by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
“I wish I didn’t have so much to write this week,” I said. It was exhaustion speaking, since I haven’t slept in days because of pregnancy-related discomfort.
And it’s Christmas, so it’s a short week and I still have gifts to finish and wrap, and all of that hangs over my head in these moments when my guard is down.
“I’m sure your followers would understand,” my husband said, and, yes, I’m sure they would.
But it’s not as much about the people who read as it is about me, because what if taking a day off moves too quickly into taking more time off, since all that extra time to sleep and read and sleep and play and sleep might be nicer than I want it to be, and then it will all snowball and I’ll never find my way back into the routine of writing?
There was a time, two years after I got married, when I just folded up my writing and set it on a shelf, thinking there was no time to pursue it and it didn’t make any money anyway and I had responsibilities to my family. It was whole years before I picked it back up.
What if that happens now?
I’ve worked hard to establish a routine, rough draft of this today, final tomorrow, along with a rough draft of that, and every day builds on another day so if one day is skipped, I fall too far behind to ever catch up.
But what about when we need to take that time off? What about when we can feel the burnout creeping in because we’ve been working so hard for so long? What about when our mind feels fatigued and overworked and ready to quit?
Our writing is better for the resting.
[Tweet “Our writing only gets better when we work rest into our schedules.”]
Sometimes we can work ourselves so hard, and we can have all these impenetrable pieces of time we have set aside for creating time, with boundaries that say, “No trespassing,” and that’s all well and good, but there comes a time when rest is necessary.
If all we’re ever doing is cranking out words on a page, and we don’t allow a cushion for those needed days off, we will wear ourselves down to a half-version of ourselves. I want to be a whole version of myself every time I pick up the pen.
And so sometimes that means putting down the pen and letting that notebook rest for a day or two or a whole week.
I have been in a place of not creating anything, and it is stale and stuffy there. I have been in the place of creating too much, and it is stale and stuffy there, too. The secret to unleashing our greatest creativity is to find balance between the work and the rest.
[Tweet “The secret to unleashing our best creativity is to find balance between work and rest.”]
That’s not easy for someone like me, because there are so many ideas and so much to do with so little time.
The other day I sat in a music service, and my kids were in childcare and I had an hour and a half of uninterrupted time to create. I opened my writing journal and readied my pen, and I could not write a thing. Maybe it’s something that happens often to other writers, but usually, when I open my notebook and ready my pen, I always find something to write about.
That block got me thinking, about how I am creating all the time, because it’s something I must do to keep from exploding. But there is something else I must do to keep from imploding: Rest.
Working rest into our schedules is one of the most important things we can do—for ourselves and our art.
[Tweet “Practicing rest is one of the most important things we can do—for ourselves and our art.”]
For some simple ways to work rest into your schedule, try this:
1. After every task you complete on your to-do list, take a break.
Do whatever you want on that break. Read a book you’ve been wanting to read. Watch a quick video. Go kiss you kids or your partner. Put in a few stitches on that product you want to make. Catch up on social media (but be sure to set a timer, because the Internet can be a black hole). Do what will fill you up and help you get back to work with a greater focus and fresh creativity.
2. Take a day off.
This is harder than it sounds for people like me. I really enjoy my work (as most writers do), which means taking a day off feels a bit like a chore. Sometimes it’s necessary—like when there’s a doctor’s appointment or something necessary. Sometimes I just know I need it, because I’ve been biting off the heads of everyone around me. Even though we enjoy our work, it’s important to step away from it.
What I do on my days off: read, sew, take my kids to the park and play freeze tag with them, play Apples to Apples with my friends, record some songs in the studio, organize my closet. When it’s a day off for pleasure, I try not to do anything like laundry (which I really hate) or cleaning (which I hate even more). I try only to do what I enjoy.
