In this article, we’ll cover what spiritual journaling is and how to keep a spiritual journal, and then offer you 46 prompts for spiritual journaling if you’d like inspiration.

What Spiritual Journaling Is

No hidden corners here. By “journaling,” I mean keeping a regular, ongoing personal record, and by “spiritual journaling,” I mean journaling about our spiritual lives.

By spiritual journaling, I simply mean journaling about our spiritual lives.

What is spirituality itself? That’s up to you to define, of course—but I would say it involves life at its most fundamental, most meaningful, most mystical, and most sacred.

Spirituality isn’t really separate from life, in my view, so I’d say every journal (even a journal of new soup recipes) is also a spiritual journal in a sense; but this is getting a bit in the weeds.

Summing up, if you’re journaling about spirituality on purpose, then congratulations! You have a spiritual journal.

How to Keep a Spiritual Journal: 5 Tips for Spiritual Journaling

Below is my advice from several years of regular spiritual journaling. This is what has worked for me on my own spiritual path (heavily informed by Tibetan Buddhism) and with my own preferences around technology and so on, so please take any part of this advice that’s useful and leave the rest.

1. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Adopt Different Technologies

There are lots of reasons to keep a multimedia journal, not just handwritten or typed text. If you see a beautiful sunset or or an unexpectedly meaningful car license plate, it’s helpful to be able to record these things in photo or video, as companions to your words. If you’re having a spiritual experience, you may want to dictate some elements of it verbally, rather than interrupting it to start writing or typing. Transcription applications like Whisper Memos are wonderful for dictating vivid dreams, when writing them would take too long and start to cloud the memory. And so on.

For these reasons, my own journal is a multimedia record of my spiritual path, more than it is a text document. This is more complex, and it does force me to rely on the security and discretion of big tech companies; but I still recommend trying it for your spiritual journaling.

My own journal is a multimedia record of my spiritual path, more than it is a text document.

For an in-depth discussion on technology options and tradeoffs for journaling, please see our overall introduction on how to start journaling:

How to Start Journaling: Practical Advice on How to Journal Daily

2. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Embrace Fluidity and Change

My own spiritual practice is constantly changing and evolving, and I believe this is how it should be. As such, I don’t journal to create a record of the absolutely correct things I will agree with forever.

I don’t journal to create a record of the absolutely correct things I will agree with forever.

Rather, I journal partly to record my spiritual practices at any given time, so that I can refer back to it later, and also partly to process my own spiritual path. I find that writing about whatever I’m going through clarifies those experiences; and it also helps them move properly through my system, so they can integrate with everything already in place, and with whatever comes next.

So that this isn’t abstract, you can imagine processing your feelings about a difficult interaction with a family member. You’re not writing it down because you’ll feel this exact way forever. Instead, writing it down both organizes your thoughts and feelings about the experience. It is also cathartic, helping open your system to the broader dynamic, and to whatever comes next in the relationship. It’s the same in our spiritual life (again, not that our spiritual and family lives are different).

So much of spirituality seems to be beyond what we can neatly encapsulate in words and then walk around agreeing with.

This point seems especially important because, for me, so much of spirituality is beyond what we can neatly encapsulate in words and then walk around agreeing with. As such, getting the words out might sometimes open us to deeper truths that our initial concepts were partially obscuring. A lot of spiritual discovery seems to take place in those moments of freshness and surprise.

3. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Be Uninhibited

As I experience it, true spirituality isn’t prim or tidy, and it doesn’t deny our pain and confusion. In fact, I often journal exactly to express and process these darker energies. As a result, my journal is as contrasting, shocking, and ultimately unprintable as life itself. 

Allow your spiritual journal to be honest and unfiltered—not prim or tidy.

The promise of any kind of journaling is this authenticity—being able to be honest and unfiltered with ourselves—and it becomes even more important in spiritual journaling, where opening fully is often the recipe for growth and discovery. Be willing to write uninhibitedly about the painful and bewildering energies you encounter on your spiritual journal.

4. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Consider Parts Work

Speaking of energies, one of the most effective ways I’ve learned to process life occurrences for spiritual growth is known as Internal Family Systems (IFS), informally called “parts work.” I urge you to read No Bad Parts, the primary reference to the IFS approach. It will be time well spent.

“Parts work” sees a human being not as a unitary entity, but as having many “parts”—personality structures, each with its own goals and perspectives.

The core message of IFS is that a human being is not “single”—a unitary, totally coherent entity doing its singular thing, like a billiard ball rolling into a pocket. Instead, we each have many “parts”: different personality structures, each with its own goals and perspectives.

If you think about it, this explains a lot. Why am I so nice most of the time, but my spouse says I have a mean streak? Am I a single unit that is “nice-most-of-the-time-but-also-with-a-mean-streak”? Actually, the mean streak is its own structure, its own thing. It recedes into the background much of the time, and under certain conditions it asserts itself.

Parts work has given my spiritual journaling a lot of specificity and healing power.

I bring all this up because parts work has given my spiritual journaling a great deal of specificity and healing power it didn’t previously have. (I personally don’t call them “parts,” I call them “energies,” and I’m also not bought into IFS’s assertion that all parts are in relation to a central capital-S Self.)

When I feel an energy arising—for example, if I’ve just acted out the mean streak I mentioned—I ask the following questions in sequence:

1. “May I speak with the energy that [feels however it is I’m feeling]?” (From there on, I address the energy as “you” and let it respond as “me”)
2. Sensation: Where can I feel you in the body?
3. Emotion: What feelings and emotions do you carry?
4. Impulse: How do you want to move the body?
5. Thought: What thoughts (words, memories, images…) do you carry?
6. Is there a name I should address you by? (To find this name, I let the energy say “I’m…” and then keep everything but the “I’m”)
7. What do you feel could be good or fruitful to discuss?
8. What do you feel you need, or what do you feel is needed?
9. Is there someone or something you protect? (This would be another energy)
10. If you weren’t in your current role, what do you feel would likely happen?
11. If you weren’t in your current role, what do you feel you’d enjoy?

In my experience, the psychological growth this process brings is also (or is identical with) spiritual growth: knowing my own energies better unlocks my power as a spiritual practitioner. More generally, whatever’s going on with me, psychologically and spiritually, is much clearer when I can give voice to and begin to connect with and integrate my individual energies.

If you’re interested in implementing parts work in your spiritual journaling, I strongly recommend you read No Bad Parts first, and I also recommend you get an IFS-trained therapist.

Doing parts work has opened energies in me that were very painful coming out of hiding.

Doing parts work has opened energies in me that were very painful coming out of hiding. I’ve had entire days where I couldn’t really get out of bed or talk to anyone. But then, after those days, my life is permanently better, like a shard of glass has been picked out of my foot.

So if you’re interested, please use caution, and please equip yourself with knowledge and with access to experts; and I hope you’ll find parts work as transformative as I have for your spiritual journaling, your spirituality, and your life.

5. Spiritual Journaling Advice: Don’t Forget to Practice Spirituality Itself

Like family, spirituality isn’t something we just learn about, think about, ponder, or discuss—it’s something we enact.

Spirituality is not just something we ponder or discuss, but something we enact.

Spirituality comes alive when we practice it through meditation, prayer, group worship, body work such as yoga or qi gong, sacred sex, visiting sacred places, absorbing spiritual teachings and so on.

So let’s give our spiritual journaling the nourishment it needs, by participating heavily in appropriate spiritual practice. Conversely, our journal can be a major asset as we find what spiritual paths and practices resonate with us.

Spiritual Journaling Prompts: 46 Prompts to Inspire Your Writing

I personally don’t usually journal from prompts. Instead, I write about whatever I’m going through, day-to-day. However, prompts can be a wonderful way to guide our focus and reflection in our spiritual journaling. Here are 46 spiritual journaling prompts as ways into your own spiritual life:

1. Sources of Support

1. What gives you hope?
2. What gives you strength?
3. What gives you courage?
4. What gives you joy?
5. What brings you happiness?
6. For what are you most grateful?
7. Whose spiritual practice do you most admire?
8. From what sources of wisdom do you draw guidance?

2. Meanings

9. What, to you, is kindness?
10. What, to you, is compassion?
11. What, to you, is goodness?
12. What, to you, is community?
13. What, to you, is connection?
14. What, to you, is life?
15. What, to you, is death?
16. What, to you, is love?
17. What, to you, is grace?
18. What, to you, is generosity?
19. What, to you, is faith?
20. What, to you, is magic?
21. What, to you, is sacredness?
22. What, to you, is power?
23. What, to you, is glory?
24. What, to you, is devotion?
25. What, to you, are blessings?
26. What, to you, is salvation or liberation?
27. What, to you, is transcendence?
28. What, to you, is divinity?

3. The Spiritual Journey

29. What spiritual path or journey are you presently on?
30. What is the biggest obstacle on your spiritual path at present?
31. What help do you most wish for in your spiritual life?
32. Where do you most hope your spiritual path will lead?
33. What is your highest spiritual aspiration or goal?

4. Working with Challenges

34. How do you work with pain?
35. How do you work with suffering?
36. How do you work with confusion?
37. How do you work with fear?
38. How do you work with anger?
39. How do you work with guilt?
40. How do you work with loneliness?
41. How do you work with self-aggression, such as self-criticism and self-blame?

5. General questions

42. What is a part of yourself that nothing can ever change?
43. What is the most spiritually powerful experience you’ve ever had?
44. Can you name some of the primary gifts you’ve been given?
45. What gift do you most wish to offer the world?
46. What is someone or something that you will always love, no matter what?

Spiritual Journaling: Enjoy!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to spiritual journaling. How do you approach journaling on your spiritual life? Do you have any questions about keeping a spiritual journal I can help answer? I’d love to hear your comments below, and good luck!

The post Spiritual Journaling: How to Keep a Spiritual Journal, and 46 Spiritual Journal Prompts appeared first on Writers.com.

Among twenty options—everything from “I struggle to complete large projects” to “I don’t feel confident navigating publishing”—here were their top 7 answers, in order:

1. I’m worried my work isn’t good enough.
2. I don’t know how to market myself and my writing.
3. I don’t have good access to constructive feedback on my writing.
4. I struggle to stay motivated.
5. I don’t feel confident in my writing skills.
6. I don’t know which skill(s) I’m missing.
7. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there.

What jumped out at me as I read these is how intimately our writing intersects with the painful topic of self-worth.

I’ve always felt this way personally, and now I have cold, hard data to back it up: The hardest part about writing is how it can activate our struggles with self-worth.

The hardest part about writing is how it can activate our struggles with self-worth.

How Writing Engages Self-Worth

We almost take for granted that writing tugs at our self-worth, so it can be helpful to remember where and how this happens. A good jumping-off point is the topic of rejection.

Writing is full of rejection throughout, not just at the obvious nadir of being refused by a publisher. Struggling to build a readership means facing lots of rejection: no matter how strongly we feel about our words, most others can’t be induced to care about them. Editing and critique, no matter how carefully structured, includes rejection: we must hear where, in others’ eyes, our words fall short.

Most important, and most painful, is self-rejection: I’m worried my work isn’t good enough. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. As our survey showed, this hurts writers more than literally anything else.

We might reject our own writing to shield from others’ criticism: “Before you say anything, I don’t like it either.” This numbs external rejection, at the cost of internalizing it. This is how we learn self-rejection: from the outside in.

We learn self-rejection from the outside in.

Then, at some point, there’s the experience of reading our own writing—writing we were excited about at the time—and finding, as if by some negative magic, that we don’t like it. This isn’t directly about others’ opinions, but is a personal noticing: This is just not good.

In other words, we feel that the goodness we intended, and which we felt as we were writing, is now not present in the words staring back up at us. We lost the goodness, somehow, exactly as some other writers don’t—the ones you’ve heard of; the good ones.

Why Is It Like This?

The pain of all this is so familiar that mentioning it almost feels like belaboring the point. But the question is: Why is it like this, and why is it so painful?

This same question holds not only for rejection, but for the closely related topics of envy, inferiority, desperation, competitiveness, arrogance, gatekeeping, snobbishness, dread, wavering motivation, writer’s block: really, every painful emotional state for which writers are known.

