Learning to Write About the Day-to-Day Things In My Life

It’s a funny thing, being a writer. Because it’s never as simple a task as the title would make it seem.

Just like a doctor has a specialty, there are different niches for each person who takes pen in hand and writes for a living. For me, I’ve always had a knack for writing long non-fiction. I can’t come up with a fiction plot to save my life. And writing choppy, fast-paced news articles or advertising slogans leaves me stumped.

That’s why when I went to college, I majored in magazine writing, where the words can flow poetically and wrap around ideas and images like a silky scarf, being twirled around in the summer breeze before skipping off to the next part of the story.

And even though writing a blog is not the same as writing a magazine article, I’ve noticed that a lot of my writing on here is quite similar to that which I wrote professionally for years: My posts tend to be longer, concentrating on a single subject with some kind of takeaway or lesson-learned nugget for the reader.

Sometimes though, I just wish I could write breezily about nothing at all. I wish I wrote more about my day-to-day life, to capture it on the screen as a keepsake of days gone by for the future. But when I sit down to do it, my mind draws a blank.

How do I write about how I spent my day and make it interesting, instead of just a list of facts? How do I share the beauty of a single moment without forcing it to be longer than it needs to be? It is a challenge for me, needless to say.

But it’s a challenge that I am attempting to overcome. So (hopefully!) you’ll notice more posts that aren’t as how-to oriented or musing on the deeper facets of life, but instead just glimpses into the ordinary aspects of the day-to-day that is my life. To do so, I'm going to try a new tactic, which is to write a post like that with a ten minute deadline. In celebration, this is the first post in this journey to open up my writing even more.

Here's to more to come…

Related Posts
My Advice About How to Improve Your Writing For Your Blog
Thoughts on Having Too Many Ideas for My Own Good

{ photo source }