A writer writes. Right? That’s what makes them a writer. Not the intention, or the dream, but the down and dirty daily discipline of bum-in-chair pounding the keys and producing words on the page. One of the best ways to establish this habit is blogging!

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So today, I want to continue talking about writing and kind of and particularly and possibly writing a book, by the way, that you can eat that elephant one bite at a time and actually kind of make progress, really very, very definite progress without being overwhelmed. You know, a writer writes. Right. That’s what makes them a writer, not the intention of the dream, but the daily discipline of putting their bum in the chair and pounding the keys to produce words on a page.

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But oftentimes, particularly if you just kind of this is just a dream that exists in your heart right now. The idea of writing a book can seem overwhelming at times, you know, because we have this idea of like hundreds of pages. Yeah. This marathon of our mind that’s really leaving us begging for rest before we even begin the first chapter. You know, but I just want to introduce you today to what could be your saving grace and a way to approach this that will kind of free you from the illusion that the only way to be a writer is to produce books.

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Yeah. So my advice to anyone out there who is aspiring to authorship is that you look for ways to just simply sharpen your writing blade. And I found the best way to do that, or certainly one of the best ways is to blog, you know, originally determined a weblog. So it was just as simple as simply a series of journal entries on a Web page. And blogging is just journey sharing. It’s a journey sharing exercise that requires nothing more than just your kind of consistent, expressed honesty on a website of some kind where people can actually access the content and partake of what you’re sharing in.

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So, you know, and you don’t start a blog to become a famous blog celebrity or to build a kind of burgeoning business, although that may you know, who knows where your writing might lead. There’s no telling where it could go there. Certainly, you know, if you never put a word on a page that we know where that will end up. But as you begin, you know, really begin just by simply looking to leverage yourself into a discipline of consistently turning up with words that you share in public.

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Nothing more, nothing less than that. And one of the things that I found about blogging myself and one of the things that I really enjoy about it is it is a dynamic way to write. It’s a dynamic way to share your content and your thoughts and explore ideas, you know, as a form of communication. It draws kind of the immediacy of your heart to the key to the screen in a way that sometimes when we come with, like a book author mindset, that just doesn’t happen.

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It’s like the connexions in our brain maybe work a little differently when we think that, you know, what we write today is just going to kind of kind of swim down the river of time tomorrow when it’s replaced by the next post. And so, you know, we’re not so it’s easy not to feel. So the grip of perfectionism when you blog, you know, and it frees you from the need to fiddle around perfecting every comma and colon and just literally enter into the simple joy of writing.

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And then from there, you know, you could actually take what you’ve written on your blog and turn it into a book, you know, your blog posts, your book essentially could be written one short blog post at a time. You know, a popular example of this is the book The Martian, you know, which was actually first published in serial form by Andy Weir on his website or his blog. You know, he has essentially wrote a long form blog that became a book that became a blockbuster.

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And you say you do not know where your public practise of writing and sharing might lead. Now, I really encourage you to embrace the benefits of just that raw, untamed immediacy and punch out your book page by page, day by day, blog, post after blog post until it’s complete, and then gather those babies together and stitch them into a whole. And of course, once you’ve then got them between some covers, you know, you can don your editors cap and tidy up their tone, smooth any uncultured grammar, you know, refined prose a little to make it feel and look more like you think a book should look but like start as real and raw daily posts of between 300 to 1000 words.

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Yeah, well, quickly slice and dice whatever book you want to read into very manageable chunks. And before you know it, your novel or non-fiction book is going to be ready for stage two blog to book and then who knows, maybe it will then be booked a blockbuster. But you know, really at this junction, you know, when you’re just beginning and as I say, leveraging this platform to move into a writing habit, the only thing that matters is not necessarily where it will lead, but here at the outset, all that matters is the first word, followed by the one after that and the one after that.

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And just don’t let anything stop you in your tracks. Make writing a daily practise just like cleaning your teeth, you know, just just beginning. It doesn’t everything. And the great thing with blogging is everything does not have to be fabulous. Everything does not have to be world changing. You know, you can just write. You might write a fairly mediocre post yesterday. And but today, you know, inspiration might hit in a fresh way. But in the practise of it, yeah, it’s going to unlock something.

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It’s going to open something up for you that will ultimately lead on to bigger and better things. Well, thanks for listening, hopefully. It’s been an encouragement to you today, if you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at Davidleemartin.com. Have a great day.