Five rules to overcome self-doubt

Neera 2 Comments

I have often bemoaned over the writer’s self-doubt.

Why, of all the other vocations in the world, writers suffer from self-doubt the most?

It is not because we toil at our craft any less than other artists. Why is it then we feel so inadequate, frivolous, phony, and unaccomplished? Why do we feel our ideas are insignificant, our vocabulary limited, our expression plain?

No writer, it doesn’t matter how many books he has written, has ever reported fully getting rid of it.

Stephen King wrote in On Writing:

I have spent a good many years—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my talent, why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk. I think I was forty before I realised that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.

Neil Gaiman talked about it in Commencement Speech at the University of the Arts Class of 2012

The problems of success can be harder because nobody warns you about them.

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now, they will discover you. It’s Impostor Syndrome—something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.

In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don’t get to make things up anymore.

Steven Pressfield wrote about it in his excellent book The War of Art:

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Virginia Woolf captured the anguishing self-doubt with which all writers tussle with in her novel, Orlando: A Biography :

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Self-doubt is the worst enemy of writers, a familiar state for all those who put pieces of their inner lives into the outside world.

Determination allows for doubt and for humility — both of which are critical.

Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist

We writers need to learn to live with self-doubt rather than to play hide and seek with it. We ought to embrace it and find ways to work with it.

I have developed five rules to write with confidence and joy even when self-doubt is holding me back.

1. Concentrate On The Verb Rule

The word ‘writer‘ is tricky. It is both a noun and a verb. Most of the time, we get stuck with the noun and forget the verb. The fact is that it is the verb that matters the most. If you can concentrate on the verb, the noun will materialize by itself.

Also, don’t mix up the word ‘writer’ with the words ‘author.’ A writer is someone who writes; an author is someone who has published something. Think of yourself as a ‘writer,’ not as an ‘author.’ It is the former that will make you the latter.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it.

— William Goldman

2. Retire The Judge rule

The judge is the inner critic that resides in you. He comes uninvited to critique your work and always finds faults in it. Even if others are raving about how good your work is, he will negate them and pinpoint the faults. He has been working all his life, tirelessly giving judgments. It is time he retires. The way to retire him is to buy him a gold watch for his services and send him home to play with his grandchildren.

In the meantime, you double and triple your writing efforts. If you are writing once a month, write once a week; if you are writing once a week, write once a day. The more often you write, the less daunting it becomes. The prolific writing is the only way to outperform the overworking inner critic.

Bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.

– Charles Bukowski

3. Get it done rule

Elizabeth Gilbert gave the famous words in her book The Big Magic, “done is better than good.”

If you keep on waiting for it to be perfect, it will never be done. If it is 80% there, it is good enough.

No book or story, or article is ever finished. You stop working on it.

So give it your best for the day and let it go to the universe. If it is good, it will survive. If not, it will meet its fate. Meanwhile, you are free to write another one.

4. The Pimple Rule

This one is borrowed from Jon Bard of Write it Done. She named it after the best advice she received as a spotty teenager — “No one cares about your pimples because they’re too busy worrying about their own.”

She writes:

It’s so true in every aspect of life.  We think that people are out there ready to pounce when, in reality, they’re more terrified of being pounced upon.

We’ve met some big-time writers who tell us that even as they prepare to publish their fiftieth book or collect another prize, they still have a voice inside that wonders when everyone will catch on to the fact that they’re frauds.  Yep, that little nagging “you don’t deserve it” voice never goes away, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

If you view the outside world as a place filled with vultures ready to swoop down and pick at your bones, it’s time to rethink things.  The truth is this – all those scary would-be haters are too busy scanning the skies for vultures of their own to bother with you.

5. Nothing is original Rule

One thing that self-doubt instills in us that our work is not original. That we are copying and imitating what we are reading from others.

Tell your self-doubt that there is nothing original. Everything that has been created so far in this universe is from some inspiration from something else that existed before it. Imitation and copying are part of the learning process.

Take the pressure off you by not trying to be original and learn from your idols. Even they learned by imitating and copying their idols. Neil Gaiman, an English author of fiction and nonfiction, said in his commencement speech at the University of the Arts, to the class of 2012.

When you are at it, making your art, doing the stuff that only you can do, the urge to copy will start to emerge. That is not a bad thing.

Most of us find our voices only after we have sounded a lot like other people.

But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you.

Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.