3. When you’ve mastered the above, try scheduling a whole week off.
Every seventh week, I take a whole week away from my work. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of a manuscript. It doesn’t matter if there are things left undone that really need to be done. I put down the work, and I rest.
It’s too easy, when we work for ourselves, to let that work take over everything. It’s a worthwhile practice to shut the laptop, slide it under our dresser, and forget about all those projects. Oftentimes, I’ll find, after a week off, that a difficult plot line has completely resolved itself without my even trying. So not only does time off allow us to rest, but it makes us more efficient writers.
You may not be successful the first few times you practice rest. But keep trying. It’s always a worthwhile pursuit to learn how to rest well.
Week’s prompt
Write what comes to mind when you read the following quote:“We wear the mask that grins and lies.”
-Paul Laurence Dunbar
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Several years ago I began a project with a photographer friend who, every week, sent me a picture, and I would write exactly 40 words about it—some condensed make-believe situation that I could “see” in the picture.
I pinned a 15-minute time constraint on the creative exercise.
I spent a year writing 40 words in 15 minutes for every picture she sent, writing and rewriting and rewriting again until just the right 40 words remained, and instead of feeling limited by the small number and ticking timer, I felt liberated.
It’s hard to explain.
So much could be said in 40 words. So many unnecessary words were eliminated within the constraint. So much focus could be pinpointed at just the right words, instead of grasping around for the millions of words available.
Not only did my productivity increase, but my creativity felt stretched and challenged, because I had 15 minutes to come up with a whole back story about the picture and then write only what was necessary.
It was a tremendous, fascinating learning experience for me.
And I started to think that maybe there was something to this constraint.
So two years ago, when I had finished my 40-word experiment, I decided to challenge myself by writing an ongoing story with the pictures my friend sent me. This project also had its parameters: tell a story with 104 pictures in the course of a year.
I enjoyed it so much I started another one the following journal.
This year I am writing my third one, this time challenging myself one step further and writing a story from three points of view.
All three of these stories have been crafted with constraints—time restraints, plot restraints (plot must weave in the picture), length restraints (the whole story must be told in 104 pictures and “chapters”).
And all of them have made me a better writer.
Here’s how I’ve come to understand it: focus is important to our productivity as creative people. If we’re given too many options, our focus ends up fragmented.
Creativity does not like fragmentation.
[Tweet “Creativity thrives within constraints, because constraints give us the gift of focus.”]
Recently an acquaintance told me about Tim Sachs, an artist who sets parameters on his work—like limiting the colors he uses (no purple, orange must be a natural orange, only one particular shade of green) because he believes it makes him a better artist. Research even suggests that people who spend eight hours a day working really only spend about half of that in focused work—so those of us with time constraints? Makes us better workers and producers and creators.
My husband and I recently watched a TED talk about choices. The speaker had spent years doing extensive research to figure out whether more or fewer choices were better for us.
Guess what? Her research found that the fewer choices people had the better choices they made.
I think of this scientific reality in light of creativity, in light of my 40-word experiment, and it all makes sense. If we are offered a wide-open world, we can quickly become overwhelmed. So we must narrow it down. Make the world smaller. Embrace our constraints.
[Tweet “Those of us with time constraints? Perfect. We’re becoming more efficient writers.”]
I wonder how much more productive and effective we could be if we put a few more constraints on our creativity. How much would we grow and improve? How much would we learn about ourselves?
I think we might be pleasantly surprised.
3 Constraints to Put On Your Writing
1. Time.
Set yourself a timer. The reality is, not many of us are full-time writers. This isn’t all we do. We have children to raise or jobs to work. So set a timer on your writing. Give yourself fifteen minutes a day. Or two hours a day. Or, if you’re fortunate enough to have nothing else in the world to do, set a timer for four hours and see how long it takes you to grow too fatigued to make sense anymore (my limit is about three hours). Training ourselves to create in short bursts is actually beneficial to building deep focus, especially if we gradually increase the time we set on the timer and do nothing but write for the time we have.
