Introduction – Memoir – Coal, Coke and Gas

This entry is a new departure. I decided that I want to write regularly. If it is to become a proper habit, then I probably need to write every day. The nominal target I’m going to set myself is 300 words per day. The problem with a target like that is that I don’t want to put pressure on myself to be “creative”, but I still need something to write about. On the one hand I want to avoid the risk of becoming “blocked” and on the other, I want to produce something useful.

I already do the “Morning Pages” each morning. The Morning Pages is a useful exercise, but what it produces is completely unstructured and often repetitive drivel. To me that doesn’t count as “creative writing”.

What I have decided to do, is to start writing my memoirs (sounds like a Victorian old soldier). I will use the memoirs as something I can fall back on to fill in the spaces when I have nothing creative to say. I hope that this will serve the purpose of allowing me to establish the writing habit, which I can then use for several purposes.

I do not intend to plan these memoirs. Instead they should be regarded as simply “notes for memoirs”. Although they will form part of the creative blog, I do not consider them to be truly creative. They are there mainly to give me a guaranteed something to write about while at the same time encouraging me to write down what I remember in a semi-structured way, so that I may be able to use it in the future.

Where possible in the memoirs I will include relevant references and sketches for diagrams. All the time the emphasis is going to be on “getting it down on paper” (or magnetic patterns on some sort of medium) so that it can be referenced and searched. I am deliberately not going to try and be impartial. Instead, I am going to write from a stated point of view – mine and from a particular time – the time when the events took place.

That’s the first day done. Let’s see how it goes from here on.

 (13th December 2016 – 371 words)