Happy New Year.<\/p>\n
I’ve decided that 2016 will be a year of writing. Quite what that looks like I’m not yet sure but don’t hold your breath that there will suddenly be more frequent posts on the blog. My plan is to write something, somewhere every day. Some days this will be covered by work: for example I usually write 1000 words per week for a Sunday morning sermon. I’m also trying to be more intentional about doing theological reflection as I’ve finally come round to the idea that it might occasionally be useful. Blogging about knitting is also included, as well as writing letters. It might include creative writing or calligraphy.<\/p>\n
In October I read Big Magic<\/em> by Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat,Pray,Love<\/em> fame). It’s a fabulous book about creativity and I can’t recommend it highly enough. There is one concept that has stuck with me particularly from the book: being a disciplined half-ass<\/em> as opposed to a lazy perfectionist<\/em>. Creativity is stifled by our own propensity to think that we are not good enough. Writing something, whether it is good or not, without self-censorship on the grounds of being rubbish is the key to getting better at writing. I see that every week as I’m writing sermons for work. There’s no real way of getting around the fact that, come Sunday morning, I have to be standing up talking about Jesus. This happens, whether or not I am actually happy with what I have prepared. I have discovered that there is very little correlation between how happy I am with the sermon and how happy other people are. (They tend to like the short ones and the ones with funny bits). The discipline of writing and writing and writing, week after week, means that I suffer far less from the crippling lack of self-esteem and writer’s block that I used to be plagued with in the early days.\u00a0 Remind me of this at 6am tomorrow morning when I am staring at the screen in despair.<\/p>\n That will have to do for now. I have a date with the family at a Chinese restaurant. My daughter has just enquired whether it is bonfire night tonight. I think this is because the last time we went out after dark it was bonfire night, so her expectations are set accordingly. She is now changing out of her wellies and putting her torch away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Happy New Year. I’ve decided that 2016 will be a year of writing. Quite what that looks like I’m not yet sure but don’t hold your breath that there will suddenly be more frequent posts on the blog. My plan is to write something, somewhere every day. Some days this will be covered by work: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":676,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trundlebug.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}