2. Word count.
Set a goal for a specific word count. Don’t worry so much about what the words are or whether or not they make sense. Just write. And when you’ve reached your word count goal, congratulate yourself. Gradually increase the word count and track how many words you get in fifteen minutes or half an hour or a whole hour. Keeping track of our word count gives us a good measure for how our constraints are helping develop our focus–which, on the difficult days, can be encouraging to recognize.
3. Strict parameters
Say you’re writing fiction, and you challenge yourself to write something about two characters who have gotten into a fight and whose lives were changed because of the fight. That’s a parameter that gives you focus. Say you’re writing poetry and you want to write a poem about the blooming roses in front of your house and how they remind you of how your life bloomed when you learned how to forgive a storied past. That’s a parameter that gives you focus. Say you need to write an essay and you come up with a headline first. That’s a parameter that will give you focus.
Open a book, read the first line and write a song about it.
Take the word “slippery,” open your journal and pen a poem about it.
Find a picture, write a story about it.
These are all parameters that will constrain you and give you a laser focus on what you’re writing for the day.
So don’t be afraid to put constraints in place. They all serve to make you a better writer.
[Tweet “Constraints make us better writers. They challenge our creativity and hone our focus.”]
Week’s prompt
A picture is one of my favorite ways to generate inspiration. Look at the picture below. Write whatever you want for as long as you can.
Photo by Frankie K.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
I usually make it my goal to read between 130 and 150 books every year. I don’t know that I’ll make that goal this year, because I’ve started doing some online courses to learn more about building a writing career, and that eats into the time I’ve set aside for reading and improving my craft (because everything I read, whether it’s critically or for pleasure, improves my craft).
Still, when people hear the number of books I read every month, they always express shock—probably because I’m the mom of six boys, and who has time to read so many when you’re a mom AND you work?
Well, here’s how I do it (and you can, too!):
1. Read aloud to your children.
We have multiple read-aloud times in our home. I read aloud to my twins and the baby while they’re having lunch (usually two picture books and a section from a middle grade chapter book). Right now we’re reading A.L. Sonnichsen’s The Red Butterfly. I read aloud to all my boys right before bed (right now we’re reading my Fairendale series—almost done with Episode 5).
Children love to hear stories, and this is a great way to not only introduce kids to longer reads but to fall in love with middle grade literature yourself. Middle grade books are great read-alouds most of the time.
2. Listen to audio books in the car.
Whenever we go on trips with our children, we bring a bunch of audio books. It’s super easy. Most libraries now have an e-audio book option, where you can download the book right to your phone and play it over your car speakers while you’re traveling. That way you don’t have to mess with CDs getting lost (which is always a plus in my house. Because we live in a house that includes a black hole).
We also listen to audio books when I’m fixing breakfast in the mornings and the boys are getting ready for school, and when I’m preparing lunch for my younger boys and they’re cleaning up their toys.
3. Get a shower speaker and listen to audiobooks while you get ready for work in the morning.
I usually do this every day (or at least when I get showers and actually find the time to put on makeup or brush my hair). (I use this shower speaker. It has great audio, great tone, and the battery lasts forever. And (best of all!) it’s affordable.Which you can’t say about every shower speaker out there.)
Some people say they’re not that great at listening to audio books. They don’t retain the story all that well. What I tell them is that they haven’t had enough practice. Listening to audio books well takes practice. I remember having a bit of a hard time at first, but after five years of practice, I’ve gotten really good at it—can even analyze books while I’m listening. My mind wanders every now and then, but audiobooks are also a great practice in focus.
4. Read while waiting in line…anywhere.
I find all kinds of little moments to read, because something I’ve learned is that I don’t need a whole lot of time to read a page or two. So when I’m waiting in line at the boys’ school to pick them up after the bell has rung, I have a book (usually poetry, because you can read in short snippets). When I’m sitting in the car waiting for my husband to get back out of the grocery store, where he went for that one item we needed and we didn’t have the energy to unpack all the boys for a “family outing,” I read. When I’m walking to check the mail, you guessed it, I read. I always have a book at the ready in my purse.
