I finally found a daily writing exercise to replace oneword. The Daily Five is a little more involved, but short enough to be doable no matter what else happens around here in the morning. You get five minutes to answer the day’s assignment (unlike oneword, you can go longer if you like). I’m only two days in and I already feel My Powers Getting Stronger. Just for fun, here are today’s results. (I went back and added some details after time expired.)

Assignment: A five dollar bill changes hands five times in one day. Make a list of where, when, who hands it over, and for what.

when: 8a
where: Bojangle’s on Bluff Road
who: a lawyer on the way to work, driving a Lexus SUV (he bought a bacon, egg & cheese biscuit and paid with a $20, of course)

when: 10a
where: corner of Main and Laurel
who: guy on the street asking for change (the lawyer meant to give $1, feeling generous, but realized too late he gave the $5 instead

when: 10:05a
where: Drake’s Duck-In, outside seating area
who: see, there’s this whole gray-market economy on the street. when the previous owner scored the five, he went straight to a fence, who sold him 3 bottles of t-bird.

when: 3:30p
where: bus stop on Assembly
who: 9-year-old boy who picked it up from under the bench. the fence dropped it accidentally while waiting for the bus. on the bus he would meet his supplier to hand over his day’s earnings. the $5 represented most of his cut for the day, before he lost it.

when: 4:30p
where: Dollar store
who: cashier who takes the dollar from the boy to buy a huge stash of candy

I hear a lot of writers talk about how they hate editing and would rather just churn out words. I may be closer to the other end of the spectrum. Most days I feel like a sculptor who finds the right rock and chips away everything that doesn’t look like a statue. I struggle with a blank sheet of paper; if something’s already written on it, I want to make it better. Is that just idea block? Do I not have enough practice at coming up with my own raw material? Or is that just who I am?

(Ed: three question marks and seven “I”s in one paragraph is far too much navelgazing. If you choose to read further, you have been warned.)

There are ways to trick myself into writing more and editing less. Like my typical writing attack, wherein I have no actual plan and just start banging on the keyboard (sometimes literally). Usually enough words end up on the page, and I can turn the shocked and indignant editor loose to find something I can cut out, fluff up and polish into a piece of… well, something. I force myself to program in much the same way, but it happens to require logical thought from the get-go. You don’t get very far just banging on the keyboard (and I have tried).

But maybe I don’t want to write more. Maybe I’d rather be an editor.

Take music. I can listen to a song in progress and figure out what it should sound like, but I can’t write music to save my life. Not that I’ve tried a whole lot.

If you asked me what my musical career of choice would be, I’d say producer. I love playing, but I don’t have enough technical talent to get by playing guitar and I can’t sing much. But I can put a stamp on a piece of music. I have strong opinions about which way the song should sound and I’ll tell you. It’s the same with a piece of writing. I can tell you what sucks about it and give you an idea to make it better. (Whether I’m right or not.)

So how do you try out editing? Do you find someone humble enough to practice on and hope you don’t kill a friendship with your red pen? I did some newsletter editing for AskSpace and really enjoyed it. Who wants to be next?

Now that Facebook is the new gorilla on the block, the inevitable backlash is ramping up. I first saw it on Copyblogger. The question asked by the post is: where are you going to put your content, on your property (where you have complete control over your brand) or someone else’s (whose main interest is making money off of your marketing data)?

This is an interesting question, but a bigger issue comes to mind. Are social networking sites a substitute for real creativity, or a bona fide means of expression?

If everyone has one good story in them, tools like Facebook and Twitter let that story come out — even if you don’t happen to be a writer. They let you publish your life to interested readers, if you care to do so. Of course it’s not a substitute for face-to-face interaction, any more than all your regular blog readers and commenters are. I don’t pretend that all the old college and high school friends I found on Facebook are really a part of my life — but I get to follow their adventures and find out things I never knew. For example, Lynn is a really good writer.

Blogging is so 2005, right? It’s all about the social networks now. The blogfading has begun, and according to this post (via AntSaint), that’s a good thing. No one wants 5 articles about my kids’ eating habits cluttering up an RSS feed that they subscribed to because they found one interesting post about startup culture.

What no one seems to have picked up on is that Twitter, Facebook and the rest are great at separating the noise from the content.

I’ve posted before about the unique writing challenge Twitter offers. You can use it that way, or you can just blast your life to the ether. Or you can do both. Whoever wants to read will read. If it’s too much noise, then they can just follow your blog for the deep stuff.

Facebook is the gossip magazine. Twitter is TV. Blogging is books and magazines. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Unless, of course, you spend so much time poking your friends that you don’t get around to writing that blog post. Guilty.