THE PURPOSE OF THE EXERCISE

Why did I write and post 23 movie reviews in 23 days? After 10 years, I could have just left the notion of reviews in the past and continued only with maintaining my ongoing list of rated films. And yet, I pushed through and (save for one late post) finished the Tour de Review series. I still have around 250 write-ups to go before I can post the review for my 1,000^th film. After that, there’s a few dozen more to go before I can start posting for movies that I watch in the present. With such an uphill climb in front of me, why bother?

My purpose is the process itself and the discipline that comes with it. At one point, I had a notebook filled with one-line descriptions of story ideas. I can’t remember if I ever turned that into a spreadsheet (I wouldn’t put it past myself), but even a rough estimate comes out to 80-100 ideas. Some are short stories, others might be a full-on book, while others are ideas for series of various lengths. In the last year, or two, those ideas and new ones came flooding to the forefront of my mind. They won’t leave me alone.

It's time for me to write. I haven’t written for purely creative reasons in a long time. I don’t doubt the potency of my ideas and that they will lead somewhere (I only know the ending for a few of them), but I’m out of practice enough to know that I need to work my way toward creative writing again. Enter the movie reviews (and this blog in general).

I wrote 23 movie reviews and 5 posts about my rating scale in rapid succession. That’s 28 posts in 28 days. To be more granular than that, I averaged 605 words a day, or just shy of 17,000 words in total. Internet searches provide varying estimates, but a full-length novel ranges anywhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. This means that I was able to crank out somewhere between 14 to 21% of a novel in a month.

This encourages me. Most of my ideas are fresher in my mind than the plots of movies that I watched five to 10 years ago. I am also more passionate about my story ideas than some of the movies I wrote reviews for last month. That would seem to emphasize writing stories over reviews, but I want to practice the discipline of writing often before segueing into writing for pleasure. Cranking out a couple hundred words for reviews on a consistent basis is a launching pad.

After just a few days off from reviews, life is already trying to till that void. If I tried to write for pleasure right away, the scheduling conflicts that pop up would smother my pursuit and I will make excuses for why it’s just too hard to try. This is partly why I stopped writing reviews years ago in the first place, so my first objective is to show myself that setting aside writing time is possible. Once I can forge a rhythm of sorts, I will internalize the reality that writing is possible and fruitful. At that point, excuses will have to work a lot harder to find a foothold.

I know that I won’t be able to write every day once my children start back to school, but if I can average even 500 words every time that I have time to sit down at the laptop, I think I can make good headway at pulling these ideas out of my head. My movie reviews are often first and final drafts. Future reviews will have more proofreading and revision time to them, but the brute-force act of forcing out content opened the floodgates even further.

Writing begets writing. It fuels the furnace of creativity. It may feel like I have unleashed a monster of my own making at times, but I have a notebook for jotting down quick ideas when I am not in a position to explore that path and fertilize that seed. When I was writing reviews last month, the juices were flowing and I wrote down quite a few notes. In the last few days, ideas haven’t really come to me, and I think that’s because I haven’t written anything more in that same span of time.

Discipline, creativity, results. They go hand in hand. It’s exciting and a little bit scary all at the same time. I like it, I need it, and I want it. Stay tuned for more reviews and related content here, as well as updates on pursuit of creative writing.