How to start writing? Steps from 33 to 38
Writers or anyone aspiring to write can find it very difficult to manage their time. To remedy this inconvenience, it is advisable to create lists of tasks and to plan them in a diary. Otherwise, without rigor, it is complicated to move forward.
Likewise, to keep your commitment to writing, you will need to take action, such as getting up earlier or going to bed later, and most importantly, taking time to write – that is the main thing!
To write, you have to manage your time, set yourself a reasonable time to complete each chapter, and also find time for your research. But above all, it is necessary to take breaks, to have fun, to breathe body and mind, which are necessary steps to recharge your batteries and feed your creative reserves.
Above all, there is only one watchword: PLEASE!
To write this article, I always base myself on Laure astragal’s book, “Writing workshop”.
Step 33: evaluate your free time
To estimate the time you have to write, just list your main recurring activities for the week.
Evaluate the time spent in your occupations in all sincerity with yourself:
- time spent working
- time spent in transport
- time spent sleeping
- time spent preparing or eating meals
- time spent washing and dressing
- time spent helping others
- time spent with friends
- time spent on housekeeping, shopping, cleaning, on the phone, watching TV
You must be aware of the time very often wasted in trivial matters: time is a precious ally! But, he can also become your worst enemy! The question is: in a week, how much time did you spend on yourself?
Step 34: weekly occupations
Laure astragal proposes to draw a table of 5 vertical columns:
- one in blue for the time spent sleeping
- one in orange for professional activities and transport
- one in red for activities done for others (except for your profession)
- one in yellow for “stewardship” occupations
- One in green for personal activities, carried out by yourself.
Then you need to take stock:
- What do you see from your table?
- Were you aware of the situation before this step?
- Do you want to change something in your weekly distribution?
Step 35: establish a security perimeter
The book Laure Astragal offers to draw a circle in color. Inside, write down the points of your life organization that you want to keep or that suit you. Place any points that are bothering you or those you want to get rid of outside the circle.
In a different color, How to create a Wikipedia page for an author write what in your environment is beneficial and harmful, what encourages you to write and what interferes with your desire to write.
The next day, reread your page calmly and draw the necessary conclusions. This step can take some time. You must be wondering how you could organize yourself to satisfy your desire to write.
Step 36: investigate yourself
For 10 minutes, you list 5 aspects of your personality that you liked about yourself as a child.
I played the game:
- curiosity
- vivacity and perseverance
- love of reading
- tell things about everything
- project myself and invent situations
Next, list 5 achievements made in your childhood that you are proud of, including pranks, for 10 minutes.
Here is my result:
- my canvas
- decide to learn English in 6th against my parents’ advice
- learn at school
- “commando” operations with my neighbors
- having managed a cake for the first time
Then write down 5 dishes or delicacies that you liked when you were a child:
Here are my favorite dishes (nothing original, actually!):
- steak and fries for Saturday noon
- potato puree
- Sunday cakes
- pasta
- roast chicken
Step 37: allow yourself time
From now on, on your personal diary, you will display the following 3 letters: TAM, once a week at least:
- TAM cinema
- TAM exhibition
- TAM DIY
- TAM gardening
- TAM listen to a record
- TAM swimming pool
- etc.
You will only do it for things that you love and to which you will deliberately devote your time without doing anything else simultaneously and of course, only for you and you alone!
It is by no means a selfish attitude, but saving to avoid falling into a frenetic rhythm, exhausting in the long run and which will undermine, anyway, all your inspiration. Inspiration requires fuel to renew itself; therefore, provide it with something to feed and develop!
You must make an appointment with yourself on your agenda. You should never put off writing time to prioritize something else. The urge to give up everything is often more convenient than the urge to persevere. Resist day after day!
Develop the daring to be yourself
When you have progressed well in your writing practice, you can start writing longer formats, even novels.
To become a known author or not, you will have to assert yourself in one way or another. Knowing how to improvise and having fun discovering stories is not enough to develop yourself as an author. You will have to stand out in your practice and get noticed.
If you take the time to think about the authors you adore, the ones you read everything about, you will realize that each one is defined by its recurrences, whether they are of substance (subjects, themes, universe), of form (voice, format) or construction (archetypes of characters, dramatic structures).
Recurrences are like the author’s DNA, an imprint that he is the only one to leave, because it is the fruit of his personality, his experience, his life as much as his writing. This paw of us that we leave through the pages we write is not so easy to express.
A veil covers this imprint that of the fear of not being good enough, of the fear of being seen, judged, booed, even adulated. There are no ‘real’ or ‘false’ authors, as if talent was something other than the art of being oneself within a mastered technique.
Writing requires learning, even if it is not pleasant to hear. It is not clear either: how to train? How to learn to write? How to become an author?