It’s Learned

My four-year-old daughter is a frequent and totally uninhibited storyteller. She never waits at the end for me to say, “…Oh! Yes, I liked it. I liked the part with—” She has never wondered whether she’s talented, let alone how talented. She doesn’t ask for feedback; in fact, she doesn’t care what I think. She enjoys the story as it dances in her mind, and she shares from that enjoyment.

Of course, my daughter will someday develop every adult problem we suffer from. The point, though, is that they’re learned. We develop them, like bruises, as the world starts to impact us roughly.

How does this happen? I can describe what I know of my own case.

Writing and Self-Worth: My Personal Experience

In my case, I’m worried my work isn’t good enough, and I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. These aren’t worries about my writing ability itself, but with what feels like the incompleteness or trivialness of what I might have to say to other humans.

Beneath all this are issues with self-worth. This is why encouragement targeting what seem to be my challenges—“your writing is great!” and “you have lots to say!”—never helps, the way itch cream doesn’t douse a fire.

Beneath my issues with writing are issues with self-worth.

I’ve begun to explore the issues with self-worth through a personal journaling practice. I’ve found many straightforward sources: being bullied in adolescence; erratic experiences in my family life; social, romantic, and academic rejections. Some are more unexpected: for example, I’ve come to associate a fear-based “travel light” mentality with my mother’s parents’ families having lost everything in the Dust Bowl.

These root issues have little to do with writing, but writing activates them.

So, these root issues have rather little to do with writing, but writing activates them. To write for others—to share my inner life in language—draws on a kind of confidence that, in me, is damaged. Until I started to untangle this recently, I found it simply puzzling why I can’t do things like “set a timer and write each morning” or “write the journey, not just the destination” or “embrace rejection” or whatever, all the good advice out there.

It’s Not Just Me

I expect that this kind of thing is what most writers are suffering when they say: I’m worried my work isn’t good enough. I struggle to stay motivated. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. We should always be growing and improving as writers, but our underlying insecurities aren’t the kind of thing that learning or accolades alone can address.

Because writing is extremely intimate, it summons, activates, what we deal with as people.

Because writing is an extremely intimate act, it summons, activates, what we deal with as people. If this is true, we need to ground how we support writers at this level, or the help we offer will tend to be of the quick-fix variety.

Where We Can Go From Here

The understanding above makes me excited to offer the following three kinds of supports on Writers.com.

1. Writing to Heal

I’ve been surprised how powerful writing can be within a broader healing process.

I have been stunned by how powerful writing can be as tool within a broader healing process. For me specifically, this takes the shape of a journaling practice, and I’ve also seen it combined with body-awareness practices. I’m very excited to explore more, and see what we can offer in this vein to Writers.com community.

The most obvious benefits of writing within healing, as I’ve experienced them, are that writing our thoughts and feelings clarifies them. It also records them, removing the pressure of either remembering them or losing them. These are more or less the base advantages of writing anything, and I’ve found them extremely helpful in personal healing.

Obviously, we can’t heal our minds fully before we start writing. (It’s taking forever in my case.) But for people who suffer in their writing, as I have, some help seems possible.

If you want to get started on this, check out our article on mixing yoga and writing, or on writing as a wellness practice.

2. Craft Foundations

What makes writing emotionally challenging becomes even harder if you feel you’re missing concrete skills that make your writing less engaging for others.

As a personal analogy: I could try to dive right into a local bar’s flamenco dancing night. However, I am an untrained and also a terrified dancer in general, and it would take a cosmically more healed person than I am to suffer the embarrassment of dancing flamenco publicly, rather than just an astronomically more healed person to learn basic principles of dance like what “footwork” means and why it matters.

Many basic writing craft elements are straightforward.

Many of these basic craft elements are straightforward. In prose, for example, learning to reword into the active voice and to reduce adverb use can do much to improve our writing. I’m excited to support exploring these foundations in community.

If you want to get started on building craft foundations, you can start with our overview of prose writing style. 

3. Mindset Support

Understanding that writing engages the deepest—including the most painful—parts of ourselves, we can approach our writing with full respect for what we’re activating.

If we understand that writing engages the deepest parts—including the most painful parts—of ourselves, then we can work with ourselves and one another on that basis. This would mean compassionate, non-bypassing support for one another, as we approach our writing with full respect for the parts of ourselves we’re activating.

I’m not aware of a single resource that’s doing exactly this (if there is one, please tell me), so this would be something I’d want to explore in community, to see what works.

To explore mindset a little more, here’s an article I wrote on the topic of working with writer’s block.

Summing Up

If you were just curious what’s the hardest part of being a writer, I hope the answer you’ve found here—that writing activates our struggles with self-worth—feels intuitively right.

Beyond that, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the ideas above, and more broadly on how to support the whole human being that each writer is. This is where I want Writers.com to go in the future, and I want very much to hear what you feel would help.

The post The Hardest Part of Being a Writer appeared first on Writers.com.

Since the topic of “how to bless someone” can carry lots of possible connotations, let’s start by exploring the topic and defining some terms.

How to Bless Others: What a Blessing Is

We’ll begin with a few examples.

Blessing Example 1: “I Will Always Love You”

Here are song lyrics, originally written by Dolly Parton:

The “I hope” and “I wish” in these lyrics—the active wishing for someone’s well-being and happiness—are core to what blessing means.

Blessing others means expressing an active wish for their well-being and happiness.

Blessing Example 2: “Love After Love”

Here’s a famous poem from Derek Walcott, “Love After Love”:

Again, what makes this poem a blessing, rather than just a confident expression of optimism, is the active wishing for—encouraging—the happy self-discovery that Walcott predicts for the reader.

Blessing Example 3: Star Wars

Here’s a third example, Han Solo in the first Star Wars:

This one is in religious language (the religion here being the Force), and speaking in those terms is a big transition point for Han Solo, certified coolguy and Space Atheist. We don’t know what Han personally believes in this moment, and it doesn’t matter: what matters is that he has enough respect for Luke to express his well-wishes in language that connects them.

Blessing Example 4: Māori Wedding Haka

Lastly, here’s a powerful example of a group blessing that originates from Māori culture:

If you’re interested, here are the lyrics of this haka, in the Māori language and translated into English:

So, these are four examples of how to bless people. Let’s explore why we’d want to bless others, and on what occasions it’s most called for.

How to Bless Others: Understanding Why and When

There is honestly no bad time to bless others with words. Someone like the Dalai Lama more or less travels the world blessing others, and he’s received few legitimate complaints for doing it.

But for busy people like us who have Warhammer 40K sets to finish painting, here are a few particular times when we’ll want to know how to bless people:

• When honoring life events (such as at weddings, baby showers, and funerals)
• When loved ones need support or encouragement
• To express gratitude for others’ kindness
• To support others in grief, loss, or sickness
• At the beginning of something new (a friend starting a new business or relationship, moving to a new place, etc.)
• To congratulate others for major accomplishments
• When giving toasts or speeches

Actually, any heading on the Hallmark aisle is an important reason to give blessings—because Hallmark cards are, literally, prewritten blessings.

From that standpoint, the exciting thing is that we can also write and speak our own blessings, ourselves. They don’t have to sound corny or saccharine, and they can be more meaningful and powerful than coming from others.

Hallmark cards are prewritten blessings—but we can also write them ourselves, and they don’t have to be corny or saccharine.

How to Bless Someone: Clearing Up Misconceptions

Lastly, here are a few possible misconceptions about blessing others:

1. Blessing others is religious. Wishing for others’ happiness has, fortunately, never been trademarked. Religious people do often give blessings in religious terms, as that’s how they understand what’s most wonderful in the universe, but it’s not necessary.
2. Blessing others is a waste of time. Please view the four examples above—from Dolly Parton, Derek Walcott, Star Wars, and the Maori wedding—and see if any of them makes you feel anything. If it does, you appreciate the power of a good blessing, and it’s worth offering that power to others.
3. Blessing others is cringe. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Like a good poem on any topic, a good blessing is strongly felt without being maudlin.
4. I’m not qualified to bless others. Yes, you are. Your well-wishes are your own, and that’s all that’s needed. Actually, much of what distinguishes more obvious “blessing-type people” like the Dalai Lama is just how strongly they wish, and how often.

Blessing means sharing your sincere wishes for the good and happiness of others. Everyone is qualified.

Again, blessing simply means sharing your sincere wishes for the good and happiness of others. It’s no big deal in a gross or overserious sense, but it is quite powerful.

How to Bless Others with Words: 7 Steps

Okay, we know what we’re doing and why. Now, here are some suggestions for how to actually bless others.

The following seven steps are for occasions where more formality and power may be needed. They would be great to go through if, for example, you need to give a speech at a wedding, or are on your way to visit a seriously ill relative in the hospital.

1. Bring to mind the person or people you wish to bless. Imagine, remember, and feel them in as much detail as you can. What memories do you have together? What is the best of this person, as you’ve experienced it?
2. Feel your connection to the person in your body. We experience our feelings in our physical bodies (not in our “brains” or “nowhere” or any other option), so as you’re imagining this person, you’ll want to bring your attention into your full body. If your attention often feels mostly up in your head, this will involve letting it settle deeper into the body—especially the torso—as you continue to imagine the person. The goal is to really feel what this person is to you, and what they’re likely feeling right now.
3. Stay in the feeling for a bit. Once you’re feeling your connection to this person, let it settle and strengthen for a little while. Ideally you can really feel it, the way you can really feel a love scene at the movies.
4. Begin to prompt your mind with “I hope…” or “I wish…” Here, those phrases mean what you hope or wish for the other person. Just start by saying one or the other two-word phrase in your mind, then cut off abruptly, and listen: how do your mind and body want to finish the thought? Write what comes up down, and try again. This is a bit like engaging your mind’s autocomplete feature (“I wish___”), and if you are feeling your connection well from steps 1 to 3, you will likely find things filling it in. If not, wait for a bit, as the true wish may be in the process of forming itself.
5. If something catches you, write freely. If you find a strong wish for this person, it will sort of “take hold” of you, like getting a large fish on a line. Let it move you into writing, and don’t worry if what you’re writing is good or too corny or not cool enough or not original or anything else. Just write it, get it fully out. Freewriting (writing uninterrupted, without thought or editing) is a good tool here.
6. Find the truest part of what you wrote, and build from there. You will hopefully have something raw and bloody looking back at you. Don’t feel embarrassed by that—find a way to share it. For example, let’s say you’re the best man at a wedding, and you came up with, “I hope you’ll spend every day as happy as we were when we were in the treehouse when we were twelve.” Uh-oh, what does that have to do with the bride?! That’s where writing and revision comes in. Don’t throw out the treehouse thing: that is your actual blessing, that only you can give. (The world has heard enough best men say strenuously relatable things like “I hope you always pick up your socks.”) Take the core blessing of the treehouse, and find how that wants to be the basis of what you’ll say to your friend on this day. It’s fun!
7. Express appropriately to yourself and your culture. Vulnerability can be scary, depending on culture. Find a way to convey your blessing that feels appropriate to you, and not in dangerously out-there emotional waters. With our best man example, if you are stoic Montana cowboys, then you can just say, “Some of my happiest memories in life are from the treehouse we built together when we were twelve. I hope that same happiness for you two in your life together.” That is very nice! Actually, some of the most powerful blessings are terse, because you can glimpse how much is locked up behind simple words—as SNL has parodied. I wouldn’t recommend being emotionally bottled-up, though, if you can possibly avoid it.

When you wish to bless someone in a fairly formal way, these seven steps will hopefully get you started. Play with them freely: the main point is simply to find and really feel your connection with another person, and to let your well-wishes express themselves from there.

The main point is to feel your connection with another person, and to express yourself from there.

How to Bless People: Notice When You’re Doing It

As a last exploration, it helps to notice when and how we are already blessing others, in ways big and small, throughout our day.

It helps to notice when and how we are already blessing others, in ways big and small, throughout our day.