So write and draw, and build and play, and dance and live like only you can.

The moment when you feel, that just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists inside you, showing too much of yourself, that is the moment you start to get it right.

You can listen to his full talk in the video below.

In summary

Don’t let doubt ruin your passion.

Have faith in yourself and your abilities.

All writers struggle with self-doubt, even the established ones. But they all learn to mange it.

Follow the five rules overcome your self-doubt.

  1. Concentrate on the verb, not the noun of writing.
  2. Retire the inner critic.
  3. Done is better than good.
  4. No one cares about your pimples because they’re too busy worrying about their own.
  5. Nothing is original.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

The teachers of the future

Neera

Dear Creative Souls,

Time for a heart to heart conversation.

Yesterday, some of you received my post Why I Started This Blog and it was an accident. It is a year old post and I was adding a pin to it and accidentally reposted it. But sometimes accidents are the best things that happen to us. Reading that post again reminded me of the commitment I made to myself.

In Hindu mythology, life is divided into four age-based stages. The first is called Brahmacharya, which is the first twenty-five years of one’s life which one should devote to learning. One should remain celibate during this period in order to concentrate on learning.

The second is Grihastha, the period to get married, raise a family, fulfill the duties of maintaining a home, educating one’s children, and leading a family and religion centered social life.

The third is Vanaprastha which starts when a person hands over household responsibilities to the next generation and takes an advisory role. It is considered the time to give back to the community and the universe in lieu of all that that one has taken from it.

The fourth is Sannyasa, which is marked by the renunciation of material desires and prejudices and leading a spiritual, peaceful, and simple life.

According to this philosophy, I am in the third stage of my life and I am surprised at the urge I have to give back to the universe. During my life one thing I have taken most from this universe is the knowledge. And it is what I want to give back to the universe too. The knowledge I have gained so far and the knowledge I continue to gain.

This website is my platform to be able to do that. Writing is my medium and studying creativity is my passion. I am sharing as I am learning.

I am not a ‘guru’ in any field, just a ‘forever student.’ But sometimes students are the best teachers because they can teach at a beginner level. It is very difficult for experts to bring themselves down to the level of their students because their minds have expanded to a much higher level.

Whereas, ‘student teachers‘ are at the beginning level. They have learned something recently and know extactly how to communicate that. They know where the pitfalls are and what to do when the going gets tough. Because they have just gone through that themselves. And they share their learnings with the enthusiasm of a novice. This is where I stand. A really ‘excited’ novice.

When I thought about sharing these thoughts with you this morning I was hesitating. Will I be making myself vulnerable? Shouldn’t I be establishing myself as an authority on ‘creativity’ and ‘writing’ if I am writing about these topics constantly on my blog?

Call it serendipity when today morning, I came across a video by Tony Robbins where he and Dean Graziosi talk about how the face of teaching is going to change in the next twenty-five years. That there will be more and more of ‘student-teachers’ sharing their knowledge as more people prefer to learn from them rather than an expert.

I found it to be true from my own experience. I follow a lot of blogs and listen to a number of videos where people like me, have learned a skill and share how they learned it. I want to know their process and want to figure out how can I use it to learn it myself.

The experts talk from a different level, and I feel I can’t reach their level. But a beginner talks to me in my language and give me hope that I can reach there too. She shares her mistakes and warns me against the pitfalls. I love her for her honesty. And I trust her more than the expert. Nothing against the expert but he is too far above in the sky.

Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi shared that Forbes is predicting that the knowledge industry which is currently 355-million-dollars-a-day industry and is going to be a billion-dollar-a-day industry by 2025. And the ‘student-teachers are going to be at the forefront of it because the current model of classroom learning is outdated. I have linked the video below in case you are interested in viewing it.

https://youtu.be/WMFmMAkujUE

I wanted to share another thing. Earlier in the post, I mentioned I was adding a pin to my post Why I Started This Blog when I accidentally reposted it. There is a story behind it.

A few days ago I came up with this idea to make a visual aid to share the creativity and writing tips I have been writing about in my posts. I was becoming increasingly aware that the key messages are getting lost in lots of text. So I decided to make ‘pins’ of the ‘tips’ and share them on Pinterest. I also decided to sprinkle them in the previous posts as a ‘take-home’ message. This is what I was doing with the first pin I created of the series when Why I Started This Blog got accidentally reposted. Now I think it is not such a bad idea and perhaps I should repost some of the posts as I include pins in them.