All the questions you ask yourself will be part of the stages you go through to write about the long term. The more or less happy realizations, the successive errors that you will make, will allow you – among other things – Wikipedia experts for hire to improve your writing.
Writing takes time. This is the reason why you are not always in a good writing mood, not always well connected to your story. This is how your identity as an author is blurred. Nothing is ever acquired; you should always question yourself!
Accumulating your experiences will help you move forward on your writing path by accepting your strengths and weaknesses, recognizing that your writing will not be able to affect everyone equally. Plus, that doesn’t say anything about their quality.
It is only through this experience that you will be able to develop the audacity to write with what makes you unique, singular and author!
Find sources of inspiration
I remain convinced that it is very inefficient to seek ideas at all costs. You can also learn by watching. There are many sources of inspiration for finding novel ideas.
Listen to the people, keep your eyes open. The world around you, your loved ones, your family, your own life, are an inexhaustible source of new ideas. Watch documentaries because they present the reality of people you don’t know, and they often give ideas.
The show, for example, “In the eyes of Olivier”, episodes available on YouTube, can be a great source of inspiration. Reading novels, and works of fiction more broadly, are a tremendous tool for shaping the imagination.
By traveling, you will open up to new cultures, new landscapes, which will allow you to learn to open your eyes and to look differently. In addition to being very pleasant, it is an excellent observation exercise!
Florence Servant-Schreiber, French author and specialist in positive psychology, has got into the habit of writing down and sharing with her family her 3 ‘kids’ of the day. It is also possible to speak of ‘gratitude’, according to the authors.
It seems interesting to me to decline this idea and to note, every day, 3 ideas, events, situations, meetings, characters, which marked your day. From this work can result the birth of new ideas!
The “What if…?”Is one of my favorite exercises for brainstorming? This can be done quite naturally. It’s about rewriting a story you just watched or read. Did you not like a detail? Character? A love relationship? What if it had been different? What if you wrote it down? How would you have done it?
Many fan-fictions begin in this way. A fanfiction (or fanfic) is a story that some fans write to extend, amend or even totally transform a media product that they are particularly fond of; whether it’s a novel, manga, TV series, movie or video game. It is in fact a derivative fiction.
If you have trouble coming up with ideas, take the time to think, daydream in the shower, take your dog out, as these seemingly futile moments can sometimes lead to new ideas. How many times while walking my dog have I had an idea for a story! Nature and calm are carriers!
Step 38: Awakening the senses – touch it
At this stage, Laure astragal suggests telling a sensory experience. First, you should list some vocabulary related to touch.
Here is my list:
- hand
- soft
- hard
- caress
- touch
- graze
- tickle
- feel
- fiddle with
- feel
- to knock
- tact
- skin
- touching
- friction
- palpation
- kneading
- tactile
- rough
- rough
- rough
- smooth
- velvety
Then, for 30 minutes, you will write 15 to 20 lines on a touching experience using your chosen vocabulary.
Here is my text:
In my garden, my favorite occupation is to use my hands to touch and feel. Contact with my trees is a most precious act that I perform as a ritual and as a meeting with my companions.
I like to run my hand over the rather rough bark of my large walnut tree, observing the traces of moss here and there on its trunk or its branches. Then, proudly enthroned at the bottom of the garden, stands the cherry tree, a smooth mahogany brown, slippery when wet. It has very interesting welts, not to say artistic. But, the tree that I prefer, the one that I have chosen to meditate on, is the birch. Its bark is very luminous, ivory white, extremely soft to the touch, unlike its closest neighbor, the acacia. The latter has many cracks, sometimes deep. Its wood is hard, its thorns formidable and they leave you with a somewhat painful memory to those who inadvertently forget them.
I don’t have an oak tree in my garden. But, in the neighboring countryside, at the end of a muddy road in this season and at the edge of a busy road, stands a proud oak tree more than multi-hundred-year-old. I like, from time to time, to visit him and stroke his powerful bark, to tap into his energy and invigorate myself.
Like birch, if I stroke the trunk of my olive tree, it is smooth, soft, almost like velvet. By closing my eyes, I will be able to guess which tree can be caressed under my hands. Trees have their own unique personality, have properties that are so important to our health and well-being.
As a conclusion
Little by little, you begin to be born to yourself through writing. But, in order to grow in this field, you must persevere in your daily endeavors. No doubt you feel an impression of power through your writing activity.
Nonetheless, you need to encourage your creativity by trusting yourself. Feed your creativity, follow your inner guide, your intuition. Don’t let others get you out of your way!
Flee from all those who are ready to break your enthusiasm, those who make no effort to understand or follow you, those who say negative about your activity, those who reproach you, those who invade your space.
Your writing time is sacred. Trust your resources, accept what is going on within you, and let your mind open at its own pace. If you feel joy while creating, you are on the right track!