Writing as Investment: Why Every Minute You Write Counts

By The Author’s Writer, January 10, 2023

©Wendy Scheuring

A lot can happen in one minute. You can make a quick phone call, check in on a neighbor, make a life-altering decision, say a prayer, smile at someone, provide assistance that makes a difference. Yes, a lot can happen in one minute that will make quite an impact!

When you look at each minute you spend writing as an investment, you will begin to see your writing grow exponentially.

This is the case whether you would like to be an author, write other types of content, or are getting your thoughts together for when you enlist the help of a professional writer to guide you through the book-writing process.

So, let’s begin. We can start by doing a simple one-minute writing exercise. Sit down in a comfortable place with a piece of paper in front of you and a pen in hand. Yes, you will be writing by hand! Before you set your timer for one minute, ask yourself how much you think you can write in one minute?

Writing with pen and paper will help you tap into your creativity!

To answer that question from personal experience, I wrote only 27 words in one minute. Yet, out of those 27 words, 8 of them reminded me of a writing project I need to keep working on every day that I had for a while put to the wayside.

Now that I had achieved clarity, I once again set the timer for one minute and started to write.

This time I wrote 21 words. And yet, I wrote more valuable content. Knowing that I was being timed, and only had a very small amount of time to work with, I did not write down complete thoughts. Instead, I wrote a list of ideas. Having less time created more focus.

Again, I set the timer once more. This time for 5 minutes. After I completed this timed writing, I wrote 167 words. To me, in this case, the number of words did not matter because what I wrote was more valuable to me. In 5 minutes, I completely rewrote a scene in my book, seeing it in a completely different light, which was more illuminating, more interesting, more captivating.

Those 7 minutes were a valuable use of time for me.

What was accomplished?

During the first minute, I eliminated the surface level and extraneous thoughts that had been blocking me.

During the second minute, I was more focused, and so I used my time more wisely writing my ideas into a brief yet condensed list.

The five-minute timed writing actually seemed like a very long amount of time (based upon my previous experiences during those two one-minute writing sessions). During these 5 minutes, I was able to re-see a scene in my book that I have been working on and write it more in a more detailed way, more descriptively, more vibrantly.

Doing regular timed writings will help you achieve more focus and clarity.

Thus, writing is an art that requires more focus than it does time. Once you are able to focus, you can write meaningful content in very short periods of time.

When you view each minute of your day as an investment, whether you are writing or engaging in something else, you will not only cherish that time, but will also make that minute count.