Now. This takes practice. You have to know your streets, because it’s easy to miss a step when you’re reading while walking. I know. I’ve tripped before, and it’s not pretty.
The point is, I read every moment I get. There’s always time to read, if we don’t have expectations for what it should look like.
5. Institute a Silent Reading time in your house.
Our family, in addition to its read-aloud times, has a Silent Reading time every afternoon following lunch (one hour) and every night before bed (15 minutes). All of us sit together in our library and read silently. This is a great way to flex kids’ reading muscles and help them prepare for reading their own books. We’ve had three early readers and are now working on our 4-year-old twins. They all pull out their books and read during these designated times. Our twins take a bit of redirection, because fifteen minutes is a long time for a 4-year-old to sit silently, but with practice, it’s become something we all really look forward to at the end of a busy day.
And (bonus!) it helps everybody go to bed much easier, because no one gets riled up during Silent Reading time.
6. Look for other places to read.
Sometimes we can cut out our social media time, because we know we spend entirely too much time playing on it. Sometimes we can cut out the amount of time we watch movies instead of opening a good book. Sometimes we can read with our kids at other points in the day.
I’m not saying that we should use every possible moment to read. It’s good for us to watch movies together (we’re still learning story!) and play around on social media, because it’s good to have community. But there is always time we can find in our schedule that we could spend with a good book.
Books and stories have a magical effect on us. We’ll certainly be glad we traded a bit of unfocused time for time spent within the pages of a story.
Week’s Prompt
Write as much as you can about the following word:
Sugar
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
As writers, we hear a whole lot of talk about this “voice” thing. What is voice? How do you find it? When do you know you’ve found it?
Well, unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly what it is. What it’s not, though, is somewhat easier to identify:
What voice is not:
1. The imitation of another writer.
2. Contrived.
3. Difficult.
Sometimes, when we’re wading through a story we’re trying to tell, and we feel like it’s maybe the hardest story we’ve ever told before, it could be that we’re fighting against our own natural voice. I used to want to write these posts on this writing blog in a really intellectual way, like I was a professor imparting wisdom to all her students. But my voice is a more laid-back one. I like to crack open my life and share examples from that, not from all the literary voices who are out there—because I can only speculate about what was learned and gleaned by them, but when it comes to my own life, I know exactly what was learned and gleaned.
I also used to fight against my natural poetic bend, because a creative writing professor in college had called me “melodramatic.” But I know now that he wasn’t correct. Maybe, at 19, my poetic bend wasn’t quite as polished as it is now, but I’ve always been poetic. Even when I was little, I would speak in poetic sentences. When I was only 9, I discovered my mom’s 1,000-page anthology of Emily Dickinson poetry—and fell in love with it—and was sold on the— absolute beauty of poetry.
(The dashes—in case you didn’t know—is a trademark of Dickinson’s poetry. This is my voice—and yet it’s not—because I’m using dashes—where I normally wouldn’t.)
So while I can’t tell you exactly what your voice sounds like, I can tell you some of the practices that might uncover your own unique way of writing. They’re really pretty simple.
1. You have to practice.
This is probably the best thing you can do for your voice. No one is going to find your voice except for you. If you’re practicing day after day after day, you’re going to find it, even if you aren’t really looking. Actually, you’ll probably find it sooner if you’re not looking, because if you’re looking and you’re thinking about it as you’re writing, then your voice will probably go into hiding, because all those internal editors will come out and start saying you need to make this sound a little more like Hemingway or Faulkner or maybe Jacqueline Woodson here and Rainbow Rowell there.
[Tweet “No one can tell you what your voice is. You find it by writing consistently.”]