Here are a few:

• Email valedictions, such as “Best,” or “Warmly,” are truncated blessings. Written out, they’d be something like “Sending my best wishes” or “Sending you warm feelings.” (Of course, their power is quite limited unless they’re connected to actual feeling.)
• The last line of an email, before the valediction, is often a short blessing as well. “I hope you have a great weekend!” would be an example, or even “Thank you for looking into this for me.” (If your emails tend to be terse, you could see what happens if you “waste” a line on this kind of thing. People like it.)
• The beginning or end of any interaction (at work, with friends, etc.) will often contain a blessing of some sort. “Hey, it’s great to see you!” or “Have a good one” would be examples. Again, these can have power, if they’re connected to actual feelings we have.
• When you congratulate someone on social media, it’s a form of lending support. Even a “Like” or “Heart” is a mini-blessing, which partly explains how we can come to crave them.

Noticing these everyday moments of blessing can help us feel natural with the topic. Again, it is quite natural and close to home, not something intimidating or alien or overformal. This noticing might also help us further extend the tendency.

Noticing where we’re naturally sharing well-wishes for others might help us extend the tendency.

In fact, for me personally, noticing the place of blessing in my speech and writing has helped me quite a bit—today, already. I needed to interrupt writing this article for a work meeting, and I was hyper-aware of the parts where the blessings were (at the very beginning and very end), how I awkwardly cut off the beginning part, and how the ending part, which I didn’t awkwardly cut off, was laying fabric for continued trust in the work relationship.

Five minutes after that, I needed to text a contractor about a property I manage. A tenant was rather mean to him in their last interaction (she felt he was too slow to fix a leak), which was a couple of months ago; so I made sure to add “Hope you’re having a great summer!” to the end of the text, to let him know I wasn’t holding the tenant’s negative feelings toward him.

Beginning with noticing, you can lean into blessing others, in ways that are comfortable and authentic to you.

Little things like this add up, so being aware of when you’re blessing others has a lot of power. Then you can lean into it, a little bit, in ways that are comfortable and authentic to you.

How to Bless Others: Enjoy!

I didn’t say this explicitly above, but to me blessing is the ultimate power of speech. We can say anything we want (Your job is making pool noodles? How hilariously sad for you), but we’re also on this actual earth with other people who are, in their fundamental experience of life, just like us.

In light of this, I feel that blessing is what speech is for. That probably isn’t sound evolutionary biology (speech probably evolved for—what, hunting?), but I still find it urgently true in a different way. As an analogy, cheesecake is definitely for eating, however it got here.

So give it a try! Again, none of this has to be a very big deal. If you don’t have any speeches coming up, I would say the best place to start could be just to notice where you are extending good feelings and well wishes in your life already, and then see if the noticing makes that want to expand just a little bit.

A simple start can just be noticing, and extending from there.

I hope this article helped you, and that you enjoyed it. Thank you very much for reading.

The post How to Bless Others appeared first on Writers.com.

In this article, we’ll look at writer’s block more deeply, asking “What is writer’s block?”—beyond its most obvious symptom (trouble writing) and into its underlying nature and causes. We’ll share standard advice on how to overcome writer’s block, and then offer additional suggestions based on a deeper look at the issue.

“Why Do I Have Writer’s Block?”: What Causes Writer’s Block

In general, writer’s block is not caused by simple problems with easy solutions, such as “being too busy” or “not having anything interesting to write about.”

In general, writer’s block is not caused by simple problems with easy solutions.

These superficial issues can seem to be causing our writer’s block, if they’re the only ready explanation at hand. But if those were the real and only causes, we could easily get rid of writer’s block with simple advice like, “Wake up earlier,” and “What interests you? Write about that.” That advice doesn’t work, because these aren’t the real causes of writer’s block.

What Causes Writer’s Block

In the 1970s, two researchers at Yale studied writer’s block, and concluded that it had four main causes:

1. Feeling constrained and creatively blocked by the “rules” of writing.
2. Seeking external validation and attention through one’s writing, and becoming disappointed and angry if not getting it.
3. Feeling not good enough and paralyzed by self-criticism.
4. Feeling afraid of having one’s writing compared with the work of others.

These sets of issues have been labeled “apathy,” “anger,” “anxiety,” and “social hostility,” but to me that has that overconfident 1970s Ron Burgundy feel to it, rather than being a useful description of these people’s inner worlds.

Whether or not these are the official four causes of writer’s block, you can see what they have in common: they reflect places where our psychology makes writing fearful or unpleasant.

Fundamentally, writer’s block occurs when an element of our psychology makes writing fearful or unpleasant.

What Causes Writer’s Block: A Personal Example

I can share why I sometimes have writer’s block, based on what I learned in a yoga-and-writing session earlier this year with our instructor Nadia Colburn:

That agonized handwriting (getting to emote in your handwriting is a big benefit of freehand writing) reads “DESPAIR. I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY.”

Later in the session:

This reads, “I WANT TO GIVE WHAT IS PERFECT LIKE HE DID”

So, of the four options above, my issues with writer’s block are largely reasons 3 (paralyzed by self-criticism) and 4 (afraid of having my writing compared with the work of others).

In my case, “I have nothing to say” means the following: my personal interest is in spiritual writing, and I don’t feel far along enough in my own spiritual journey to be able to contribute anything the world really needs. So “Feeling not good enough and paralyzed by self-criticism” does fit the bill. “Despair” is an additional bit of what that feels like in my case.

“Like he did” refers to a personal favorite spiritual writer, whose writings feel to me like a very high bar that I don’t know if I’ll ever approach—in which case, why am I adding yet more inferior words into this world? So, “Feeling afraid of having one’s writing compared with the work of others” does fit, although in this case it would be me doing the comparing.

What is Writer’s Block?: A Deeper Look

Let’s look at writer’s block more deeply. As we can see in my example, writer’s block is not a simple issue of needing a jolt of excitement or discipline. Instead, as The New Yorker reports in an article on writer’s block: “Many symptoms of writer’s block are the kinds of problems psychiatrists think about.”

I would say this more straightforwardly: writer’s block is a topic within mental health.

Writer’s block is a topic within mental health.

Please don’t take that the wrong way. By mental health, I mean “our level of inner well-being,” and, for all of us, it varies, for reasons. For example, although I’m great one-on-one, I am personally terrified of crowds of new people. So, depending on the situation (it varies), I struggle with people, and those struggles are for reasons which I only partly understand. This is the kind of thing I’m referring to, and it’s the shared experience of everyone who’s ever lived.

There is still sometimes stigma around acknowledging that our minds actually do struggle. So I want to emphasize that I don’t feel that my own or anyone’s experiences of writer’s block are in any way an occasion for self-blame, shame, or stigma.

Rather, I’m simply saying that, just as our psychology can help us or hinder us in our other life pursuits—meeting friends in a new place, recovering from a career setback, and so on—it can help us or hinder us in our writing. In other words, writer’s block is about how we feel about ourselves and our world.

Writer’s block is about how we feel about ourselves and our world.

In my own case, I have no trouble writing, as far as that goes. What has tended to block me is my sense of inferiority, unreadiness, as a writer of spirituality, which I never even fully noticed until the workshop with Nadia. It’s an emotional block.

As the Yale researchers found, most experiences of writer’s block follow this theme. Writer’s block is not about writing per se, but about our feelings around writing: feeling judged by others, feeling rejected, feeling inferior, feeling stupid, feeling hunted by self-criticism, feeling stifled and oppressed, feeling alone.

Writer’s block is not about writing per se, but about our feelings around writing: feeling judged, rejected, self-critical, and so on.

The role of writing itself is simply that it triggers those feelings in some people. We’re disciplining ourselves to find words that seem worthy to write down, and then sharing those words out for others to scrutinize (or ignore!). Many parts of that process can be very heavy emotionally. If the process activates painful feelings in us so strongly that we can’t proceed, we call that writer’s block.

If writing activates painful feelings in us so strongly that we can’t proceed, we call that writer’s block.

Based on this knowledge, let’s look at some advice for overcoming writer’s block. Simple behavioral fixes really can help with writer’s block in some cases, and not in others: it depends exactly what’s causing it for you. We’ll look at different approaches below.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

Overcoming Writer’s Block: The Standard Advice

The standard advice for writer’s block offers simple behavioral fixes.

The standard advice for writer’s block focuses on simple behavioral fixes and optimizations, such as:

• Break your writing project into manageable chunks. For example, you can set a timer for a set number of minutes and “do nothing but write” during that time. Take refreshing breaks between sessions.
• Eliminate distractions. For example, you can disable your internet access as you write.
• Don’t get caught in perfectionism as you write a first draft; remind yourself that the draft doesn’t need to be perfect, or even good.
• Find a physical environment and time of day where you feel most inspired and creative, and make it a habit to write there and then.
• Establish a ritual around your writing. For example, you might have a particular song or drink when it’s time to write.
• Do something calming (meditate, stretch) before you start writing, to soothe any anxiety you feel.

If these types of straightforward advice solve your writer’s block, that’s great: whatever its cause may have been, you’ve found a way to work with your system to move past it.

Overcoming Writer’s Block: When the Standard Advice Isn’t Working

If simple fixes don’t work for you, you’ll need to change your approach.

However, if the fixes above don’t work, you’ll need to change your approach. When these behavioral fixes do try to engage the deeper causes of writer’s block—the internal challenges we discussed above—the result is advice like this:

“Consciously stop any non-productive comments running through your head by replacing them with productive ones. Rather than labeling yourself a ‘bad writer,’ think about what parts of the writing process you excel at (idea generation, conclusions, sentence style, etc.) and plan to allot more time for the steps that take you longer.”

To my eye, this is not very curious about the writer’s inner world. It feels like ignoring calls from a collections agency one-by-one as they come in (call up one of your friends instead!), rather than figuring out what the agency wants and what to do about it.

If the standard advice for how to overcome writer’s block isn’t working for you—as it hasn’t for me—then read on.

Overcoming Writer’s Block: Directly Accessing Creativity

The New Yorker article acknowledges the deeper causes of writer’s block, but describes the Yale researchers finding a moderately successful fix for writer’s block that doesn’t address those causes. The fix has to do with producing dreamlike mental images:

“These writers would sit in a dim, quiet room and contemplate a series of ten prompts asking them to produce and then describe dream-like creations. They might, for example, ‘visualize’ a piece of music, or a specific setting in nature. Afterward, they would visualize something from their current projects, and then generate a ‘dreamlike experience’ based on that project.

In multiple cases, the exercises led, over time, to the alleviation of writer’s block—even in the absence of therapy… Emotional blockages did exist. But he was wrong to assume that, in order to move past them creatively, writers needed to address their emotional lives. In fact, the process could go the other way.”

I think this is valuable advice, from the following standpoint: we don’t have to heal ourselves first; the writing itself can be healing.

We don’t have to heal ourselves first; the writing itself can be healing.

But I find the broader implication—that, yes, you can just ignore the causes of your fear of writing by accessing your creativity directly—to still be rather ignorant.

The article expresses dismay that everyone’s mind is different: “Unhappy writers, it seemed, were unhappy in their own ways, and would require therapies tailored to address their specific emotional issues.”

The objection seems to be, “Who’s got time for that?”

“Therapy” here means “professional talk therapy”—you would need to pay for a person’s time, and there’s no guarantee it would work. Under those conditions, I suppose I agree with the objection. It still seems rather dismal.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block: Working with Root Causes

If, after we’ve “tried everything,” our writer’s block continues to haunt and confuse us, it’s likely because we’ve been trying behavioral fixes for what is ultimately an inner, personal conflict in how we experience ourselves and our world.

If our writer’s block continues to haunt and confuse us, we’ve likely been trying behavioral fixes for a deeper inner conflict.

As an example, let’s return again to my own writer’s block. Is setting a kitchen timer and taking regular breaks really going to help me with the following dilemma: Why would I want to put more inferior words into the world?

Timed or untimed isn’t the issue, nor that I write without a set writing ritual, or with access to the internet. Again, I’ve been struggling with an emotional block, something so painful in how I feel about myself and the world that it shuts down my writing.

If we want to work with those directly, how do we do it? Read on.

Working with Writer’s Block: Embodiment and Connection

Not coincidentally, I first even noticed my writer’s block directly—saw it for what it was, including its causes—in a workshop that combined the very energetic embodied practice of kundalini yoga with short episodes of freewriting.

I’ve written about the experience here, but overall I’d like to advance a few things that are extremely important to the positive result I had, both in Nadia’s description of her teaching and in my own experience:

Come Into the Body

To feel into the things we carry, we need to feel into our bodies. We as a culture are needing to come out of the rational-head-on-a-stick model we inherited, as useful as it can be.

