Take your own advice

Do you take you’re own advice? The old cliche “easier said than done” is timeless because it’s so true. I am able to give advice about writing because I’ve done it and read about it and taught it – but it’s easier to give advice based on past experience than to maintain a writing discipline of my own.

This summer my step-daughter decided she’d like to live with her mom full-time. We’ve been privileged to have her with us full-time for nearly two years as she finish junior high in the same school. It makes sense that she missed her mom and wants to be with her.

This radically changes things for my husband and I. Additionally, he is taking a year off from the elder board at our church. It’s starting to sink in that we will have a very different and somewhat lighter schedule this year. Yesterday he asked what we should do with our time.

I’ve been on hiatus from blogging since August 2011. Two years. Lately I’ve been wanting to get back to it, and I have a growing clarity about the subject matter. This summer I’ve done manuscript critiques for two women who are wondering about writing their stories. We’ve had written conversations around these critiques and, in the process, I often wished I had a series of blog posts for them – not just with my own ideas, but pointing the ideas and posts of other people.

This evening I took about 40 minutes to copy and paste one of these conversations from Facebook into a Word document. I plan to break it down into a series of blog posts. It’s eleven pages long (font: High Tower Text, font size: 11, single-spaced with a break between each paragraph). That’s a lot of material! That’s a lot of advice.

So do I take my own advice? Yes and no. Not always in the structured way that I advocate. But that’s one answer to my husband’s question: both of us would like to work on writing projects. Developing this blog will be one of mine. Regularly writing in my journal will be another.

For the record, even though this blog has been silent for two years, I have still been writing. Here are links to a series that I recently wrote for Ambrose University College Bookstore’s Facebook page:

Why we carry fair trade gift products.

1. Because they are meaningful.
2. Because they dignify.
3. Because they make a positive difference.
4. Because they are beautiful.

What advice do you tend to give a lot? In what ways are you taking your own advice?

 

* Pictured above: our cat Finnick. He’s one of my writing helpers – though it’s not very helpful when he sits on my work!