What can you do to create a sense of safety to play and experiment as you write?
Hit reply and let me know.
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This next step helps me if anxiety arises or when I find myself frozen in fear at the blank page.
2. Breathe. You are alive.
Take a few deep breaths and feel the feels.
Writing fiction is about evoking emotion in the reader.
To do that you need to feel your own feelings.
Contrary to popular belief, emotions are neither good or bad. They are flowing expressions of our needs.
3. Ba and Ya
Ba is a Japanese term that roughly translates into "the origin of everything."
In this context, I use it to include our origins as humans. I'm also including your ancestry, your origins in this life, all the ways things originate in you, including where your story idea come from, where the dream came from to be a writer. All of it.
Jan Jacob Stay calls it a "kind of mini Big Bang from which all the essentials" can be understood and explained. In his book, co-written with Barbara Hoogenboom, Systemic Leadership, the context is of companies, but I see it applies equally to our lives as creative writers. (Direct link: https://books2read.com/u/4EKYo0)
When you take a moment to acknowledge where you come from, culturally and psychologically, and include your desires, hopes, dreams, and fears, you can start your writing session from a place of strength, from a place of rootedness.
Like a massive oak, you are grounded deep. From this stable place, you can create.
Ya is a Japanese term that roughly translates as "that, where it can all lead to." (From Stam.) A place past the planned future, an emerging future that we may not be able to see or experience yet.
When it comes to planning and writing a novel, you are reaching into the far future. You are crafting something that isn't yet known or created for a moment in the future where readers will have their own emotional experience of the story you created.
Even in the planning stage, you can day dream about the moment a reader discovers your book and their heart speeds up in excitement because it's exactly the kind of story they wanted to read, and didn't even know it until that moment.
Or maybe they were looking for exactly that type of book and they can't wait for that delicious moment where they get to sink into your story, their favorite beverage at their side, and their furry companion at their feet.
4. Choose a writing focus.
You may have a million ideas but when it comes time to write, you may feel at a loss, like a leaf on the wind, shoved about without a rudder.
That's why it's useful to choose a specific focus for your writing session.
It really doesn't matter what the focus is. You're looking for the doorway into your creative flow.
For example, you can start with this prompt: "What I really want to say is..." or ""What if..."
Once you find your creative flow, direct your focus more specifically to your story.
That's why I find useful to use this last essential tool to get writing: Timed writing.
5. Timed writing.
My favorite get-writing tool. Even after all these years of writing (fiction, nonfiction, journaling), I use timed writing almost every single time I sit down to write.
I recommend setting a timer for 20 minutes, then choose your focus -- either to connect with yourself and your creativity -- or a story prompt to brainstorm -- or a question to resolve in your edits.
And write.
Even if you've been writing for a while, you may find the guidelines I offered my creative writing students yesterday helpful.
- Set a timer.
- No judgement. Not the time to judge what you write.
- Write whatever comes to mind, mistakes and all.
- Quality is not important, expression is.
- Be in an explorer’s frame of mind. Be curious and open.
- No stopping to fix anything, if you can.
- Allow play and risk and joy to enter, and invite judgement to step aside.
- Stop once time is up.