So much of our emotional life is in the body. Our feelings are called “feelings” rather than “musings,” because we feel them, physically.

In particular, the body stores our trauma: the things that scare us for reasons we don’t understand (or, more precisely, don’t remember), which is a topic utterly relevant to writers’ block.

Our traumas, large and small, are deeply embodied. Just changing our thoughts or attitudes won’t address them, and this is why we can’t simply talk ourselves out of writer’s block.

That our traumas, large and small, are deeply embodied, and not addressable by trying just to change our thoughts or attitudes, is a finding so important that it is the title of the seminal book on trauma: The Body Keeps the Score. This is why we can’t simply talk ourselves out of writer’s block.

In Nadia’s workshop, we spent minutes just getting into full experience of our bodies, and the writing came from there. Nadia’s direct advice is as follows:

Here’s more detail on that same advice from a later workshop I attended with her: “When we’re writing we often disconnect from our body; see if you can stay connected to your body and your breath as you write, so you’re not just writing from your head, but from lower down.”

Feeling and Writing into Blocks

Nadia says, “Yoga gave me tools to unlock what my body was carrying.” This doesn’t have to be through yoga, but the idea is that writer’s block, or any other emotional-energetic block in the body, is not something to route around or ignore. Instead, it’s something to feel into, kindly.

Any energetic block in the body is not something to route around, but something to feel into, kindly.

This involves directly experiencing the energy block, in the body, as part of a gentle, embodied practice like Nadia led. Then, as you feel into the block, you can give it voice, through writing itself. The jagged handwriting I shared at the top of the article started as energy: as feelings in the body (tension in the upper stomach, constriction my throat), which then found words to express themselves. The reason the letters are so jagged is because I was allowing this energy to flow and shift, including through my hand as I wrote.

You can write into blocks to explore them, and this is an important method of letting the why of your writer’s block express itself, as happened in my case.

Blocks as an Energy Source

You’ll also find that the energy stored in emotional blocks—including writer’s block—can power your writing.

Again, writer’s block isn’t really a bland, “I can’t find cool things to write about”-type experience. Instead, it’s an “I feel like I’ll never be good enough”-type experience, or “I know I’m better than other people, and I don’t want to give them a chance to disagree by criticizing my writing”-type experience, or any of the other inner conflicts on or off the Yale researchers’ list.

All those cases have something in common: they’re very painful! There’s a lot of energy there.

When your writer’s block reveals its actual source and nature, you’ll likely have plenty to talk about.

When your writer’s block stops being a random weird thing you banish with an egg timer and a favorite cola, and reveals its actual source and nature, then it’s quite likely that you’ll have plenty to talk about. You may also have plenty of energy to do the talking, as with my jagged handwriting.

To explore any of these elements, you can look at Nadia’s teaching, or any other process that combines deep bodily awareness with writing into blocks.

Working with Writer’s Block: Meeting Our Parts

I can’t do full justice to it here, but I’ve been reading a book called No Bad Parts, by Richard Schwartz, and applying its exercises in my own life. It’s changed both my perspective and my day-to-day life by an extreme amount—perhaps more than any other book I’ve ever read.

The book’s core thesis (and of the broader literature known as Internal Family Systems, IFS) is that our minds are not single but multiple: we have many “parts,” each in their own role. By the time we reach adulthood, many of these roles are stuck and confused.

Imagine a normally nice person who has “a mean streak” or “a bad side.” The idea is that that “streak” or “side” is real: it is one of many parts of that person, with its own goals, fears, and perspectives. It is not just an odd and inexplicable “habit” affecting a single, coherent individual.

How does this apply to writer’s block? Well, writer’s block is similarly “odd and inexplicable.” How could a person who loves and values creativity find their own creativity blocked? How come we keep telling ourselves to “just write it, it doesn’t matter what other people think”—and yet we never do? It just doesn’t make sense, if we’re the single, rational, straightforward unit we often assume we are.

Writer’s block happens when we can no longer silence parts of ourselves—that are bound up in shame, inferiority, craving the approval of others, fearing rejection, and so on—enough to keep writing.

After exploring the perspective in No Bad Parts (known as Internal Family Systems, IFS), it’s impossible not to see writer’s block in terms of parts of ourselves—parts that are deeply bound up in shame, inferiority, craving the approval of others, fearing rejection, and so on—feeling so much pain and conflict when we write that we cannot continue.

In general, we’ve never even noticed these parts for what they are (as I hadn’t with the energies I was voicing in Nadia’s course), let alone begun the healing process of reconnecting with them. When we can no longer silence these parts enough to keep writing, we call it “writer’s block.”

Parts Give More Detail

Working with writer’s block using this perspective is very similar to what I did in Nadia’s workshop. The only difference is looking at the conflict in my body not just as an energy, but as a part—a miniature personality. The emotional block I felt is not “my” overall sense of inferiority (which I don’t have!), but is within a system of feelings and beliefs held by a part of me.

This part feels inferior, and is in conflict with other parts of me—say, the parts that would love to write a book, or that feel that what I might have to say may not be perfect, but it is surely worth saying.

Crucially, this part, and all parts, are a friend, not an enemy. The book title says it beautifully: No Bad Parts. When a part is in pain, I don’t need to convince it otherwise, silence or distract it so I can do what must be done, or anything else aggressive, hostile, or bypass-y. I need to listen, and discover why it feels that way.

You can actually communicate with your emotional blocks—including whatever is giving you writer’s block.

The big discovery here is that you can actually communicate with your emotional blocks—including whatever is giving you writer’s block. They aren’t just energies unspooling in the body, but they have stories, fears, goals, and perspectives of their own, which you can actually learn!

That process of reconnection and discovery—which unfolds through energy moving, as happened to me in Nadia’s course—is the healing process itself. It also makes a great energy source for writing, as I mentioned above.

Try It!

If you want to get into this, I strongly recommend reading No Bad Parts. Do the exercises in the first few chapters. (The book is front-loaded in the value it delivers, which is nice.) From personal experience, it has really addressed my own writer’s block.

If you do get into this, please proceed with caution: it is like opening pressurized containers, to an extent that has repeatedly surprised me. Make sure to have good supports around yourself.

Courses to Help You Overcome Writer’s Block

Many students of ours take our classes to find community, accountability, inspiration, and other forms of support. If you’re looking for another way to tackle your writer’s block head on, take a look at these courses on embodiment and journaling:

Courses on Embodiment

• Sing the Body Electric: Poetry of the Body
• Telling the Stories Your Body Holds
• Writing the Body: A Nonfiction Craft Seminar
• Writing Chronic Illness

Journaling Courses

• These Fragments: From Journal Pages to Personal Essays
• Where the Diary Ends and the Essay Begins
• Creating the Visual Journal
• From the Source: Journaling for Self-Knowledge and Creativity

Courses for Inspiration

• It Starts with Play: Get (Back) Into Writing
• Finding Inspiration in Dreams

You can also take a look at our upcoming online writing courses. 

Working with Writer’s Block: Final Thoughts

No one wants to suffer writer’s block. So we ask, understandably, “How to overcome writer’s block?” “How to get rid of writer’s block?”  and so on.

On the other hand, given its actual causes, trying to “cure” or “banish” or “get rid of” a severe case of writer’s block, without addressing those causes, could be a bit like looking for a trick to silence the hungry kittens in your pantry so you can get back to composing your violin sonata. Even if you succeed, the whole thing is rather sad.

In this article, I’ve given you a detailed description of the causes of writer’s block, and a lot of options for addressing it—from the simple and straightforward to the profound and weird. In general, I’d say try simple first, just on the off chance you have a mild case. If that isn’t working, get weirder, and you may find yourself healing your actual issues too.

I hope this helps you, and happy writing!

The post Writer’s Block: What Causes Writer’s Block, and How to Overcome It appeared first on Writers.com.

When my memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body, was in its just-about final, final, final draft, a friend who had recently read it told me to cut the part where I kind of diss a family member. As soon as she suggested this, a chord rang through my core. I knew she was right, and I also knew how much I didn’t ever want to use my writing to counter negative family dynamics or ever use my writing to get back at someone who did me wrong.

My decision at that point was easy: the scene wasn’t crucial to the book, and the family member was an exceedingly minor character, but this experience, along with teaching students writing memoir and memoir-esque projects for years, has made me think hard about what it means to write about real people. Moreover, I’ve been pondering for many years the ethics of writing about other people’s lives. My friends and family know well that anything they do on the delightful/amusing/winning side of things may well appear in my blog (they also know I don’t tend to expose their foibles) or perhaps in an essay or memoir, yet just having people know you’re a writer who might use them as material isn’t, in itself, ethical to my mind.

Here are some notions and ground rules I’ve arrived at over the years:

• Show Them the Manuscript Before Publication: If you’re writing about a family member or friend in something about to be published, it’s only fair to show it to them and make sure publication wouldn’t cause them pain. The exception is, of course, writing about estranged people who brutalized you (but even then, take good care to present the story in the way it best needs to be told). For a blog or short essay, I might say to someone, “Hey, I want to include a picture of you in your starry pink dress and write about what you said about springtime in Siberia. Cool with you?” For something more substantial, share the manuscript ahead of time. When I wrote Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each other, based on oral histories with two men, I showed them first the interviews and later the manuscript. At the same time, I made it clear that I wouldn’t be changing any quotes (both men are not native English speakers), nor would I write things necessarily the way they themselves would write them, but if there was something they couldn’t live with seeing in print, I would remove or alter it. When The Sky Begins at Your Feet was in final stages, I sent copies to my immediate family members as well as my husband and children, and I told them, “Let me know if there’s something about you that really bothers you.” Hardly anyone asked me to change anything, but seeing it ahead of time helped them feel good about the process.
• Tell the Truth Without Tattling: What was true when you were five is true now. Our writing — even and especially memoir — should never be to tattle-tale on someone or even the score. First of all, such writing could be legally questionable. Second of all, it’s just not right to use our privilege as writers (as in, the privilege of putting our side of things out into the world) to hold power over another person. Even if you’re writing about a family member who physically abused you, the writing will be strongest and most transformative if it’s written from the perspective of telling your truth rather than judging and convicting your torturers. What’s the difference? Usually, it’s perspective — having had enough time, space and healing pass through you that you can tell the story that wants to be told. Showing — through precise description and clear images — will go much further than bundling it up in a lot of adjectives.
• Represent Yourself Warmly, Accurately, and Unmercifully: There’s a line in one of my favorite movies, “Almost Famous,” where the almost-famous rock star is worried about how the very young rock journalist will portray the band in a Rolling Stone article. The young journalist says, “I will quote you warmly and accurately.” Later, the journalist’s mentor tells him to “be unmerciful,” and reminds him that sanitizing a story doesn’t serve anyone. When writing about yourself, you need to be especially unmerciful and yet also warm. Show your humanness: your foibles and failures, your stupid thinking and social gaffs. Look at how Anne Lamott’s memoirs are so honest when it comes to her flawed humanness that most of us adore her and love reading her books. Being honest also makes for a more compelling book.
• There’s Nothing Wrong With Asking Permission: When I had started writing my first novel, The Divorce Girl, I had a conversation with my father. “I’m writing a novel about the divorce,” I told him, meaning that it was about his divorce from my mother. He shrugged, “Write what you want.” He also knew writing what I wanted would entail me showing – even in a fictionalized way – how abusive he was. That conversation gave me greater freedom in writing the novel, and started us toward some kind of forgiveness and reconciliation. While this doesn’t always happen, there’s nothing wrong in erring on the side of asking such questions.
• Just Because Someone is Dead Doesn’t Mean They’re Fair Game: It’s easy to think, “I’ll write the truth about Mom after she’s dead,” and many people do wait until the ones who did them the most harm can show up in print. But it’s a fallacy to believe the coast is ethically clear when someone is dead. Others who knew and loved them live on, and also, it’s a good thing to be in good relationship even with those we’ve lost. So think through how to best portray someone and a situation in the clearest, truest, and more ethical light. Doing so serves you and the highest aspiration of the writing.

