Writing a blog post in 15 minutes - the sequel

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about writing a blog post in fifteen minutes. I didn't really ever get into the habit I had pondered of actually writing a blog post every morning in 15 minutes and publishing it. For a start I found that writing a blog post in fifteen minutes wasn't that easy in reality, and the results were not all that brilliant when I did.


But I have been playing with a new approach to writing this weekend, which made me think again about it. This is inspired by the Most Dangerous Writing App. This is an app that destroys all your work if you stop typing for 5 seconds.  This is a scary process.  But I am quite enjoying the sense of  danger it gives me.  I am not sure whether it will improve my writing or not.  There is always the risk that the extra pressure turns into words but not into words that are worth reading.  But I am already convinced that it is improving my typing speed.  So from now on I am going to see how often I can knock off a really quick blog post.  Daily seems like too big a commitment, but maybe two or three a week.

The ground rules are going to be very simple.  I will set the clock going on the app for 10 minutes.  Once the ten minutes are up I will stop writing and spend the rest of the five minutes doing the necessary admin for publishing a blog post - mostly finding a suitable royalty free image.

I hope that by doing this I will create a series of very direct posts that reflect whatever I am thinking about at the time. For example at the moment I am thinking a lot about exactly the kind of life I want to lead and what that means about me as a person.  The thing that has often troubled me philosophically is that I have two ambitions that seem to be mutually exclusive, or at the very least not particularly compatible.

I would like to be a successful businessman, to the extent that I would like to be financially independent.  I would also like to be politically active and radical.  On the face of it, being a radical politician ought to be contradictory to being a successful businessman.  But I am not so sure that the two aims aren't in fact totally congruent and arising from the same basic impulse.  I think that I need to do some more thinking about this, but my time is nearly over.  This probably isn't the most fascinating post I have ever written, but I have got about 450 words done in ten minutes and clocked up an impressive, by my standards, 45 words per minute.

Let's see how it goes.