Writing for the rest of us. The Rock Stars of Writing - Part 1

Even in the digital / visual / social media age of micro-mini attention spans, writing rules. Whether you want to persuade, explain, entertain or sell, if you can’t get your ideas across in words, the rest of it is just eye candy.
To hone your writing skills, take a look a writing rock star: Plato.
The classical Greek philosopher Plato was a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy of Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
He was also one of the first regular users of an alarm clock (a water alarm clock, specifically). And that makes him a writing rock star.
Here’s why.  
Set an alarm, spare the writing angst.
How many times have you sat down in front of a blank page and froze? Like I do on just about every piece I write, including this one. You think about how much you have to accomplish, how many pages to fill, what to say, how to say it, why it needs to be said, and on and on and on.
Minutes, hours, days later, and the page is still blank.
That’s why you need to take a lesson from Plato and make a simple alarm clock (or timer) your most important writing tool. Here’s how:

1. When you’re ready to write, set the alarm for a short amount of time. I’m talking really short.  For years, I used a 15-minute alarm.  Now I’ve moved up to 25 minutes.
   
2. Turn the clock face down so you can’t see the time. There’s nothing worse than watching the clock while writing. Sometimes, it feels like you’re laboring for hours, and the clock is refusing to move.
3. Don’t worry about how much you’ve written. Now I know some writers opt for a word or page count instead of a time count, but I don’t want that pressure.  I just want to know that I put in a solid 25 minutes and kept the keyboard (or pencil) hopping.
4. Now that your alarm is set and you’re not watching the clock, let loose with the writing. Of course it’s hard, but it’s only 15, 20 or 25 minutes – come on, anyone can get through that.
5. Here’s the magical part. Once you relax knowing you only have to put up with writing hell for 20 minutes or so, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
6. And here’s the even more magical part. When that alarm goes off, you may actually turn it off and keep writing because you’re in a groove.  When that happens, just set that alarm again and do a double session.  
7. From personal experience, I’ve found that the alarm clock approach works wonderfully with short snippets as well as hundred-page manuscripts.  Just break up your longer writing projects into shorter writing segments, with five-minute walking/coffee/book/video game breaks in between. Believe me, you’ll get a lot more done with this approach than with those chained-to-the-desk, have-to-have-thirty-pages-written-by-five torture sessions.

So for less painful, more productive writing, set your alarm clock.
​Thanks, Plato.