Writing Small: The Case for Ten Minutes a Day

Over the summer, I did a little experiment: I wrote for ten minutes a day for thirty days. It wasn’t a profound experiment, by any means—just something small to help grease the wheel. Most mornings, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went straight to the computer. I set the timer for ten minutes and wrote, mostly with no thinking. No rules except to write the entire time.

I heard about this specific experiment from Devi Lasker’s interview on The Stories Between Us podcast. She recommends writing in a notebook for ten minutes a day for thirty days. Once the thirty days are up, let the writing rest for a week, then read through it all with a highlighter in hand and use what sounds good to create your own list of writing prompts.

So, every morning for a month(ish), I did my ten minutes of writing first thing. I typed instead of writing by hand. And instead of returning to the writing after a week, I waited roughly six months before summoning the courage to read through the seventeen pages of it.

It seems silly and I hate to admit it, but I didn’t want to read through it at all. In recent years, I’ve gotten much better at being a generative writer, but when it comes to circling back to reread and revise, I hesitate. I convince myself that the writing is garbage, so I stick what I write in a drawer or a file that goes untouched.

I know this is fear, which if you’re Elizabeth Gilbert, gets to ride in the car with you on your creative journey but doesn’t get to drive. Not me, though. I let fear take the wheel, then I fall asleep with my head against the window.

What am I afraid of exactly? My voice, my instincts, my intuition. Not being good enough. Being insignificant. That my best days are behind me. That I will never amount to anything.

You know, the regular stuff.

But last week, I summoned enough courage to read through it, telling myself that it didn’t matter how bad it was because that was last summer me and that me is long gone. The pages were printed out and sitting on my desk for months, and I wanted to clear them off. If the writing was bad, I could chalk it up as a failed experiment. Thankfully, enough time had passed that I could believe all this.

So, one morning last week, instead of reaching for the book of poems I’ve been reading, I grabbed a highlighter and the stack of pages, and I started to read.

Earlier this month, I read Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds, a book filled with the most delightful and lyrical pieces of writing. They aren’t essays exactly, and at times the book reads more like a series of creative writing exercises than anything formal. But the writing is so tender and raw. It’s imaginative and playful.

To say I loved it is an understatement.

There are certain writers who have this way about them. Their writing comes across as free and uninhibited. They write loosely, unself-consciously, and with deep vulnerability. I’m thinking of Abigail Thomas and Anne Lamott. But also others: Dani Shapiro’s memoirs, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, Lauren Winner’s Still, anything by Kelly Corrigan.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy a well-structured, narrative piece of writing—I do. But the kind of writing that calls to me is this looser, more organic style. Often, I’ve wondered how someone pulls it off. How do you sustain enough of that in-the-moment stream-of-consciousness to garner an entire book?

I’ve thought quite a bit about this over the years and done more than a fair share of reading about the essay form. I’ve tried more traditional styles, sticking to the rules for personal essays. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. What I’ve learned, though, is that I lean much more toward shorter, more lyrical pieces than long-form narrative.

That probably shouldn’t be too surprising considering my background in poetry. Poems tend to be shorter, even when they’re long. The form is compact and tight, the language rife with imagery and metaphor. And, best of all, poetry blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, giving the poet license to blend the facts with her wild imagination.

All this to say, when I read through short ten-minute pieces from the summer, I was pleasantly surprised. Overall, the writing wasn’t particularly good, though there were a few gems that sparkled among the rest. What I found was a start, something to build on. These were my raw, in-the-moment thoughts. Writing like this every day lowered the bar and often gave way to something true or beautiful.

I finished reading the seventeen pages of it and realized something important: doing this one small thing, writing ten minutes a day, is enough to start something. Like the tiny tinder of kindling, just a tissue and a few twigs.

How do you write in that tender, vulnerable, unself-conscious way? Start small.

In an interview, Jenny Slate said she wrote her entire book by sitting down and writing whatever she was thinking about. Not with a ten-minute timer, but with looseness and freedom. She called it improvising, which shouldn’t be surprising with her comedy background. Maybe it’s not so much the “yes, and” of improv, but the work forming itself as you write it, one step at a time.

It’s like a patchwork quilt, all the pieces wonky and uneven. The quilter picks up one piece at a time, sees if it fits, and sews it to the next piece, forming the shape as she goes. Not every piece is the perfect square you’d expect, but still somehow something beautiful is created.

I have been searching for a way to be freer as a writer. In taking all the advice and trying to “be a pro,” I lost my ability to simply sit down and put words on the page. With every word came the question, Where is this going? With that question came more questions: How do I do this right? and Where is my place? and Will I ever make it as a writer? and What does any of this mean to me?

Instead of doing what I knew how I knew to do it, I questioned everything and lost my way.

Too many times in the last few years, I willed myself not to write anymore. I put everything away, only to get it all back out again. I tried to shut out the voice in my head, the writer-voice that descends and triggers my impulse to grab a pen or run to the keyboard. I tried as hard as I could.

But I couldn’t not write. I can’t.

Still, the inner battle has waged on. Something so easy when I was younger, even when I was in college and graduate school, even when I wrote for magazines and websites, it wasn’t so hard. I didn’t ask so many questions. I simply did the next thing and the next.

It was when the questions came in, when someone told me I had to “be a pro” and take my writing seriously—that was like putting a yoke on my neck and asking me to pull a plow across a field. Once I had flitted and buzzed through the flowers, wild and unfettered, then all of it was gone.

And still, I wrestle with it every day.

I’ve decided to get back to my ten minutes of writing each day, to generate more spontaneous, in-the-moment work. Each day, I set a timer and write about whatever I’m thinking. I let myself be loose. I let it not always make sense or bunny trail off into weird directions. I use my imagination.

My goal is to blur the line between what’s real and what’s imagined, straddling somewhere between what I empirically know and what might be possible. Just like a poem, whose scope and capacity can expand in a hundred directions.

Day by day, we pick up the scrap pieces of our lives and try to make them into something lovely. The shapes might be uneven, but the hope is, these wonky, uneven shapes might become something. That someday, after all this labor and love, they might become art.

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I’m participating in the #100dayproject this year by sharing a time lapse video of me writing 10 minutes every day. You can check that out on Instagram or keep an eye out here for updates.