2. It’s okay to emulate.
For a time. That means it’s worthwhile to study some other authors and try to get a feel for their voice. Something I like to do every now and then is read a passage of text I have in a document and try to guess who wrote it. Some of the old classic writers have quite amazing voices. Faulkner is one of my favorites. He wrote differently in all of his novels, but one of my favorites is As I Lay Dying. Each character in it has his own voice (which should happen in fiction, by the way—there’s your voice, but there’s also your character’s voice. They should be two different things. But before you can write the voice of a character, you have to be familiar with your own.).
Test yourself. Study the masters. But don’t try to emulate them for long, because it’s disingenuous to your own voice—and the world needs your unique way of telling stories.
3. Keep a journal.
The best thing I ever did for finding my voice was taking out a physical journal and writing by hand every evening. I did it every evening for a year, and those writings became a book, but they also became a better grasp on what my real voice sounded like. So much of our writing today is done on computers, but writing by hand is a great way to slow your hand down enough to listen to the voice that’s speaking inside your mind, which is the voice that holds the essence of your true voice.
4. Remember that your voice will be unique.
Comparisons are out. Don’t sound like Wilkie Collins? That’s alright. You’re not Wilkie Collins. Don’t sound like Salman Rushdie? Perfectly fine. You’re not him, either. You’re you, and you have to be okay with not sounding like anyone else.
I’ll be honest. This isn’t always easy. There have been a number of times I have read an essay that some other blogger has written (or a song or a book), and I’ll think, Man, I wish I could have said it exactly like that. The most recent example of this was a Kelly Clarkson song called “Piece By Piece” that felt like it was written about my life. Right after I heard it, I sat down to try writing a song that said the same thing in the same powerful way. I gave up after a few hours, because I have my style and she has hers. I have my voice, and she has hers.
At the end of the day, the only thing that will help us along the way to discovering our voice is to practice—and to quit comparing, to quit trying to be like all the other people. We have a unique talent, and we have a unique way of telling stories.
[Tweet “We have a unique talent, and we have a unique way of telling stories.”]
We just have to uncover it.
Week’s prompt
Write what comes to mind when you read the following quote:
“And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Personal essays—we see them all the time out in cyber-space. We read about how this person went to the store yesterday and met a woman there who said something that annoyed them or hurt them or made them feel sad, and now they’re trying to air their feelings. We read about people meeting together at coffee shops and we read about the bigger things that happen—a new car!—and we read about the tiny minutiae of a day.
One of the questions we’ll often ask ourselves if we’re in the business of blogging or writing personal essays is the question, Am I an interesting enough person to write a personal essay?
I’ve considered this one often. I run a humor parenting blog, and many times I’m simply telling the daily stories of my life in a humorous way (because life is pretty humorous when we think about it long enough. Sometimes I try to make those stories a bit more universal, and sometimes I make them so specific to my family that I don’t think anybody’s even going to care about it. Turns out, people do. People do care about it, because, in every story, they get to see themselves.
At least this is what I believe.
[Tweet “Our stories have value because in them people find themselves.”]
We’re all connected by our humanity. If we find value in a story, others will, too.
Now. It makes a difference how you tell it. If we’re just telling the facts of our outing to the grocery store, we’re probably not going to get many people nodding their heads in agreement. No one really wants to know that at 8 a.m. we pulled up, and the parking lot was close to empty, and we brought home five pounds of apples and ten pounds of bananas, because we live with the equivalent of monkeys. But what they will want to know is how we feel about that grocery bill and maybe a funny story about what one of the kids did when he tried to carry a gallon of milk to the basket.
The most important characteristic of a personal essay is its emotion.
[Tweet “The most important characteristic of a personal essay is its emotion.”]
