Gimmie Five!

Five Minutes.  How long is that?  Not long at all, right?  I mean, come on.  Five minutes is probably about the amount of time you spend in the restroom.  It's the length of about two commercial breaks.  It's about the amount of time it takes to go from laying in the bed to falling asleep for some folks.

So, what else can we do in five minutes?  I found out while reading "Immediate Fiction" by Jerry Cleaver.  Heck, these days, the book is even available on Kindle!  I digress.  In the book, Cleaver gets the writing juices flowing with a Five-Minute daily exercise.  The agreement one makes with oneself is that for 30 days, the writer promises to take just five minutes to write something. Anything.  Actually, when first starting out, the writer isn't supposed to write anything - just relax and let go for five minutes.

So, I am taking the challenge.  Each day during my lunch hour at work, I am taking five minutes to write.  So far, nothing of substance has materialized, but that's okay.  I am jotting ideas, exploring characters, writing jibberish in some cases.  But, I am writing.

I challenge you to try it yourself.  As Cleaver says in his book, by a year's time, you could easily have written 100-150 PAGES of text.  For someone who "can't" write or who "doesn't" write, you may find yourself face-to-face with the start of a novel or a collection of short stories or a book of poetry!