It All Comes Down to This: What is your intention with your writing? What do you want to give to readers? Why are you writing this article or essay or book? Strip away whatever yearning to be loved or accepted, get revenge, feel worthy enough and whatever else is floating on the surface. Then ask the writing what its deepest intention is, and how you can best serve this piece of writing in line with your own values.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg has written about a lot of real people in her blog of 17 years, Everyday Magic (http://carynmirriamgoldberg.com/blog) and a collection of her blog posts, Everyday Magic: Field Notes on the Mundane and Miraculous; in her fictionalized novel, The Divorce Girl; and in several memoirs, including The Sky Begins at Your Feet: Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body, Poem on the Range, and Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other; as well as in seven collections of poetry.She looks forward to diving into the rushing river of students’ memoirs in her upcoming class, “The Body and Soul of Your Memoir”.

The post Writing About Real People appeared first on Writers.com.

How to Start Journaling: What Is a Journal?

“Keeping a journal” could technically be any ongoing, regular record (like recording your resting heart rate), but I personally journal about my own experiences of life: what I’m going through, what I’m struggling with, what I like, stray thoughts I have, ideas for poems or book titles, and anything else I feel like sharing with myself.

I journal about my experience of life: what I’m going through, what I’m struggling with, what I like, and anything else I feel like sharing with myself.

For me, journaling is primarily a spiritual and wellness practice. (I’ll write about these elements specifically in a separate article.) For now, I would say that journaling, as I mean it in this article, is an ongoing practice of recording and reflecting on our own lives.

Journaling, as we’ll discuss it here, is an ongoing practice of recording and reflecting on our own lives.

You can call this a “diary,” if you want—definitions vary, but people seem to see a diary as being more structured and having a stronger emphasis on once-per-day than my own approach to journaling. To me, the journal vs. diary discussion doesn’t matter too much, as it’s just writing down my own life for myself, whatever one calls it.

What is a Journal Entry?

As a last piece of terminology, each piece of writing in a journal is known as a “journal entry.” You might have one entry each day, or many—in my own journal, I’m usually entering snippets of things throughout the day, so the “entries” are really strings of thought and experience that bleed into each other, much more than they are defined, organized, once-per-day units. A more structured approach may work better for you as you begin journaling regularly.

How I Started Journaling

I wasn’t looking to start a journal—I stumbled into it. About two years ago. I was trying to write a book about my spiritual tradition, and as I started to gather the material I thought I’d share, I found myself more and more often recording my personal thoughts and reflections. At some point, I started noting the date of those thoughts and reflections. Just like that, I was journaling. So for me, how to start journaling was: accidentally.

My journal grew out of my book project the way mushrooms grow out of an old log. I can watch this process happen in the Google Doc where I started journaling. And now the mushrooms are huge, and they mean a lot more to me than the original log.

What Journaling is Like

Journaling, as I do it, is extremely personal.

Journaling, as I do it, is extremely personal! It’s much too private to show to anyone else. There are no other people (friends, family, relatives) who wouldn’t be shocked by much or even most of it. I’m not embarrassed by this. Evidently, it’s just the case that what we humans can show to others isn’t close to 100 percent of what we are.

It turns out that what we humans can show to others isn’t close to 100 percent of what we are.

To me, an enormous pleasure of journaling is to write (thousands of pages of) what is so searingly personal that I can’t share it with anybody else. I love being that naked and open with myself, with no need to look over my shoulder. I had nothing like that outlet before I started journaling, and it was a love I fell into on accident.

To me, an enormous pleasure of journaling is to be able to write what is so searingly personal that I can’t share it with anybody.

How to Start a Journal: 7 Benefits of Journaling

These have been the major benefits of journaling for me. There are many others.

1. Journaling records life.

The first, maybe obvious, benefit is that I’m not in danger of forgetting what my life has been like. This is like having a shopping list when you go to the grocery store. Rather than try to keep things in my mind, which I have to stress out about remembering (and will certainly forget), I record them. Then there’s no danger I’ll forget them.

I can often let them go at that point, which I’ve found is very helpful for personal development: many things come up and then release without needing to be something I focus on for a longer time than that. So the act of recording my life actually helps me move through it rather than get stuck on it, afraid I’ll forget something important.

The act of recording my life helps me move through it rather than get stuck on it, afraid I’ll forget something important.

I can look back on two years of journals and remember exactly where I was at different times, how I felt, what I was struggling with, what I hadn’t yet realized or encountered, and even specific details—little interactions with my daughter or my wife that I never would have remembered and that are quite wonderful to me. Journaling records life, and in that sense, it preserves life.

2. Journaling maps the arc of life.

This is related to the first benefit. Having a clear picture of my life over time helps me see the sweep of life in a way I can’t when I’m up-close, day-to-day. It’s like looking at a “100 Years of Fashion” coffee table book: you can see very clearly where today’s fashions came from. They didn’t just pop up out of thin air, but it takes added perspective to see that.

It’s the same in my own life: I can see where I am now more clearly, because I can see exactly where I was one week, one month, one year ago. I find that this benefit adds up the longer I continue journaling regularly.

3. Journaling helps us listen.

For me, journaling is a way to listen, to hear—I could say “hear myself,” but it also feels broader than that, like hear life itself. Before I started journaling, I was much less attuned to life, because I didn’t have this type of listening practice.

Before I started journaling, I was much less attuned to life.

4. Journaling is cathartic.

I find that recording words helps bring the feelings that accompany them to the surface. It helps those feelings find full expression. If I didn’t have journaling, I’d feel quite bottled up with the things I carry.

Sharing words helps bring the feelings that accompany them to the surface, and it helps those feelings find full expression.

Journaling has many, many times helped me say something I needed to say—knowing that only I could hear it, so it could be as embarrassing as it needed to be.

5. Journaling feels good.

For me, the act of journaling is pleasurable. I enjoy being in relationship with my feelings, and with the voice and voices that come through my mind. Sometimes I’m feeling good, sometimes I’m feeling bad, but I feel much less lonely and more connected. I find an intimacy in my own life that is wonderful in a way I never expected when I accidentally started journaling.

6. Journaling brings self-knowledge.

When I journal, I often make connections and understand what I need to do much better than if I’m just sitting with my experiences, even thinking about them.

I’ve often recorded impactful experiences, and seen deeper meanings in them only once they were in my journal.

I’ve often recorded vivid dreams or impactful experiences, and seen deeper meanings in them only once they were in my journal. Again, our memory can only hold so much: if I’m trying to remember something that happened while also working to understand it, it’s a bit like trying to both remember and analyze the Gettysburg Address. If I can instead see the Address on the page, I can make connections with the burden of memory relieved.

7. Journaling brings self-love.

When I look through my journal, I can see very clearly that I am good.

When I look through my journal, I can see very clearly that I am good. I am quite clearly working with challenges and with my own flaws and imperfections, but I am also obviously well-intentioned and kind, basically a good person.

Journaling is like a mirror, and I see myself better for having it.

Without a mirror, we can’t see ourselves easily, because we are too close. Journaling is like a mirror—a record of my mind that is external to my mind, not just the moment-to-moment thrum of my mind itself—and I see myself better in it than without it.

This is a bit of a spiritual statement to make, but if you give yourself genuinely to journaling, you will see yourself in the mirror, and I promise that what you will see is good. Depending on what you may be struggling with, you may not see it as good, but I promise you that it is good, and that seeing that goodness is possible.

I hope those benefits have you motivated and oriented. Let’s start to look at the specifics of how to start journaling.

How to Start Journaling: Choose the Right Formats

I could not have started, or continued, journaling without finding formats that were right for me.

Where and how you’ll record your thoughts turns out to be extremely important in how to start a journal. I could not have started, or continued, journaling without finding journaling formats—tools and technologies—that were right for me.

Finding these right-for-me formats took me a very long way past pen and notebook (although I use that too!), and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about the strengths and weaknesses of the different options.

Freehand (Pen-and-Paper) Journaling: 2 Advantages and 3 Disadvantages

Freehand writing—writing by hand onto paper—is, of course, the traditional way to journal. Here are some advantages and disadvantages I’ve found to journaling freehand.

Advantage #1: More Embodied

Freehand writing is known to engage the brain better than typing or than to dictate into a transcription app. Freehand writing is a much more embodied experience, and to me it feels much more powerful. I feel much more powerfully connected to what I’m writing.

Advantage #2: More Versatile

Freehand writing opens up all kinds of artistic possibilities.

Freehand writing opens up all kinds of artistic possibilities. The freehand parts of my journal often have wildly varying fonts and font sizes. They might incorporate drawings, or if I’m really upset I might write in a jagged hand whose letters heavily overlap each other. Anything is possible.

Here’s a page from my paper journal that I’ve blurred, to show the contrasts in handwriting as I feel different things.

Changing fonts in a Google Doc or hitting italics in a phone’s notes app is not the same, and so freehand writing just packs a lot more information and feeling. It has dimensions that typing just doesn’t.

Disadvantage #1: Slow

If I’m having a vivid experience and try to journal about it freehand, the writing will sometimes slow that experience down.

Relative to talking or typing, freehand writing is by far the slowest. If I’m having a vivid experience and try to journal about it freehand, the writing will sometimes slow that experience down: the experience will start to fade as I wait to finish writing out my current thought word-by-word. Another thing that can happen is that I feel compelled to share only little snippets of the experience, maybe terse bullet points rather than everything that happened or is happening in as much detail as I can give.

I have vivid dreams, and I sometimes narrate everything I can remember about them into a transcription app on my phone. It would take me literally hours to write those several thousand words freehand, and by that time much of my dream would be forgotten. It simply wouldn’t be worth the work to try this way. When I go back months later and read the transcripts of these dreams, I find that they are extremely vivid and detailed, and I can remember much more than I could if I was just writing the highlights freehand.

Disadvantage #2: Tiring

I find writing freehand to be quite strenuous.

Perhaps because it is slow, I find writing freehand to be quite strenuous. It’s not something I could easily do for long periods on end—typing or speaking isn’t either, but I would definitely find those less draining.

Especially if you’ve been feeling like you ought to journal, but can never get around to it, it’s possible that recording your thoughts by hand with pen and paper is part of the difficulty. Maybe not, but I feel it’s worth playing with other options to see.

Disadvantage #3: No Backups

With freehand writing, if you lose your journal, you lose your journal.

With freehand writing, if you lose your journal, you lose your journal. If your journal gets wet or a roommate or spouse throws it out, you may lose everything you’ve written. A simpler scenario is that you might also simply lose interest in your journal—and then, five or ten years later, realize that you really wish to review something in it. If you had everything saved in a Google Doc or emailed to yourself, you could probably find it, but with a physical journal you might be looking through your attic, storage containers, and so on.

You can overcome this lack of backups by taking pictures of every journal page with a smartphone, which leads us into the other technology options for how to start journaling.

Other Journaling Formats

If you’re open to considering other formats and technology choices as part of how to start journaling, here’s what works for me based on trial and error. Again, I would not personally be journaling if it was only freehand, so this choice is quite important.

Very Reluctant Mac Plug

To get it out of the way, I have to say that these most of options use smartphones, and that iPhones work better than Androids or other choices. It upsets me to write that, because I used Androids for a long time, and because I dislike Apple (or, honestly, any $3 trillion company) just as much as the next person. But iPhones simply are more seamless. They work, without making you figure things out. Also, a lot of app developers are snobs, and only write cutting-edge apps for iPhone, not for Android—two of the tools I use everyday for journaling are iPhone only.

I also believe the whole experience would be even more seamless with a Mac computer. I’ve used Windows my whole life, and I’m considering switching—partly for the sake of my journal. So, if you’re considering making technology switches, I reluctantly but firmly recommend Apple products. They work best for the anytime-in-the-field-in-the-moment writing that journaling is for me.

With that (not sponsored; I wish!) plug out of the way, here is the mix of technologies I’ve found work well for journaling. If you’re looking into how to start journaling, you might want to consider these.

1. Notes app on phone

On an iPhone, this app is specifically called Notes. You can write an endless amount in a single Note, which is what my journal looks like.

The default method of text entry is by typing on your phone’s keyboard, or with “Slide to Type,” which is a bit faster. This method is slow, perhaps just a bit faster than free handwriting, but I do use it fairly often.

