A Year to Improve, Day 1

This woman, Karen Cheng, learned to dance in a year. When I watched the time lapse video, she looked okay to me at the beginning, but she really does look like a pro at the end.

When you go to her website, it's not all about dancing. It is about achieving goals. She talks about setting milestones and reaching them. She talks about determination and practice. 

So it got me thinking: what would I like to learn or work to improve in a year? 

Dance? What kind? Aaron and I have talked about going to ballroom dancing classes. I would also love to learn hip hop. 

Musical instrument? I've always wanted to play the cello. But I would have to buy, or somehow get daily access to a cello. 

I'd like to work on creative writing. I used to write stories upon stories when I was younger, but at some point I decided I wasn't a creative writer and it was silly to keep doing it. Maybe I decided that, because making a living as a writer was unlikely, I had to stop all together? I don't know; I don't remember. But I'd like to try again. 

I like the idea of setting a goal to work on something, one thing I want to be better at, for an entire year. While I've always been a person who enjoys schedules, routines, and color-coded planners using different pens for work, fun, and whatever else, I've never been great at doing something every day, no matter what.

So I want to do it. I want to write every day. Every day. Maybe one day will be a paragraph about something I saw or a blog post. Maybe one day will be a great sentence or phrase that came to me, and another day will be an outline for a story. 

I don't have one concrete project in my head that I want to work on (other than my vague, naive dream of writing a YA novel). So for now, I will just write. Fiction, nonfiction, whatever. Just work on my writing skills and my discipline, and commit to working on every single day. I'd like, by the end of year, to have started (or be ready to start) a concrete project, to have a goal for year 2.

And my secondary goal is to read every day, something for pleasure. An article, a chapter in a book, a blog post--but I'm going to make sure I'm reading for fun outside of work a little bit every day. As Stephen King said (and has since been quoted a million times), 

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write."

Ready to start!

When I started this post, I was planning to write, "and I'll start this sometime in August after I've moved to Seattle and gotten settled." But isn't the whole point of this to commit and start immediately? Isn't the point to decide that you can find the time, that it's worth making the time, no matter how busy you are? So scratch my original plan. Today is day 1. July 20, 2013. I am going to write every day. And I'm going to tell people (obviously, this is the internet...) so that I'm held accountable. 

Today is day 1.