 2015, here with my family here at the house. So you might hear my son playing video games in the background, or a cat might jump up into my lap, who knows? We're having a very kickback day, but I wanted to get this message out to you kind of fast because we had a lot of response yesterday to the idea of writing one sentence a day. And I wanted to show you. That's like one line that we said during our 10 week life writing home study course. And everything is so inter nested that sometimes it's useful to unpack what it is that we're saying. So let's take a look and see. Is it true? Can you actually accomplish something valid with one minute a day? Just because that's about how long it would take you to write a single sentence, right. If you plan it out before you sit down. And I'm going to say yes, as a matter of fact, heck yeah. And let me tell you why that's important. A long time ago, I did a course called the five Minute Miracle that was about what happens if you just take one minute breaks five times a day to do deep breathing. You completely rewire your nervous system's response to stress because you'll start noticing when you're breathing in an unresourceful fashion and you'll make that change. Well, put a pin in that and take a look over at the concept that Tananariv and I have taught that we call either the machine or the garden. What that is, is what is it that you have to do every day that you have to maintain or build like a machine, or you have to plant and nurture like a garden, such that if you just water it every day and take care of it every or you just maintain it, give it oil, tighten the screws a little bit every day that you will be able to create an engine that will take you where you want to go, or a garden that will bear fruit. Because you have to remember that time is a factor here. You cannot sprint all the way to Disneyland, but you can walk there. So the machine, which is the model that I tend to use more for myself personally, is roughly speaking for there's a machine for anything that you want to do in life. And in writing specifically, it might be expressed as you read 10,000 words a day, you write a thousand words a day, you finish a story a week or a story every other week, you put it in the mail, keep it in the mail until it sells, and you repeat that process for 100 stories. If you do that, you're going to learn everything that you need to learn. It'll take you between two and four years to do 100 stories at that pace. It's up to you. And you will learn a massive amount just by doing a little bit every week. Because you could be aiming at a thousand word short stories, flash fiction, I don't care. Because what you're trying to do is take the entire pattern of writing and move it from conscious competence to unconscious competence so that you can just have fun with it. You can just feel your way through the writing. You can just flow with it. So what people say is, I don't have any time, I don't have the time. My family gets in the way. This, that, all that stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a form of writer's block. All of that is your negative self trying to stop you from being everything that you can be. And the proof of that will be reducing it to the minimum amount that would actually get you moving forward. And what I'm telling you is that that's one sentence a day. Now, why is that true? It's true because in order to write one sentence a day, you still got to sit down in front of your computer, or you've got to sit down in front of your typewriter, if you've got one, or open your writing pad, whatever it is that you're doing, and focus and do it. In other words, if, let's say, the ideal amount of work to do might be a thousand words a day. Because 1,000 words a day, that's 365,000 words a year. Nobody needs to write more than that. That's three novels, right? It's a novel every four months. So half of that would be a novel and a half every year. And one sentence a day will take a long time to get you there. But the trick is that if you admit that you've got the time to do one sentence a day, once you are sitting there, you will actually find that you might as well go ahead and do a paragraph. As long as you're doing a paragraph, you might as well go ahead and do a page. And if you can do one page a day, that's a book a year. Easy peasy. So it's very similar to saying, okay, I don't want to run five miles, but I'm going to go down to the track and I'm going to run around, I'm going to run one lap. Now, what does that mean? It means you had to get out of bed. It means you had to get dressed in your tracksuit, put on your shoes, stretch, go down to the track, run around once, and then go home. By the time you've run around once, you might as well do it again, and you might as well do it another couple times, and then you might as well walk an extra mile because you've done all the setup, all the psychological preparation. What you know is that you're not being stopped by factors outside the actual time and energy that it takes to do it and remember. And this is critical to remember what will stop you will be a lack of focus, a lack of alignment, emotionally having conflicted beliefs, conflicted emotions, fear will stop you more than everything else combined. So that by reducing the amount of work that you have to do to some tiny little piece that it is obvious to you and everybody else, you could have done this. You could have done this today. What you will do is you will actually come in contact with who and what it is that you are. What it is that has deviled you over the course of your life, what it is that stops you from being what it is that you need to be. And once you start tracking that, why did I not do one sentence today? Keep a journal if you can, or at least keep track of it in your mind. What stopped you? How did you break your promise to yourself? How did you lie to yourself? How did you let your family interfere, your work interfere, other things? Television is too important. Once you start understanding how you stop yourself from doing the minimum thing necessary in order to accomplish the thing that you have committed to doing. You've said this is important. You want to be a writer. Okay, well, write. That's what writers do. Authors publish. Writers write. Be a writer. Because you can be an author with something that somebody else wrote. You know, you can make a ghost write it for you. But it's your name on the book. That's not what you want. You want to touch your heart, to express yourself, to share your vision with the world. And you can do that. Easy if you can do a thousand words a day. Easy if you can do a page a day, a paragraph a day. The doorway into all this is to do just one sentence a day. So let's try a three month promise. 100 days. For 100 days, you're going to write at least one sentence a day. You're going to actually sit down and you're going to do this. I promise you that if you will do this a hundred days from now, you'll be a different person, different writer. You'll understand yourself better. You'll probably have work finished, but you will most certainly understand what stops you and why it stops you and how it stops you. Furthermore, you will start seeing the same patterns in other arenas of your life. In your relationships, in your physical health, in your discipline, in terms of taking care of your finances. You'll start seeing how your avoidance patterns screw you over. And once you see it, then you can reach out for resources. And there are tons of resources out there, including the ones that you can find from us. You can go to lifewritingworkshop.com and you will find all sorts of resources, all sorts of things that will help you to move forward in your life. But meanwhile, I don't want to wait for that. I want to be able to give you these things right away. So ask questions. You can go over to Facebook. Join the Life Writing Facebook group. You can contact me on Facebook and ask any questions that you want. You can leave questions here on YouTube and just think about it. One sentence a day will open the door to being the writer that you deserve to be. That little kid inside you that wanted to write. Give him a break. Give her a break. One sentence a day. Take one minute to start making your dreams come true. I promise it'll be worth your while. Now I'm going to go and enjoy Labor Day with my family. And wherever you're listening to this and whenever you're listening to this, God bless you. Have a wonderful, wonderful day and I'll see you soon.