What I most often do is dictate what I want to say into the best transcription app I can find. For a long time, that transcription app was the ChatGPT app for iOS. The little gray microphone here connects to ChatGPT’s Whisper AI transcription service, which is the best transcription I’ve found. I will dictate a journal entry into the Whisper service and then paste it into Notes, without ever sending it to ChatGPT.

However, ChatGPT does have a habit of sometimes returning nothing at all, meaning you lose hundreds of words that you may not remember, so that’s not great. Also, the interface makes it too easy to delete the block of text that you’re trying to copy. I still use this from time to time, though.

2. Google Doc

My journal started in a Google Doc, which is now over 3,000 pages long. Most of those pages are images, screenshots from my computer, which I paste in, and I imagine there would be about 500 words worth of text as well. Google Doc is great because you can access it from any device. Access it and update it from any device, as long as that device is connected to the internet. It also lets you type, rather than write freehand, which is much faster, and which is the way that I journaled for the first year or so. Lastly, I can’t overstate how helpful adding computer screenshots and other pictures to my journal has been, because they often illustrate exactly, not approximately, what I’m thinking about or dealing with.

I skimmed the 3,000+ pages of my Google Doc journal for an example, and here is one screengrab that didn’t feel too personal to share. It’s of a drawing my daughter made when she was 3, which, to me, looks like a blue dragon soaring in front of the moon and stars (once I figured out how it might want to be oriented).

With those upsides of Google Doc journaling described, here’s a downside: it requires a robust, arguably unhealthy trust of big tech companies. I was willing to do this, but you might not be, especially if you are considering running for US President on an anti-tech platform, or anything else that could turn the whole situation cyberpunk. Actually, this warning applies for all the higher-tech options explored here.

3. Whisper Memos app

This app allows you to dictate 15-minute chunks of spoken text, which it transcribes almost perfectly.

Snobbishly available for only iPhone, this app allows you to dictate 15-minute chunks of spoken text, which it transcribes with almost perfect accuracy. It automatically emails the transcript to you for long-term storage.

This is quickly becoming my most used way of journaling, because I record my thoughts at the speed of speech itself, which for me is just about the speed of thought. So I can be fully in an experience, and be describing it at the same time. In an odd way, it’s actually more embodied than freehand writing, because I’m not stuck in one position. I often narrate multiple energies, or multiple points of view, and my tone of voice often changes from quiet to loud, or from slow to slower to fast.

Whisper sometimes records these changes with exclamation marks, or ellipses, but usually not. Still, when I watch the transcripts, when I read the transcripts, I feel extremely clear on what I was feeling moment to moment, which is very rewarding, and I think is a good goal for journaling.

Whisper Memos charges a one-time fee of $30 after you record your first 10 memos. By that time, you should have a sense whether the app is worth the investment for your personal needs.

4. Phone photo and video

I highly recommend working photography into your journaling.

I highly recommend working photography into your journaling. Obviously, the most seamless way to do this is using your phone’s camera. I’ll often see something that is only there for a few seconds, like a butterfly on a branch—and exactly how it looks, its colors against the color of the branch, is quite important, part of the memory I hope to record. My phone’s camera is really the only option here, and looking back over my phone’s picture library, a picture really is worth any number of words. I wouldn’t want many of the pictures and videos I’ve taken to be written journal entries instead, no matter how vivid or detailed.

I wouldn’t want many of the pictures and videos I’ve taken to be written journal entries instead, no matter how vivid or detailed.

As well, I can often write (or dictate) hand-in-hand with taking pictures with the knowledge that exactly what the image looked like or even how it moved if I take phone video is recorded in detail as well as my personal reflections on it.

Again, I probably would not have done this on my old Android phone—because of slightly reduced picture quality, because of slight friction saving images, working with them, knowing that they’re reliably backed up to the cloud, and that they won’t overwhelm my phone storage, no matter how many I take. So having an iPhone is really what unlocked this form of journaling for me. :/

How to Start Journaling: Final Word on Journaling Format and Technology

In practice, I use all the options above.

In practice, I use all the options above—so I don’t have a single journal, but rather a physical journal, the Google Doc, lots of photos and videos, a big (tens of thousands of words) Notes note on my phone, and lots of voice memos in my Gmail.

It’s a bit of a sprawl, but what comforts me is that it’s all digitally archived. (Again, I do photograph my physical journal pages.) It’s all in one of three places: iCloud, Apple’s storage system, for the Notes, photos, and videos, Gmail, for the voice memos, and the Google Doc.

Two things I wish were different:

• I wish it was all stored in one place rather than three, as I probably won’t know where to look for things ten years from now.
• I wish I wasn’t trusting giant tech companies with the most private thoughts I could possibly share.

Overall, though, this set of tools works great for me, and it means that I can always journal, anywhere, in whatever format will be best, and have confidence that I’ll have access to it whenever I want.

I can always journal, anywhere, in whatever format will be best, and have know that I’ll have access to it whenever I want.

The point is: Please find what works with you, and do that. And I strongly you suggest you experiment as you’re getting started with journaling, even if the Unsplash aesthetic of the neatly folded smallish journal is super-gorgeous.

Gorgeous!

Just make sure you’ve explored what will work best for you as you get into journaling regularly.

How to Start Journaling: 12 Journaling Prompts

These prompts employ the extreme honesty and vulnerability of the journal form.

If you’re not sure what to write in a journal, here are 12 prompts to get you started journaling. A common theme is that they employ and enjoy the extreme honesty and vulnerability of the journal form.

Journaling is just for you, so you don’t have to be normal or okay, and you don’t have to make sense. You can just say it.

Remember, journaling is just for you, so you don’t have to be normal, okay, or acceptable, and you don’t have to make sense. You can just say it.

Try any of these prompts that grab your attention:

1. What is the one thing you wish you could scream repeatedly at the top of your lungs? Get as close to doing that as possible, given the writing medium you’re using. You could actually scream if you’re alone and recording yourself, or you could type hard or write in a heavy hand. Repeat whatever it is over and over again until you feel like writing something else, or stopping.
2. What is the most direct, honest statement of how you’re feeling exactly right now? No one has to see it but you. It doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It doesn’t have to agree with your politics. What is it? Write it down and go from there.
3. What do you feel in your body right now? What does that seem to want to say?
4. Gratitude journaling: What are you grateful for? If this is hard to access, think: What is something you would fight desperately not to lose? Imagine losing it. Now, here you are, back in reality, not having lost it. Write about the experience.
5. What is something you’ve never told anyone, because there’s just no benefit that outweighs the risks and costs? Tell it to your journal.
6. What wants to come out of you? You can just start writing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or hold down the F key on your keyboard, until something else starts coming out automatically. Then go with that.
7. What would it feel really good to say? Say it.
8. What are you very scared to say? Say that.
9. What’s most confusing to you in your life right now? You can write, “I am very, very, very, very, very, very confused about…” and then go from there.
10. What makes you smile? Find something that actually causes your face to smile, and write about it.
11. What hurts to remember? What words does remembering it bring up?
12. Is there anything you might want to apologize for? Apologize into your journal, however feels right to you.

I’d be happy to offer you more prompts if you like, and I hope you can also go from here in terms of accessing the deepest parts of yourself in your journal with no embarrassment.

Starting a Journal: How to Journal Daily

Below is my own perspective on starting a daily journal. I think many other people’s approach may be different from mine, but I want to share mine as food for thought.

I journal quite a bit more often than once per day. I don’t set time aside in my day to journal, and I don’t make it a point to journal. It’s more like something I’m doing through my day, continuously.

I’ve found over time that journaling becomes instinctive. If there’s something I want to work with or process, I turn to journaling automatically.

I’ve found over time that journaling becomes instinctive. If there’s something I want to record, process, work with, feel into, consider, share, understand, or release, I turn to journaling automatically.

Again, this wouldn’t be possible if I hadn’t made technology choices that work well for me. I know “journaling technology” might sound a bit dismal, but I truly couldn’t do it if the only process was to open up my notebook and put pen to page. I need to be able to journal wherever I am, which is what phone applications are great for, and I often need to be able to do it at the speed of thought—meaning speaking rather than writing—which is what the new transcription technologies do so wonderfully.

Your own experience of these technologies may be very different, but I strongly encourage you to experiment, especially if you find your first form of journaling to be a chore or something you’re having trouble finding time for.

Journaling isn’t a chore, something I have to work to commit to. It’s more like having a friend with me whom I can always talk to, about anything.

I don’t feel that way at all. Journaling isn’t something I have to work to commit to, or make a priority. It’s more like having a friend with me, whom I can always talk to, about anything. It’s something I would feel desperately lost without—within minutes, or at the most hours.

Learn How to Journal at Writers.com

Writers.com offers a few different classes on how to start a journal, including:

• From the Source: Journaling for Self-Knowledge and Creativity
• Where the Diary Ends and the Essay Begins
• Move Your Writing Forward: The Art of the Bullet Journal
• Creating the Visual Journal

Additionally, many writers go on to use their journals to inspire poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. If you’re interested in consolidating your material into publishable works of writing, take a look at our upcoming online writing courses.

How to Start Journaling: Have Fun!

That’s an introduction to journaling. I hope you have enough to get started.

How to start journaling is just part of the story, of course, as lots of people drift away from it over time. I’m going to write a follow-up article on journaling for wellness and spiritual growth specifically, and in that article I’ll address writer’s block and trouble committing to journaling in more depth. So if you do start journaling and find it difficult, painful, or hard to stick with, please stay tuned for that article.

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear your questions or comments below.

The post How to Start Journaling: Practical Advice on How to Journal Daily appeared first on Writers.com.

One thing to consider is that not all goals are created equal. Goals can be fuzzy (“I want to write more”), over-ambitious, or have lots of other issues.

To help, people who think about this sort of thing have come up with a great system for goal-setting: SMART. Based on that system, here’s some simple advice for the goal-setting writer in each of us.

If you’re serious about your writing in 2024, check out our online writing courses. They’ll keep you accountable to concrete writing goals, with the mentorship of award-winning instructors, and in a supportive community of like-minded and passionate writers. They’re the perfect environment to get your best writing done.

How to Set SMART Writing Goals for 2024

SMART is an acronym, and it’s one of those cool acronyms where the word it forms describes the thing the acronym is about.

SMART is a good acronym. Not like this one.

What “SMART” Stands For

SMART is all about the properties of a good (“smart”) goal.

It stands for:

1. Specific. Make your goal or objective as specific as possible. Say exactly what you want to achieve in clear, concise words.
2. Measurable. Include a unit of measure in your goal. Be objective rather than subjective. When will your goal be achieved? How will you know it has been achieved?
3. Achievable. Be realistic. Ensure that your goal is feasible in terms of the resources available to you.
4. Relevant. Your goals should align with your values and long-term objectives.
5. Time-bound. Give yourself a deadline within a year. Include a timeframe such as a week, month or year, and include a specific date if possible.

(See here and here for more on these descriptions.)

A Few Examples of Non-SMART Writing Goals

Here are some draft goals (or resolutions) that might not fit within the SMART framework:

• “I really want to finish my novel.” (Not specific.)
• “I’ll write lots more this year.” (Not measurable.)
• “I’ll write 20,000 words every week this year.” (Not achievable???)
• “I feel like I should start writing again.” (Why?)
• “I hereby commit that I’m going to work on my memoir until it’s finished.” (When? Not time-bound.)

A Few Examples of SMART Writing Goals

And here are some examples of draft goals or resolutions that would fit within the SMART framework:

• “I will finish my novel manuscript by the end of the year.”
• “I’ll set aside 15 minutes in the morning to write, at least 5 days a week.”
• “I’ll have an outline of my memoir completed by July 1.”

A Few Thoughts on “Relevant” (the R in SMART Goals)

Each of these feel like good goal-setting elements in general, but what really stands out to me is R, Relevant. This is a chance to ask: What does this writing goal, resolution, project, or process mean to me? How is it part of the life I wish to live?

This is certainly worth reflecting on. In my experience, knowing why I write can help a huge amount with the how and when.

Our reasons for writing will—of course—be different for each of us. With that in mind, I’ll offer that, in my view, having the chance to share our humanity with one another through written language is one of the great gifts of life. So whatever your reason is, I know it’s a good one.