Here is my first Unleash Your Creativity Tip #1:

Pint them to your Pinterest board and to collect them all subscribe to my email list below.

So you want to quit your job

Neera 1 Comment

For some time I have been writing about how I quit my job and made the transition from competitive to the creative life. It might sound like; I walked to my boss’s office, handed in my resignation and stormed out never to come back. That is not true.

I didn’t quit my job on a whim and then sat at home twiddling my thumbs thinking ‘what next?’ I planned it and gave myself two years to transition from a competitive to a creative life.

The transition was not easy. While planning on my own, I wasn’t sure whether I was covering all the grounds. Imagine my surprise when I found out that there is a ‘coach’ out there who specializes in helping people ‘quit’ their jobs.

I found Blaire Palmer who runs a website A Brilliant Gamble and coaching business after I had already quit my job and established my business. But Blaire has more than twenty years of experience helping people to do just the same.

Many of my readers want to get out of their jobs to lead lives inspired by their creativity but find it too hard to break the cycle.

I decided to ask Blaire how she did it and how she advises her clients to do it. Below are her responses.

Would you please let us know about your own journey from competitive to a creative life?

I was a BBC Journalist for a decade before starting my coaching business in 2000. Having said that, as a student I’d been a volunteer for a student counseling service called Nightline. We were trained by The Samaritans in non-judgemental, non-directive questioning to access the wisdom of the other person so coaching was kind of in my blood from a young age.

But when at the age of 29 I read a newspaper article about the new profession of coaching, I realized that it was perfect for me. I got a coach (the one from the newspaper piece) and started planning my exit from the BBC.

Having trained with Coach U I grew my business to nearly seven figures before having another change of priorities and deciding to reduce the size of the business and get back to my roots – coaching and speaking rather than running a business where other people in my team got to do the work I loved while I spent hours on budgets, salary negotiations and trying to pay the bills! 

When you decided to make the transition from competitive (job) to creative (leadership coach) life, what planning you did? How long it took you to make the transition?

I decided to become a coach about a year before I actually left my job. I had done some coaching first to ensure it was the right choice for me and then began my training about 3 months later. I started working with non-paying clients first just to get some experience but quickly felt like I was adding value so I started charging.

After 6 months I had 6 clients, paying me the equivalent of half of my BBC salary, that I was working within the evenings and weekends. I’d been saving that money to build a financial runway so that I had a bit of money to live on once I left my job and then felt confident it was time to leave. I couldn’t take on more clients AND keep my full-time job.

It took another 3 months to get all the pieces in place (I tried to negotiate to go part-time or taking a sabbatical but my organization wouldn’t agree) so I handed in my notice in the August of the year and was sitting at my desk, at home, thinking ‘What now?” by the September. 

What are the main key areas to plan during the transition to lead a creative life?

The money! That is critical. It can take a year or more to get your business off the ground. And even then you’ll have bad months. Lack of cash flow kills businesses even if you’ve got a healthy pipeline and you don’t want to pressure clients to work with you before they are ready just because you need their money. So get some savings in place, cut your outgoings if you can, have a backup plan if things don’t work as quickly as you hoped. 

Test out your business model. You might know what you’d love to do instead and think that other people would be willing to pay for it. But you won’t know for sure until you try. Start your new venture as a side hustle and see if you can get customers or clients to part with their cash. You might have to tweak your idea or think again until you find the right services and products. 

Create networks. This might be a network of people who can refer business to you, a network of your ideal clients/customers, and a network of other business people who can offer support and advice. You’ll need all three! And the earlier you start the better. Their advice and feedback will be really helpful and later you can give others the benefits of your experience. 

Financial worries are the main reason that stops people from quitting their job, what advice do you give people regarding that?

Yes, you’re taking a financial risk when you quit your job. But you’re also giving yourself the chance to earn more doing something you love.

Everyone worries about money. Some worry so much that they stick with a job or lifestyle they hate just because it’s relatively secure. For me, security isn’t as important as some other things that matter to me. I’d rather live with the insecurity than do something I don’t like and that I can’t change.

With a business of your own, if it’s not working you rethink, pivot, do some more selling, change your pricing…you have options. It suits my character better because I trust that I will be able to come up with ideas and just keep plugging away until something works.

