May: 20 Minutes of Daily Writing

Creativity at its finest.

In May, I challenged myself to write for 20 minutes every day. This was easily my favorite challenge of the year.

I love to write, but I don’t do it enough. As I mentioned in my April post, The Challenge Year is not just about pushing yourself into something new but also about building in more time to do the activities you enjoy.

I looked forward to this challenge daily, so finding the 20 minutes I needed every day was easy. In fact, I spent way more than 20 minutes a day writing.

I have been writing since I was about 13 years old. I often wrote poems growing up, and as I have gotten older, I have journaled and written about my thoughts. In addition to those writing exercises, I started writing a story in May.

The idea for this story came from my dreams. When I wake up after a dream, I do my best to grab my phone and write it down. I’ve been doing this since high school, so I have written down an extensive collection of dreams. While looking for ideas to write about in May, I had a dream and thought it would be interesting to turn it into a story. From there, I started flipping through my dream notes to see how to incorporate them into the story. Through doing this, I found that I really enjoy writing fiction. I now have an outline and a few chapters complete for this story. When the time is right for me to prioritize this again, I plan to pick it back up.

A great benefit I noticed with writing daily is that it makes me more creative. Growing up, I created all the time. I completed art projects, made up games, and played out Oscar-worthy stories with inanimate objects. As I have gotten older, this creativity has turned into work and other commitments. As I lost my time with creativity, I naturally fell deeper into black-and-white expectations of myself.

As the month went on and I wrote more, my imagination was unlocked. I found ideas to write about and additions to my story on the most mundane days. The world became more beautiful as my eyes opened to the stories and ideas constantly surrounding me. Through this creativity, the imagination I had when I was younger returned to the surface.

Another benefit I find with writing is that it is very meditative. It puts me alone with my thoughts in the heart of the present. The various types of writing exercises help me in different ways. Journaling helps me work through life experiences, writing about ideas pushes me to think more profoundly, and writing fiction brings my imagination to a distant planet.

I highly recommend this challenge to everyone, especially if you have not written much throughout your life. Writing can help you see beyond the status quo and help you process your thoughts.

I set out to do this challenge so that I could spend more time doing something I enjoy. This month allowed me to do just that while learning new ways to love it. Through writing, creativity floods my world with vibrant colors and helps me see beyond everyday life.