Brad isn't clever. 30 minutes. Unfiltered. Every day. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s odd to find that inspiration can be fleeting. I mean, it makes sense to me because it happens again and again, but I feel like it shouldn’t. One would think that once some external force causes air to rush into your sails, that you should launch forward and keep going until you’re finished. Unfortunately, this never seems like the case for me.

I find that it’s easy to get inspired, but I’m rarely ready to go at the exact moment inspiration strikes me. If I’m sitting in the middle of a conference downtown, I can’t shut the world off and focus solely on my own writing from that point. If I have a brilliant idea while driving my car or walking around, it’s very difficult to harness it and unleash it with the same passion at a later time.

It’s too easy to hope that inspiration will nudge you in the right direction and keep pushing you when you grow weary or start to lose your way. Truthfully, inspiration merely kicks things off when it is at its best.

What separates people from success and just another failed idea is perseverance. You should consider yourself lucky to have days where you want to pick up the pen and write or start to clean up around the house. Those days don’t always come. As many of the talented writers seem to indicate, most days… that inspiration won’t be there at all.

Perhaps one has to develop that same sense that most have when they struggle to rise out of bed in the morning. Even if I had the best job in the world, I feel like I will still have this initial moment of hesitancy where my body requests more sleep while my tired brain struggles to determine why that’s a bad idea.

Of course it’s a bad idea to stay and sleep in and avoid work. It has long-term ramifications that the tired mind can’t easily see. If you sleep deprived chess grandmasters and other athletes, they won’t be at the top of their games either. They’ll miss key moves.

So what do you do? You engrain a habit to the best of your ability. You try to get the 8-9 hours of sleep your body wants. Sometimes, you will succeed. I know that even when I do manage to get 8 solid hours of sleep, I still wake up tired. You just have to fight that overwhelming urge of resistance to sleep.

You have to fight resistance. I’m not content with my position in the status quo. I’d like to be doing much more. There’s a great deal of resistance surrounding me and it’s nauseating to fight it sometimes, but I have to trudge forward. Like walking into a sandstorm, fighting resistance can often be difficult and painful. It’s much easier to give way and let the storm push you back. It’s easier to run to shelter and try to wait out all the storms on the horizon.

Unfortunately, those storms will keep coming, in one form or another. You can wait forever, half-heartedly satisfied with the status quo, or you can do something. You can fight. One foot in front of the other.

Set small goals that you can measure and succeed at. It’s easier to feel good about your progress when you can see its results. It’s overwhelming to try to think about a massive project all in one capsule. If someone asked me to build a house by this time next year, I would be intimidated. The ONLY way I would succeed is through careful planning and small, measurable goals.

June 1 is my deadline to submit a teleplay. It’s intimidating to think I’ll have one done by then. Ideally, I’d like to have one that I’ve thoroughly edited two to three times ready by then. The only way I can get there is if I keep my writing going. I may miss out on some fun events or just on life in general, but I want to keep putting one foot forward.

Now is the time to be passionate about things and to throw most everything I have at them. Why hold up? In the future, I might be tied down and worried about other problems. Now, I’m just worried about being happy. That’s a wonderful problem to have.

I’m encountering some resistance now as I write these words. There are ten minutes or so left in my exercise and I’m growing increasingly tired. I feel like the last paragraph was a pretty good stopping point. It would be easy to stop there and write things off. But I won’t. I’m determined to write for at least 30 minutes a day, every day that I can.

Hell, something interesting may develop out of one these stray paragraphs as my stream of consciousness veers away from the previous topic.

I wonder what it takes to truly succeed. I know I am putting forth effort and starting to make progress, but what one event will throw me over my hurdles and into my dreams? Will it be a sum of these moments—pounding away on a keyboard in the dark with nothing in particular in mind?

In a way, it’s an excellent record of the 30 minutes and my thought process throughout. However, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to create a fantastic record. I am using these 30 minutes to become a better writer. i don’t need to relive them by looking at my writing in the future. If anything, I can edit it down some, but I have this weird problem with writing to myself as if I know I’m going to be looking over these entries later. Will I?

For now, it’s just words strung together on a screen. There’s no real end in sight, and that’s a good thing. I know the timer will go off sometime in the near future, but not knowing when pushes me to go further. Rather than think, “Ok, I’ve got enough to time to come up with a solid closing line,” I just keep typing. Good lines come and go, but I’d rather discover one by accident than waste precious time trying to impress an anonymous reader with a random closing shot.

I feel my eyelids getting heavy. It is starting to get harder to open them. Sleep draws near and I can’t wait for it. I am desperate to check the timer again and see how much time is left, but it’s a stupid move. Why should I care if there are two minutes or two seconds left? The time will come either way, and my checking the clock only stalls my thought process.

Agh, I need a haircut. It’s starting to intrude on my everyday life. Maybe I’ll put in a call to Hayley tomorrow and see what she can do for me. A part of me will be sad to see it all lopped off, but I am free to make my own decisions. For me, anytime I choose to get my hair cut is the “right” time.

I’ve noticed I use the word “unfortunately” a lot in sentences. It’s as if my preferred sentence opener is, “Unfortunately, …” That’s unfortunate.