So if security is top of your list of priorities running a business probably isn’t for you. If it’s up there but other things are more powerful for you, then you’re more likely to take the plunge.

Plus, you do become more comfortable about the insecurity the more you live with it. You’ll get more risk-tolerant with time. But it doesn’t suit everyone. 

What are the pitfalls of earning a living from your creativity one should be aware of and plan for?

While you left your job because you wanted to be more creative there’s a lot about running a business that isn’t creative at all. Budgets and finance, sales and marketing, answering emails, and dealing with customer queries…You only get to spend a small proportion of your time doing the thing that makes the money. The rest is all the other stuff that keeps the show on the road.

Someone I spoke to a few days ago who has a very successful VA (Virtual Assistant) business aid 80% of her time is marketing, creating content to promote herself and her business, handling queries. Only 20% is the actual VA work. I’d say this is pretty typical. So when you imagine your day just crocheting baby booties or coaching people or teaching the violin to kids remember that’s just a small part of running a business. 

Another pitfall can be that the thing you love turns into your business which might make it less fun. Now you’re doing it because it pays the bills. You can’t just wait for your muse to strike. You have to get yourself into the right frame of mind like it or not!

What rewards you had for making the transition to a creative life?

The biggest reward for me is the freedom to make my own choices. Having run a business for 20 years I’ve changed it many times. I’ve had to adapt to changes in the market, my life circumstances, my needs…but all of that is in my power.

I don’t have to ask permission to change the copy on my website or create a new product or take a course. I don’t have to do office politics, or presenteeism or apply for a promotion. I choose my clients as much as they choose me. I don’t think I could ever give that up!

That makes sense.

The decision to quit your job and being an entrepreneur or a solopreneur is a big one and not to be taken lightly.

It is worth reading Blaire’s post signs it is time to quit your job and getting her free Escape the Rat Race Checklist to have a handy list of tasks and questions you need to consider if you make the decision to live the life you want to live.

If you found this post helpful you might want to join my email list. I publish two to three new posts every week, to help unleash your creativity. 


Top Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Side projects are a good thing

Neera 1 Comment

Some of you must have noticed some wired circles in my Instagram posts and at the bottom of blog posts wondered what are those about.

Time to reveal the secret.

I am doing a drawing course, a cartoon drawing course to be more precise, and our first assignment is to draw circles. Circle-y-circles as they call them. Three times a day, for five minutes each time.

Not only we are to draw circles but we are to share them as well on social media. That is the commitment. And I am fully on-board with it. This particular course uses the old Eastern (and Renaissance) teaching methodology where repetition and incremental learning is used to bring the expertise.

We were in fact asked to read the book The Talent Code (which goes on to break the myth that talent is inborn) and watched the videos from The Karate Kid movie series.

As some of you might be aware that I wanted to learn drawing for some time now. I tried to do it myself, by trying to do a sketch a day, but it didn’t last long. Now with this course, within five days I have made so much progress.

While writing is my main vocation, drawing is my side project. Side projects are very important to unleash creativity. Because they are done for fun they bring out the playfulness much easily than our passion where we tend to behave like a martyr.

Austin Kleon wrote in his book How to Steal Like an Artist:

One thing I have learned in my brief career: It’s the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing arouod. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.

[…]

It is good to have a few projects going at a time, then when you get stuck on something with one, you can jump on to the next one. This is called ‘productive procrastination.’

Hobbies are other things that are beneficial to unleash creativity. A hobby is something creative that you do just for yourself. You don’t try to make it your vocation or get famous for it. It is something that gives you pleasure and helps you unwind.

There is no one better than Stephen Duneier to talk about hobbies. He tells a story about when he got into knitting on his wife’s suggestion.

He was not that passionate initially, but one day while sitting underneath a forty feet tall eucalyptus tree he had a thought, “that tree would look really cool covered in yarn.”

At that time he didn’t know there was any such thing called yarn-bombing where people wrap public structures with yarn. This is what he exactly did. In 82 days he finished his first project of yarn-bombing.

Image from Ishknits

He got so hooked that he kept going with bigger more ambitious projects that required engineering skills and the use of different materials such as fiberglass and metal.

He ended up wrapping 18 boulders and the whole of TMC Children’s Hospital in Southern Arizona.

Photo from Rhodetails

The moral of the story is if you haven’t got a side project or a hobby, it is time to start one.

I publish two to three new posts every week to help unleash your creativity. If you don’t want to miss any, join my email list.