Emotion is universal. That’s how we make our story universal to our audience. We sprinkle in a little emotion, tell about how this trip to the grocery store affected us, tell about what we thought as we strolled out the doors with that basket full of groceries and the receipt still crumpled in our hands and kids hanging off the sides, making the basket even harder to push. We tell about how it seemed like the sky turned grayer as we walked to the car, because we’re worried about how we’ll possibly be able to feed the bottomless pits of six boys when school’s out for the summer.
We don’t have to make up situations or things that happened in order to make our lives interesting enough to warrant a personal essays. The trick is just to highlight the emotions of an encounter—whether that’s humor, fear, hope, joy, frustration, surprise. The possibilities are endless. I could write four different personal essays out of one event in my life, focusing on different emotions.
Essentially, a personal essay is the telling of a life story and our reflection on it.
So it doesn’t really matter if we lead an “interesting enough” life or not (also, who gets to decide who leads an interesting enough life, anyway); what matters is that we know how to tell a story.
Do we know how to tell a story?
A story has characters, and it has plot, and it has tension (this is where I feel we’re getting a bit confused in our culture of marketing-with-a-story, because we’ve forgotten what the essentials of a story are—but more on that another day). We start with characters, we add a little conflict and tension, we have a theme, we have characters transforming, even a tiny little bit, by the end of it. A personal essay needs all of those elements, too.
If we think about our lives, they have all of those elements. Characters: family and friends. Conflict and tension: Our dealings with other people, the environment, ourselves. Plot: what happens in the course of a day or outing or whatever it is we want to write about. Theme: What we take out of our experience. Character transformation: We are changed by everything that happens in our lives.
Writing a personal essay is, at its simplest, telling a good story. It’s a commentary on the human condition, told through a personal story.
So maybe rather than worrying about whether or not we have an interesting enough life to warrant a personal essay, we worry more about weaving a story around our lives that, though specific, feels universal to the human condition. We look at the stories we’re telling about our lives. We examine where themes slide in and where conflict throws rocks on the road and where we might be most changed, and then we tell it all for the understanding and recognition it might bring.
There are millions of blogs out in cyberspace. How we make a mark in all their minutiae is to tell something that matters to us and the rest of humanity. Even if we’re writing about surviving the time when our son was diagnosed with a heart murmur, as long as we’re writing about the emotions of that experience, other parents suffering through their own child-scares will find value in it. When we work through our emotions on a page, we make our personal stories mean something to others.
I tell personal stories all the time. I use them to demonstrate a larger point, because it’s only after I’ve reflected on my personal stories and tried to find a common theme in humanity, tried to find where the story fits in the world, that I feel I can effectively share that story with the world’s people.
So, you see, it’s not about whether or not we’re interesting at all. It’s really about how well we can spread our experience into the experience of others.
Week’s prompt
Pictures have an amazing ability to spark our creativity. Write whatever you want for as long as you want on the following picture.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writers, we sometimes tend to be different people than the national norm. Not all of us, but some of us. I know a few of us who are really positive people, but a whole lot of us feel like the world’s ending when we can’t think of anything to write for the day’s blog or we’re stuck tight in a plot line. What if it never gets better? What if this is all we’ve got? What if all of that is true?
I tend to be one of those people who thinks worst-case scenario. If something goes wrong, I think it will always be so. If I write a blog post I think will cause all sorts of waves and maybe even hit the coveted viral spot (even though that’s overrated) and then I share it and it’s crickets, I think no one likes the things I write and that I’ll never be popular enough to do the whole blog-a-book thing. And if I have a book that doesn’t do as well in a launch as I’d hoped, I think that it’s probably always going to be this way, that no one will ever enjoy my writing and the people who read all my writings right now are probably the only audience members I’ll ever get.
So it’s odd that I would be the one to make a case for thinking positively, since that’s something that most definitely does not come easily or naturally to me. My husband is a positive guy, and he’s usually the one who can talk some sense back into me when I’m feeling a little down about something that went wrong for the day. He’s usually the one who can help me see what it is that I’m doing and how I can learn from the disappointing experience.
