Learning From The Prairie Dog
Prairie dog families live in underground colonies called burrows. The burrows can be more than a hundred feet (30 meters) long and have many different compartments (at bottom) where the prairie dogs sleep, raise their young, and stay safe from predators. They are part of the squirrel family and multiply very quickly.
When I was growing up on a ranch in eastern Montana we began to have large colonies of prairie dogs begin to build what were called prairie dog towns. As you looked across the land you saw many holes where the burrows opened and they came to the surface above ground.
It was very dangerous for the animals who could fall into the holes and injure their legs. A very costly problem for anyone who had livestock , in my father’s case, horses, sheep and cattle.
So what does the prairie dog have to do with writing?
Life can become so busy trying to handle the things that pop up, like the prairie dog popping out of it’s burrow unexpectedly, that it can become like a giant game of Whack-The-Dog. Every time you solve a problem, two or three even more stubborn challenges pop up to distract you and try to pull your attention away from your life and writing to problem solving mode.
This can seriously hinder your ability to think about how you want to communicate unless you are jotting down the steps to how you are solving the problem. Those steps can really help others if you will share what and how you handled the problems you encountered.
Knowing how you solved a problem that you dealt with can save others many hours of trying to figure out what to do. Think about a solution you came up with when someone else was sharing how they solved a problem.
On the other hand, your mind continually pops up ideas for you, that if you jot down at the time, you can go back to later and add more content to expand on the idea.
Be pro-active at keeping those dogs (problems) at bay and be diligent at spending a few minutes a day at your writing. Those 5 minutes here and there can even produce a nice income for you. Click Here! for more information about how you can do that.