Tag Archive - Creativity

Capture your Creativity by Journaling

Today’s guest post is by author and writing coach Catharine Bramkamp.

As writers we often start our day scrubbing in one kind of a journal or another. But did you know that journaling with intention can create your first steps to better work?

There are as many iterations of journaling as there are writers. Julia Cameron calls her journaling work “morning pages.” Natalie Goldberg calls first-thing writing her “ten minute write.” You can call it unconscious or spontaneous writing, or you can call it channeling the muse or just bitching on the page to avoid bitching to loved ones.

You can call it anything  you like, but journaling will deliver new ways to capture old thoughts. And the first way to accomplish this is to write without stopping so your subconscious can take over your editor.

In my journaling classes, I ask students to write for ten minutes.  What they discover is a  decided divide between minute five and minute six. At minute six the writing switched from surface observations to deeper ideas and surprising thoughts.   One student started writing about her parents, one started chronicling her recovery process. One asked how many minutes should a person spend on discussing his feelings.

What is so radical or even magical about writing for ten minutes without stopping?

Continue Reading…

How to Put Passion into Your Writing

I’m reprinting a post I wrote years ago because, well, it bears repeating!

When you read a novel and you sense the passion behind the story, what does that look like? Do you ever start reading a book and feel it’s flat and formulaic, like the writer wrote it in his sleep? At very least, you can’t imagined he cared much for his story, or stayed up late nights writing because of the excitement coursing through his veins.

I often quote a particular line from a movie (I think it was Rich and Famous, so if you know the source and I’m wrong, please enlighten me!) that has stuck with me through my decades of novel writing: “If your writing doesn’t keep you up nights, it won’t keep anyone else up either.”

I think the highest compliments a writer can get (and the ones I love the most regarding my own novels) are when readers remark that they stayed up all night reading the writer’s novel, unable to put it down.

That’s not implying your writing should be keeping you up because you just can’t make it work or you are stuck or it’s just plain terrible. What I feel that line means is the writer is so passionate about the story he is telling that he can’t stop thinking about it, and he can’t sleep because he just has to put on the page all the wondrous words that are aching to get out. Or something like that. Continue Reading…

How Facing Your Space Could Improve Your Writing

Today’s guest post is by architect Donald M. Rattner.

As an architect who studies the psychology of creative space, and the author of a recently published book on the subject, I’m often asked by my fellow scriveners what the most common mistake writers make in fitting out their physical workspace.

Easy, I reply. They’re looking the wrong way.

Looking the wrong way? It sounds like what happens to a North American who travels to the UK and forgets that the traffic moves in opposite directions when stepping out into the street.

No, what I’m referring to isn’t about failing to adjust for unaccustomed traffic patterns. It has to do with how we humans have been genetically encoded to orient themselves to our environment, and how we remain guided by that code even though the conditions that prompted this bit of bioengineering have long disappeared.

To understand what I’m getting it, we’ll need to travel back in time about 190,000 years, to when the first Homo sapiens emerged on the African savanna. Continue Reading…

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