Here’s to a wonderful and writerful 2024!

The post How to Set SMART Writing Goals for 2024 appeared first on Writers.com.

Three of us were able to go: Frederick Meyer (Director), Sean Glatch (Administrator), and Brookes Moody (Marketing Associate). Brookes also coordinated Writers.com’s presence at AWP, and our lovely offsite event with instructor Nicole Hardy and the book signing at our booth with instructor Lisa Taylor—thank you so much, Brookes!

Below are reflections from each of us on the experience, with takeaways for your writing. We hope to see you at the next one!

Reflections from Frederick Meyer

This was my first event of its kind, and I was most struck by the people. To me, they seemed introverted, with a strong but inward relationship to beauty, spirit, or the divine. Press a flashlight to your palm, and see the glow through the backside of your hand: the people seemed to glow that way. Many of them had good personal style, too, which I’m not used to at conferences (most of my conferences have been in web development—uh, no offense).

You would love AWP or a conference like it if you have a strong passion for literature: deep, considered, meaningful self-expression through language. It wasn’t as much a place, in general, for genre fiction, self-help, or anything less oriented toward writing as high art.

AWP would be dynamite networking for you if you are considering pursuing an MFA or similar degree, or want to meet the publishers of literary journals or presses where you might submit your work. Beyond that, the offsite readings, and even some of the scheduled events, were truly beautiful, and were very diverse and creative in format—especially Nicole Hardy’s offsite at a wonderful Seattle publisher called Chin Music Press, which explored writing freely across genre boundaries using, as source material, a delightful illustrated book on pie.

I enjoyed AWP a lot, and I strongly recommend it to you if you’re looking to connect with the literary heartbeat in the United States.

Reflections from Sean Glatch

While good writing is hard to accomplish, many writers struggle with something much harder to teach in the classroom: community.

Our best writing simply cannot happen without community. Yet finding it is rarely easy. Some folks find their people in schools, whether it’s their MFA programs or the classes they took with Writers.com. Others find their people at writing groups, literary readings, social media, or a friend of a friend, etc.

When you’re just starting out being a writer, it can be incredibly lonely. What’s more, it seems like the entire writing world is closed off to you. The conversations people are having and the spaces they’re creating don’t seem open to new people. How can we fix that? And how can new writers overcome that?

I learned a lot paying attention to this at AWP. Here are some takeaways:

1. Most writers aren’t aloof, they’re just introverted.

It might seem hard to meet new writers. Speaking from experience, a lot of the folks I meet in writing spaces tend to be slightly withdrawn or cautious when I first start talking to them. But (with a few exceptions), that’s not because they’re aloof, or that they think they’re better than you. It’s because most writers are just introverted.

This was certainly true at AWP, even for people who came up to talk to Writers.com at our booth. But starting a conversation is the hardest part. Once I asked questions about the person’s writing, their interests, their struggles, and the things we’d both read in our lives, it was much easier to build a relationship from common ground.

You already have something in common with every writer you meet. If they’re friendly (and most writers are!), you can build a connection with your shared passion for the written word.

2. Don’t take the aloof writers personally.

Of course, there are writers that aren’t necessarily kind when you talk to them. Don’t take it personally.

Most writers are juggling a bunch of things in their head. I like to say that my brain has 80 tabs open at any given time. At AWP, folks were tired from traveling, from networking, and from the long pile of emails waiting in their inboxes.

This can be true at any given time. Most writers who are unkind or aloof aren’t trying to be that way, it’s just that being a professional writer is hard. Most of us have full time jobs, many of us freelance, and we’re all a bit behind on our emails, writing projects, etc. Not to mention, we’re all trying to protect our energies in an industry that can be chaotic and downright draining. Writers are often preoccupied. The problem isn’t you.

And if a writer is mean and aloof, do you want to be in community with them anyway?

A lot of people think they need to put up with unkindness, particularly if it comes from a writer who’s in an established, elite space. This didn’t happen to me in AWP, but it happens a lot where I live in New York City, a place with a lot of ivory tower folks trying to step over one another to be The Next Big Thing.

I’ve learned not to sweat those gate-keeping folks with elietest attitudes. They’re probably not going anywhere, anyway. When you find your community, the people who were unkind to you become a lot less important. It’s your community that shapes your writing journey, not the people who said you couldn’t make it as a writer. (You can!)

3. All writers are looking for community.

I had so many fantastic conversations with writers and instructors at AWP. Many of them have books, writing and teaching gigs, even tenure. Many of them wanted absolutely nothing from Writers.com or from me, they just wanted to meet and make a connection.

The writing world is small. There were only about 9,000 attendees at AWP this year. Of course, there are many more writers in the United States alone, but still, we’re not that big of a population. All writers are looking for community, and all writers are part of a broader community simply by being writers.

I was lucky to attend a few panels at AWP regarding writing and community. The big takeaway: we all want to celebrate our work with one another. As our Marketing Coordinator Brookes Moody says: a high tide lifts all boats.

When one writer succeeds, we all succeed. Why don’t we help each other succeed?

4. If you can’t find your community, make it.

Another important takeaway from the panels I attended: if you don’t have a community, make one.

I’ll speak from personal experience here. I moved to New York in August of 2021. It was always my dream to be a writer in NYC. Of course, when you don’t live here, you come with a lot of myths about the Big Apple, about its magic and mayhem. I learned quickly that it’s a bit more mayhem than magic.

Part of the reason I moved here was because I wanted to live in a city of other writers. So, I did what anyone else would do: I went to poetry readings, literary events, libraries, writing groups, etc. I entered spaces that seemed to align with my interests and identities, and spaces that certainly didn’t align with me, but were open to all writers.

I never really found “my people.” I’ve made some cool friends, and I currently attend some cool writing groups, but I wouldn’t say I have a space I consider “mine.”

I’ve long known that I need to create my own community. But my background, as well as the background of many modern writers, is on the internet. So I know how to send emails and get on Zoom calls. I know how to order books from indie presses and find poetry readings on Eventbrite. But I haven’t had much experience seeing communities blossom in the real world.

AWP was my opportunity to see that. Between the panels I attended and the people I met, I have a strong sense of what my own community could look and feel like in New York, and what’s more, I have an idea of how to build it. I’m much less afraid of creating a community space and not having anyone join (or having “the wrong people” join.) The people I’m looking for are looking for me, too. Instead of waiting to meet them, why don’t I take the first step?

If you’re looking for community in your own corner of the world, don’t wait to meet the right people. Create the space for you to meet.

5. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Lastly, writing is a lonely business. I think the pandemic and the internet has, in some ways, made it lonelier. Our lives are siloed by the internet in many ways, and while I can connect with you on Twitter or hop on a Zoom call, I can’t connect in the same way as I would in person.

Knowing this, and knowing most writers feel this way, I’m less scared to start a conversation. If I like someone’s book, I might email them. If I like someone’s short story, I might follow and DM them on Twitter. There are countless opportunities to reach out and make a connection. If the worst that can happen is nothing, why should I sit around doing nothing?

Reflections from Brookes Moody

In my first five minutes of being at the Pike Place Market, I saw a fishmonger hurl a salmon to his coworker. The quintessential Seattle scene was punctuated with a cliffside view of ferries crossing Elliott Bay underneath a gray drizzle. Surely the opening cords to Nirvana’s Nevermind were only playing in my head.

Traveling and experiencing a new city is just one of the perks of the AWP Conference. Another is the many Off-site Events that encourage participants to get out of the confines of panels and rows of bookfair booths and venture into the inspirational surroundings of a novel place. Without literary magazines and small presses organizing readings, I probably would not have visited the funeral home-turned bar The Pine Box for Poetry Northwest’s event or ventured to Pioneer Square for Kundiman Presents: They Rise Like a Wave Anthology Reading.

As rewarding as it was to explore the heights of Capitol Hill—shout out to Wave Books for their marathon—I am partial to Writer.com’s very own Off-site Event. Held at the independent publisher Chin Music Press, Writers.com hosted its first in-person workshop led by instructor Nicole Hardy. Both local and out-of-towners gathered on Thursday morning in the press’s store front on the third floor of the afore mentioned Pike Place Market to listen to a craft talk, participate in writing exercises, and eat pasties. Using Chin Music Press’s title, A Commonplace Book Of Pie by Kate Lebo, Nicole walked writers from all backgrounds on how to be flexible with genre and approach writing with humor and joy. Being able to jolt down ideas and share both leads and false starts with fellow writers in a supportive environment allowed me to return to the conference with renewed energy.

Writers.com is just that: a Dot Com, a fully virtual community stitched together over the ether (or is it ethernet?) over two-hundred countries since its inception. Over all the distant, it was meaningful and generative to come together in person and brainstorm ways to perfect our craft—and maybe pick up a few books to spur on creativity. I may not have made it to the Space Needle or the Jimi Hendrix Museum during this trip to Seattle, but I can still feel the heavy imprint from where my tote bag, ladened with new books, cut into my shoulder.

The post Takeaways from AWP 2023 appeared first on Writers.com.

When Writers.com sent out an email in 1995, listing its first classes to be offered, Shelley Singer was one of the teachers. She continued teaching for Writers for decades, a resource for her students as she worked to move her students in whatever direction they wanted to go with their writing.

Shelley was an experienced teacher when she joined Writers, and a published novelist. She continued publishing, totaling over a dozen novels. I think that inspired her students, seeing that she could do it, was doing it even with other demands on her time. And I think they knew that her intention to help other writers was genuine; they could relax and trust her direction.

I enjoyed every one of the many conversations we shared over the twenty-four years we worked together. It was talking with a friend, an engaging friend. She had a great sense of humor, always just and accurate, and flavored by Chicago where she’d had a career in Journalism. And where she got to know cops and criminals, corruption and justice or lack thereof, and where she learned to write on deadline. All this helped her as a novelist, and the skills she developed and passed on helped her students.

She was patient and supportive while the school stumbled through various technologies as the early Web, and Writers, grew. I appreciated her steadiness, her calm when there was chaos around some new techno disaster. She had seen much and had been seasoned by the times in which she lived, by the prejudices she witnessed and experienced. But she remained good-hearted throughout. She was the kind of person, you realized soon after getting to know her, who would tell you the truth, and that you could completely trust.

Earlier today I thought about how many students she taught over her career. The number is certainly in the thousands. Those who connected with her often returned. I remember one years-long period during which a group of mystery writers took one of her classes again and again, as a group, writing entire novels as Shelley gave feedback chapter by chapter. She cared.

Many of Shelley’s students’ lives were enriched by knowing her. As was mine.

She gave a lot. And she did a lot of good. I don’t know that there’s a better epitaph.

Mark Dahlby

The post Remembering Instructor Shelley Singer appeared first on Writers.com.

Nonetheless, the art of writing short stories is not easy to master. How do you tell a complete story in so few words? What does a story need to have in order to be successful? Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point.

Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels. Whether you want to master the elements of fiction, experiment with novel ideas, or simply have fun with storytelling, here’s everything you need on how to write a short story step by step.

The Core Elements of a Short Story

There’s no secret formula to writing a short story. However, a good short story will have most or all of the following elements:

• A protagonist with a certain desire or need. It is essential for the protagonist to want something they don’t have, otherwise they will not drive the story forward.
• A clear dilemma. We don’t need much backstory to see how the dilemma started; we’re primarily concerned with how the protagonist resolves it.
• A decision. What does the protagonist do to resolve their dilemma?
• A climax. In Freytag’s Pyramid, the climax of a story is when the tension reaches its peak, and the reader discovers the outcome of the protagonist’s decision(s).
• An outcome. How does the climax change the protagonist? Are they a different person? Do they have a different philosophy or outlook on life?

Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction, such as a setting, plot, and point of view. It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started.

Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots. The focus should be entirely on a single, central storyline. Subplots will either pull focus away from the main story, or else push the story into the territory of novellas and novels.

The shorter the story is, the fewer of these elements are essentials. If you’re interested in writing short-short stories, check out our guide on how to write flash fiction.

Article continues below…

Short Story Writing Courses We Think You'll Love

We've hand-picked these courses to help you flourish as a writer.

Our top choice for you!

