12/09/2025
10 min per diem
(this is a repost from my substack bc clearly this site needs content)
When I was an undergrad at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I took a creative writing class - not because I had any literary aspirations, but because I realized if I took one more english class that I would qualify for a minor in the subject.
What a strategic and lucrative move that was in hindsight.
Anyways, the professor was a cool young guy who maybe had some poems published on an obscure site, and he would start each class with the same exact task - write for 10 minutes, stream-of-consciousness.
The idea, he would say, was to get all the weird errant ideas out of your head onto paper now, so that when you started to really write you wouldn’t have as much to get hung up on. Kinda like a vocal warm up prior to a choral performance.
Every day I would have to write something, I would first start a 10 minute passage to shake out the literary jitters. And even though most of these passages would be basically journal entries, it worked, and even sometimes led to inform my writing & work.
I thought it would be a practice I would carry with me throughout my career, but as my writing switched from creative briefs to emails, the 10 minutes per day practice went away.
Until a few months ago, when I was feeling so creatively stifled by my job that I just needed to address it by picking up a pen. After getting some of those weird meta entries out in a private medium, I think I’m ready to bring it to a public forum.
I think most of these 10-minute entries will be fairly uninteresting, but if any of them facilitate any level of discourse then it’ll be worth it.