If you don’t have a husband like mine, maybe I can help you a little.
There are all kinds of studies that show us the power of thinking positively. We can accomplish more in a day when we meet it head-on and see its challenges as learning experiences rather than you-should-give-up-now experiences. Recently, the hard drive of my computer, where I have ALL of my writing (the ONLY place I have ALL my writing—about three million words that exist in no other place on earth) decided it didn’t want to be all that helpful anymore, and I thought I’d lost it all. Years of writing I would never get back.
[Tweet “It’s much easier to bounce back from hardships when we see them as learning experiences.”]
My husband, of course, thought it would be possible to restore everything, and he hoped enough for the both of us. I was ready to hang up my career, because that was eight manuscripts I’d worked on last year, and how would I ever recover from that? There were book releases that were fast approaching, and I didn’t have any of those books available anywhere else. It was the worst thing that could have happened.
My husband spent hours trying to recover my work, and he succeeded, not thanks to me.
But I’d lost a whole day to worry. I’d lost a whole day to imagining the worst-case scenario. Sure, I tried writing a little to distract myself, even though I didn’t have a computer to write on and had to use my husband’s unfamiliar one that didn’t know my hands like mine knew them, which was, in itself, a reminder of how dire this situation was (what if I didn’t get all that work back? What if I lost whole years? What if my computer was broken for good?). The writing helped me not think about it as often. But every time there was a lull in the typing of an essay, I would think about how I would have to give up. It wasn’t worth trying again, not if we couldn’t recover those files.
Everything ended up perfectly fine. And what we learned from the experience is that we need to back everything up, because those files are far too important not to—and we do this every evening when I’m done for the day.
How much time would we save in thinking positively? I’d wasted a whole day thinking negatively. I could have done a whole lot in a whole day.
I know it doesn’t necessarily come easily for all of us, and I know it can get difficult to see the silver lining in something like losing a whole hard drive with three years’ worth of work on it, and it can be hard to see the positive in a book release that fell flat, and it can be hard to look at personal problems with something akin to hope. Sometimes we’re too afraid to hope, because we’d rather imagine the worst-case scenario and then be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t end up that way.
But we could save ourselves a lot of heartache and worry if we would just think something like this:
Yes, this will go well.
Yes, I can do this.
Yes, I will get through this.
It’s not easy to change ourselves so drastically, but here are some things that might help us see the value in positive thinking:
1. We won’t spend as much energy worrying.
So many studies point to the fact that worrying is terrible for our bodies and our minds. It affects us physically and emotionally, and that, too, can affect our ability to write well. If we weren’t spending so much time and energy worrying about what might happen, we could spend a little more time writing. Which is always needed in the life of a parent writer.
2. Thinking positively has been proven to make us feel happier and more fulfilled.
If we’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, we tend to see everything with a glass half empty. We see our family and our relationships and our writing and our life half empty. I want to see my life full. I want to see my relationships and my family and my writing with a glass half full. I want to believe that this is the best life ever—even if my hard drive crashes and I lose all my work—and that the future has great things in store for me. Maybe being disappointed, if those things aren’t actually true, is better than being pleasantly surprised, because, along the way, you actually get to LIVE.
3. Thinking positively could possibly bring those positive things to you.
There are different camps to this line of thinking. Some say it doesn’t matter what your mind thinks, the universe gives what it gives. But more and more people are recognizing the power that our minds can have over what we get in life (and some scientists have even proven it in studies). When we see things in a positive light, they say, we tend to attract those things.
And if I’m looking at it objectively, when I’m caught in one of my negative thinking patterns, I tend to see the negativity everywhere. What if we expected the best? Would the best then come to us?
Well, I guess I’d like to try. Wouldn’t you?
[Tweet “What if we expected the best? Would it come to us? I guess I’d like to try. Wouldn’t you?”]
Week’s prompt
Write as much as you can for as long as you have about the following word:
Smells
