Okay it’s getting late and I need to put my words in for the day. Man, can you believe it has been over 300 days of writing already? That’s right, today is day number 302 (to be clear, I'm counting from December 31st, which was day 000)! I didn’t miss the moment I hit day number 300 but I also didn’t feel the need to reflect at that time. To be honest, and I know I have said this before, I don’t know what I still want to share in these Monologues anymore. At this point, I feel like I either start repeating myself too much or I need more time to write a piece than the few minutes I grant myself each day now.
That’s not to say the project is failing. My writing muscles have definitely warmed up and I hope I can continue exercising them after the year ends. This project has taught me the discipline required to be a writer but I also realise that writing extensive, well thought-out pieces require time and revision. Neither of those are luxuries I currently enjoy. Each entry gets maybe one quick revision, right after I complete it and that’s it. Which trains me to get things right as much as I can right away. It does make me feel like I’m plateauing though.
I think for the next step in my process I’ll need to start writing more stories with substance that require more thought, research and reflection. Sure, there can be other topics I can think of that will fill the remaining days of this project. I can even write something low-effort and meaningless each day as well. The project has no rules on any of that. As long as I force myself to sit down each day and jot something down, I can at least be sure I’m writing more good stuff than I would’ve done without the project. You just have to weed through the yapping and streams of consciousness to see the goodies.
I guess that’s something I’ll have to do when the year comes to completion: sit down and read through all my entries to find topics I’d like to expand on. This whole year has been a constant stream of rough drafting and some of those might be worth it to revisit. On the more successful days of the project I’ve done some of my best writing, I’m pretty sure of that, but the actual good writing I can hopefully do is still way ahead of me.