Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Battling a bunch of writing false starts

Today is a day of false starts. That happens from time to time. Sometimes you end up writing and switching topics before they are complete.

Here we go again chasing that illusive 3,000 word per day writing habit. Before you know it the year will be over. 2017 was a very striking year. I’m still surprised that we are 17 years passed the millennium. Watching the Stanford vs. USC PAC-12 championship game seemed like a good idea. We will see how it shapes up, but at the moment the game is not that competitive.

Bravo shared a quick look at the next season of Top Chef. Year after year it seems that Top Chef is a show that I record and watch. Even during the years where I cut the cord and did not have cable I purchased the show online to watch. This season is based out of Colorado and that alone would kick my interest level up a notch. I’m guessing that one of the episodes will be devoted to whiskey.

Writing while listening to music seems to work out well enough for me. Writing while watching television always seems to produce disjointed prose. Generating a false start mid paragraph is actually easier to do than you would think. A distraction could occur and stop the writing process. Sometimes a new idea will pop up and things will shift to an entirely new topics. That happens more often than you might expect.

Setting up to write 3,000 words in a sitting could benefit from a small amount of prep work. Sometimes I find it beneficial to make a list of a few topics before jumping in to write. It might be a good idea to outline and plan a structure of what is about to be written, but that does not really happen. Only during the course of creating academic works do I utilize the outline and build framework.

Really digging into a topic and writing about it requires a certain amount of intensity and attack. Things that inspire passion are probably going to receive more sustained attention. Some topics like what phone or Chromebook should be my next major purchase receive more attention than they deserve. It seems to be about one or two times a day that I spend a few minutes thinking about buying a new Chromebook or laptop. That has probably happened just about every day for almost 20 years.

Over the last few days I have been really enjoying writing using Google Docs. I am not exactly sure how or why that happened, but it has certainly been the case. At one point, I had decided to write in one document and follow a book format. That idea seems to have faded away. It has been easier to simply open a new document each day and begin to tame the blank page. That pretty much means that my collection of writing is somewhat unstructured. Obviously, the content placed on the weblog has both marks for category and time.


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