In Focus: Writing Short Stories

Discover the power and impact of the short story form. Explore new ideas freely and begin up to 6 new...

6 Weeks | Starts February 4

Find Out More

Our top choice for you!

In Brief: Explorations in Short Story Forms

Explore the intricate world of short prose forms. Experiment with story forms from one-syllable micros to full-length short stories, and...

10 Weeks | Starts January 14

Find Out More

Or click below to view all courses.

See Courses

Article continues…

How to Write a Short Story Outline

Some writers are “pantsers”—they “write by the seat of their pants,” making things up on the go with little more than an idea for a story. Other writers are “plotters,” meaning they decide the story’s structure in advance of writing it.

You don’t need a short story outline to write a good short story. But, if you’d like to give yourself some scaffolding before putting words on the page, this article answers the question of how to write a short story outline:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline

How to Write a Short Story Step by Step

There are many ways to approach the short story craft, but this method is tried-and-tested for writers of all levels. Here’s how to write a short story step-by-step.

1. Start With an Idea

Often, generating an idea is the hardest part. You want to write, but what will you write about?

What’s more, it’s easy to start coming up with ideas and then dismissing them. You want to tell an authentic, original story, but everything you come up with has already been written, it seems.

Here are a few tips:

• Originality presents itself in your storytelling, not in your ideas. For example, the premise of both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden are very similar: two men and two women, in intertwining love triangles, sort out their feelings for each other amidst mischievous forest spirits, love potions, and friendship drama. The way each story is written makes them very distinct from one another, to the point where, unless it’s pointed out to you, you might not even notice the similarities.
• An idea is not a final draft. You will find that exploring the possibilities of your story will generate something far different than the idea you started out with. This is a good thing—it means you made the story your own!
• Experiment with genres and tropes. Even if you want to write literary fiction, pay attention to the narrative structures that drive genre stories, and practice your storytelling using those structures. Again, you will naturally make the story your own simply by playing with ideas.

If you’re struggling simply to find ideas, try out this prompt generator, or pull prompts from this Twitter.

2. Outline, OR Conceive Your Characters

If you plan to outline, do so once you’ve generated an idea. You can learn about how to write a short story outline earlier in this article.

If you don’t plan to outline, you should at least start with a character or characters. Certainly, you need a protagonist, but you should also think about any characters that aid or inhibit your protagonist’s journey.

When thinking about character development, ask the following questions:

• What is my character’s background? Where do they come from, how did they get here, where do they want to be?
• What does your character desire the most? This can be both material or conceptual, like “fitting in” or “being loved.”
• What is your character’s fatal flaw? In other words, what limitation prevents the protagonist from achieving their desire? Often, this flaw is a blind spot that directly counters their desire. For example, self hatred stands in the way of a protagonist searching for love.
• How does your character think and speak? Think of examples, both fictional and in the real world, who might resemble your character.

In short stories, there are rarely more characters than a protagonist, an antagonist (if relevant), and a small group of supporting characters. The more characters you include, the longer your story will be. Focus on making only one or two characters complex: it is absolutely okay to have the rest of the cast be flat characters that move the story along.

Learn more about character development here:

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

3. Write Scenes Around Conflict

Once you have an outline or some characters, start building scenes around conflict. Every part of your story, including the opening sentence, should in some way relate to the protagonist’s conflict.

Conflict is the lifeblood of storytelling: without it, the reader doesn’t have a clear reason to keep reading. Loveable characters are not enough, as the story has to give the reader something to root for.

Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Cask of Amontillado. We start at the conflict: the narrator has been slighted by Fortunato, and plans to exact revenge. Every scene in the story builds tension and follows the protagonist as he exacts this revenge.

In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist’s unmet desires.

Read more about writing effective conflict here:

What is Conflict in a Story? Definition and Examples

4. Write Your First Draft

The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story. Make sure as the story progresses that each scene heightens the story’s tension, and that this tension remains unbroken until the climax resolves whether or not your protagonist meets their desires.

Don’t stress too hard on writing a perfect story. Rather, take Anne Lamott’s advice, and “write a shitty first draft.” The goal is not to pen a complete story at first draft; rather, it’s to set ideas down on paper. You are simply, as Shannon Hale suggests, “shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build castles.”

5. Step Away, Breathe, Revise

Whenever Stephen King finishes a novel, he puts it in a drawer and doesn’t think about it for 6 weeks. With short stories, you probably don’t need to take as long of a break. But, the idea itself is true: when you’ve finished your first draft, set it aside for a while. Let yourself come back to the story with fresh eyes, so that you can confidently revise, revise, revise.

In revision, you want to make sure each word has an essential place in the story, that each scene ramps up tension, and that each character is clearly defined. The culmination of these elements allows a story to explore complex themes and ideas, giving the reader something to think about after the story has ended.

6. Compare Against Our Short Story Checklist

Does your story have everything it needs to succeed? Compare it against this short story checklist, as written by our instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko.

How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist

Below is a collection of practical short story writing tips by Writers.com instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko. Each paragraph is its own checklist item: a core element of short story writing advice to follow unless you have clear reasons to the contrary. We hope it’s a helpful resource in your own writing.

Update 9/1/2020: We’ve now made a summary of Rosemary’s short story checklist available as a PDF download. Enjoy!

Click to download

How to Write a Short Story: Length and Setting

Your short story is 1000 to 7500 words in length.

The story takes place in one time period, not spread out or with gaps other than to drive someplace, sleep, etc. If there are those gaps, there is a space between the paragraphs, the new paragraph beginning flush left, to indicate a new scene.

Each scene takes place in one location, or in continual transit, such as driving a truck or flying in a plane.

How to Write a Short Story: Point of View

Unless it’s a very lengthy Romance story, in which there may be two Point of View (POV) characters, there is one POV character. If we are told what any character secretly thinks, it will only be the POV character. The degree to which we are privy to the unexpressed thoughts, memories and hopes of the POV character remains consistent throughout the story.

You avoid head-hopping by only having one POV character per scene, even in a Romance. You avoid straying into even brief moments of telling us what other characters think other than the POV character. You use words like “apparently,” “obviously,” or “supposedly” to suggest how non-POV-characters think rather than stating it.

How to Write a Short Story: Protagonist, Antagonist, Motivation

Your short story has one clear protagonist who is usually the character changing most.

Your story has a clear antagonist, who generally makes the protagonist change by thwarting his goals.

(Possible exception to the two short story writing tips above: In some types of Mystery and Action stories, particularly in a series, etc., the protagonist doesn’t necessarily grow personally, but instead his change relates to understanding the antagonist enough to arrest or kill him.)

The protagonist changes with an Arc arising out of how he is stuck in his Flaw at the beginning of the story, which makes the reader bond with him as a human, and feel the pain of his problems he causes himself. (Or if it’s the non-personal growth type plot: he’s presented at the beginning of the story with a high-stakes problem that requires him to prevent or punish a crime.)

The protagonist usually is shown to Want something, because that’s what people normally do, defining their personalities and behavior patterns, pushing them onward from day to day. This may be obvious from the beginning of the story, though it may not become heightened until the Inciting Incident, which happens near the beginning of Act 1. The Want is usually something the reader sort of wants the character to succeed in, while at the same time, knows the Want is not in his authentic best interests. This mixed feeling in the reader creates tension.

The protagonist is usually shown to Need something valid and beneficial, but at first, he doesn’t recognize it, admit it, honor it, integrate it with his Want, or let the Want go so he can achieve the Need instead. Ideally, the Want and Need can be combined in a satisfying way toward the end for the sake of continuity of forward momentum of victoriously achieving the goals set out from the beginning. It’s the encounters with the antagonist that forcibly teach the protagonist to prioritize his Needs correctly and overcome his Flaw so he can defeat the obstacles put in his path.

The protagonist in a personal growth plot needs to change his Flaw/Want but like most people, doesn’t automatically do that when faced with the problem. He tries the easy way, which doesn’t work. Only when the Crisis takes him to a low point does he boldly change enough to become victorious over himself and the external situation. What he learns becomes the Theme.

Each scene shows its main character’s goal at its beginning, which aligns in a significant way with the protagonist’s overall goal for the story. The scene has a “charge,” showing either progress toward the goal or regression away from the goal by the ending. Most scenes end with a negative charge, because a story is about not obtaining one’s goals easily, until the end, in which the scene/s end with a positive charge.

The protagonist’s goal of the story becomes triggered until the Inciting Incident near the beginning, when something happens to shake up his life. This is the only major thing in the story that is allowed to be a random event that occurs to him.

How to Write a Short Story: Characters

Your characters speak differently from one another, and their dialogue suggests subtext, what they are really thinking but not saying: subtle passive-aggressive jibes, their underlying emotions, etc.

Your characters are not illustrative of ideas and beliefs you are pushing for, but come across as real people.

How to Write a Short Story: Prose

Your language is succinct, fresh and exciting, specific, colorful, avoiding clichés and platitudes. Sentence structures vary. In Genre stories, the language is simple, the symbolism is direct, and words are well-known, and sentences are relatively short. In Literary stories, you are freer to use more sophisticated ideas, words, sentence structures, styles, and underlying metaphors and implied motifs.

How to Write a Short Story: Story Structure

Your plot elements occur in the proper places according to classical Three Act Structure (or Freytag’s Pyramid) so the reader feels he has vicariously gone through a harrowing trial with the protagonist and won, raising his sense of hope and possibility. Literary short stories may be more subtle, with lower stakes, experimenting beyond classical structures like the Hero’s Journey. They can be more like vignettes sometimes, or even slice-of-life, though these types are hard to place in publications.

In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape. In Literary short stories, you are free to explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and inchoate, realistic endings that suggest multiple interpretations, and unresolved issues.

Some Literary stories may be nonrealistic, such as with Surrealism, Absurdism, New Wave Fabulism, Weird and Magical Realism. If this is what you write, they still need their own internal logic and they should not be bewildering as to the what the reader is meant to experience, whether it’s a nuanced, unnameable mood or a trip into the subconscious.

Literary stories may also go beyond any label other than Experimental. For example, a story could be a list of To Do items on a paper held by a magnet to a refrigerator for the housemate to read. The person writing the list may grow more passive-aggressive and manipulative as the list grows, and we learn about the relationship between the housemates through the implied threats and cajoling.

How to Write a Short Story: Capturing Reader Interest

Your short story is suspenseful, meaning readers hope the protagonist will achieve his best goal, his Need, by the Climax battle against the antagonist.

Your story entertains. This is especially necessary for Genre short stories.

The story captivates readers at the very beginning with a Hook, which can be a puzzling mystery to solve, an amazing character’s or narrator’s Voice, an astounding location, humor, a startling image, or a world the reader wants to become immersed in.

Expository prose (telling, like an essay) takes up very, very little space in your short story, and it does not appear near the beginning. The story is in Narrative format instead, in which one action follows the next. You’ve removed every unnecessary instance of Expository prose and replaced it with showing Narrative. Distancing words like “used to,” “he would often,” “over the years, he,” “each morning, he” indicate that you are reporting on a lengthy time period, summing it up, rather than sticking to Narrative format, in which immediacy makes the story engaging.

You’ve earned the right to include Expository Backstory by making the reader yearn for knowing what happened in the past to solve a mystery. This can’t possibly happen at the beginning, obviously. Expository Backstory does not take place in the first pages of your story.

Your reader cares what happens and there are high stakes (especially important in Genre stories). Your reader worries until the end, when the protagonist survives, succeeds in his quest to help the community, gets the girl, solves or prevents the crime, achieves new scientific developments, takes over rule of his realm, etc.

Every sentence is compelling enough to urge the reader to read the next one—because he really, really wants to—instead of doing something else he could be doing. Your story is not going to be assigned to people to analyze in school like the ones you studied, so you have found a way from the beginning to intrigue strangers to want to spend their time with your words.

Where to Read and Submit Short Stories

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or want to publish your own stories, you’ll find great literary journals for writers of all backgrounds at this article:

https://writers.com/short-story-submissions

Learn How to Write a Short Story at Writers.com

The short story takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. Learn how to write a short story with Writers.com. Our upcoming fiction courses will give you the ropes to tell authentic, original short stories that captivate and entrance your readers.

The post How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist appeared first on Writers.com.