Why I start every day with my writing practice
Friday, April 23, 2010 |
7 comments
Categories: Copywriting, Creative process
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I’m no creature of habit, but one of my few routine activities is a daily writing practice. I started this practice a little over two years ago during my yoga teacher training, to help distill the mountains of information that was coming my way: I was working full-time and spending 25+hours/week in training on top of that.
What I do
My writing practice is something that I use to settle in, clear my mind, and prepare for the day ahead. It’s not necessarily a journal, and there’s not set format, other than committing pen to paper every day. Here’s what it entails for me:
- I have a specific notebook dedicated to my writing practice.
- Each day, I write until I fill two pages of my book. For me, this works out to roughly ten minutes.
- I drop any concerns about spelling, grammar or style. The main focus is on keeping the pen moving across the page.
- Anything goes: I don’t have to tell a story or recount events. I just write any words, phrases or sentences that come to mind. If my train of thought is interrupted, my writing follows the new path.
The benefits
My daily writing practice benefits me in many ways:
- Some days, it serves as a form of meditation.
- Some days, it helps me to purge distractions – it feels like I’m moving them out of my mind by writing about them.
- It can unlock my creative potential – there’s something to be said for going through the process of actually creating each letter – rather than having my word processor do so for me. I’ve been amazed at the ideas and solutions that come to me unbidden when writing.
As a communicator and copywriter by profession, my writing practice serves another very obvious purpose: practice writing. The more you write, the easier it becomes – particularly helpful if writing is an intimidating prospect for you. It’s very liberating to know that this is writing without expectation: no one will be reading, critiquing or evaluating it. There is no measurement of my success. Success is simply filling the page.
Sound promising? Give it a try!
I know that many of us create loads of content in the form of documents, e-mails, business correspondence, blog posts and tweets, but there is no substitute for going ‘old school’ and letting the ink flow. It’s easy to get started: try it tomorrow with your morning coffee or while your computer is starting up. And if you remember to, let me know how it goes!
Comments
Marlene
Greg, so wonderful that you have a daily meditation practice! And you’re right - it’s very liberating. Even though I do plenty of writing in a day, I really look forward to my ten minutes of laying down ink! 
If you try it, please come back and let me know what you think!
Greg Blencoe
Hi Marlene,
I just gave your daily writing practice a try. I timed myself for ten minutes. But it felt like only 2-3 minutes had gone by. And I wanted to keep writing, so I kept doing it. I ended up writing for just under an hour.
To be honest, while I just started writing random thoughts at first, what eventually happened will sound bizarre! But maybe we can discuss it via e-mail or something. I’m wondering if you’ve ever had something happen that is similar.
I will say that within a minute or two of writing I started getting the tingling feelings that I get when I meditate. They weren’t as strong as they are in the morning since my eyes were open, I wasn’t focused on deep breathing, and I was writing at the time, but a much toned down version of the feeling was there. I thought, “This is probably what she meant when she said it sometimes serves as a form of meditation.”
Anyway, I may just try doing this exercise again to see if the same thing happens. It was quite interesting!
Marlene
Very interesting, Greg. I can totally relate to wanting to go on longer, but I haven’t had quite the experience you did. What I find is that the writing practice can feel like a form of contemplative meditation. The benefits include those mentioned in this blog post (which I just found in looking for a good summary): http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/index.html
Incidentally, I see that they’ve included ‘journalling’ in their list of practices on this diagram:
http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree.html
I’m happy that you’ve already had interesting results!
Greg Blencoe
Marlene,
Thanks for the links. I think the experience definitely included contemplative meditation. And it was an extremely effective way of living in the present. I was totally in the moment.
Greg Blencoe
Marlene,
If you have 20 minutes to check it out (being a writer, I think you would definitely enjoy it), here is a very interesting Ted presentation by Melissa Gilbert that I happened to watch last night that sort of gets into what happened earlier today. Basically, it felt like channeling instead of my writing.
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
Anyway, thanks again for introducing me to this exercise.
Hi Marlene,
I’ve actually never tried writing without knowing what I was going to write about. But it actually sounds pretty interesting!
I imagine it must indeed be quite liberating to not be limited to a topic and not be concerned about what is written. I can see how this might indeed spark a lot of creativity.
I really enjoy meditating every morning, so it’s appealing to hear that writing like this can at times serve as a form of meditation for you.
Thanks for the suggestion!