WHY FIVE? by C.M. Mayo

Here is this week's appearance from a guest blogger!

Why Five?
by C.M. Mayo

C.M. Mayo http://www.cmmayo.com/ is the author of the widely-lauded travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico (Milkweed Editions) and Sky Over El Nido (Univ Georgia Press) which won the Flannery O'Connor Award. She is founding editor of the bilingual chapbook press, Tameme http://www.tameme.org/ and editor of the anthology of Mexican fiction and literary prose, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press). She teaches at the Writers Center http://www.writer.org/ near Washington DC and via Dancing Chiva http://www.dancingchiva.com/in Mexico City. She blogs at Madam Mayo http://madammayo.blogspot.com/ .

No time to write? Ha. You've five mintes, I'll bet--- and if you really, truly do not, lock yourself in the bathroom, OK? You might be amazed at what you can come up with in five concentrated minutes. Need a nudge? Here www.cmmayo.com/d5mwe.html --- free--- are 365 five minute writing exercises.

Why five minutes? Five reasons:

#1. To Train the Brain to Get Into the Habit of Writing How do you write a 500 page book? Or, for that matter, a poem? A piddling 5 minutes at a time. When you're not feeling ready to commit to writing a short story, magazine article, or, (gulp) a novel, brief exercises (which of course, can expand to any length of time) can serve as a bit of track to run on, as it were. The more often you write, the easier it gets.

#2. To Train the Brain to Imagine More Vividly with Ease And how do you conjure a vivid world for readers? By use of vivid detail that appeals to the senses (smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch), by convincingly conveying other points of view and by playfully exploring that ever-strange energy of 'what if?' For the most part, these are the tasks of the 5 minute writing exercises.

#3. To Enhance the Flow Tomorrow Alas, there are days--- even for full-time writers--- when it is impossible to block out the ideal number of hours for writing. On such days, if you can write intensely for 5 minutes--- even just 5 minutes--- the writing "muscle" stays pumped so that the following day, the writing once again flows.

#4. To Bust a Block For those with writers block--- whose excuses usually include variations of "I don't have time" and/or "my writing must be super special & perfect or else why bother" --- five minutes is a low bar indeed. (By the way, if the block is bad, try setting an alarm clock or an egg timer, and promise yourself, when it rings in 5 minutes, you'll quit writing. A bit of reverse psychology.)

#5. To Seed Something Big & Wonderful Pourquoi pas?