Journal writing – a simple practice that will make you the writer you want to become.

Neera

Writing is a challenge even for the best of the writers. For beginners, the undertaking is so daunting that most of them give up after a few tries. When the first novel or a bunch of short stories or hastily written poems don’t bring them either the satisfaction or the accolade they were looking for, they give up; without realizing that they could have kept their dream alive by doing one single practice.

Journal writing.

Journal writing is one simple tool that can make you an eloquent writer, a clear thinker and a much better human being.

What is a journal, anyway?

A journal is a place where you record your observations, insights, memories, impressions, and feelings. It is a keeper of your secrets and holder of your dreams and hopes. It is a whiteboard where you analyze stuff and make plans. It is a safe haven to vent your anger and share your hurts.

The simple practice of journal writing, if pursued faithfully, can make you the writer you want to become. Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, blog or business documents, you will find that the practice of keeping a journal makes you a much better writer.

Journal writing has been around for centuries. It is a practice adopted by the old and new writers alike.

Many prolific writers were journal-writers. Rainer Maris Rilke, Virginia Wolf, Whinston Churchill, Louis XiV, Henry David Thoreau, Carl Jung, Anais Nin, and Susan Sontag became the writers they are through the practice of keeping journals.

This is how Anne Frank started, at age thirteen, with the following words in The Diary of a Young Girl.

Thirteen years old Anne went on to become the most famous journal writer in the world even though her life was tragically cut short only a few years after she wrote those words.

If you have too many obstacles in the way to follow your dream, then do just one thing, keep a journal. Here are ten ways a journal will help you become a writer.

1. Journal writing will keep your writing dream alive

Twenty years ago, when I felt an urge to write, I couldn’t even put a decent sentence together. Having not written anything other than a bunch of letters I had no expertise in writing. Out of sheer luck, I picked up an old diary and started writing.

My first entry was a letter to my husband. I wrote on-and-off for a few years, gradually increasing the frequency to weekends and whenever life threw lemons at me. Little by little the urge to write took hold of me so much that any day I don’t write doesn’t feel like the day I have lived.

Journal writing, more than anything else, kept the dream of becoming a writer alive for me. All through the years while I was busy with work, home, raising children and parenting the parents, the only writing I was doing was in the journals. But this simple act made me a much better writer than I was before. I am a full-time writer now. It wouldn’t have been possible without the practice of journal writing.

2. Journal writing helps you become a better writer

When I started writing I had a very limited vocabulary. My writing expression was plain and I didn’t know a lot about literary devices and my knowledge of fiction and non-fiction writing was next to nil. All I had was a desire to write.

My journal became my teacher. I wrote in it whichever way it came, never editing, never trying to improve anything. For the first couple of years, I wrote with a pencil rather than a pen so that I could erase whatever I didn’t like but I don’t remember using it much. It was just there for comfort.

As I wrote I got better and better at it. My vocabulary increased and my sentences improved.

Journal writing provides you with a safe environment to practice. No one is going to read your journals. They are for you and you only. You can write in it whichever way it comes. Broken sentences, random rants, off-tangent remarks, unfinished poems, mundane stories – everything is acceptable.

In journal writing, it is not the outcome but the practice that matters.

3. Journal writing will bring out what lies buried deep inside you

A journal is a place where you can write intimately, truthfully, and without any constraint. No one is going to read what you write. You are writing for yourself.

It is also a very effective tool to bring out to surface what is buried deep inside you. When you write in a journal you inevitably return to the center of your being. A journal becomes a trusted companion to whom you can tell everything without the fear of being judged.

On the surface everything was fine, but deep down I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it and the nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. I went through the day, distracted, a part of my brain continuously trying to figure out the problem.

Finally, when the day was over, all the chores done, I sat in my bed and opened up to my journal. Layer by layer I started peeling off the ambiguity. One by one, I recounted all the reasons. Every pent up emotion came out. Raw and fierce.

At times I went off the tangent, but it didn’t matter. In about half an hour I started feeling better as if there was weight on my chest and it has been lifted. I could breathe normally now.

The problem was still there but I had dissected it. It was not a huge monster any more. It lay there in tiny pieces and I was not afraid of it any longer. I knew solution will come to me sometime in future. I closed my journal and drifted off to sleep.

An excerpt from my journal

Journal writing teaches reflection and brings focus. It gives you room to know yourself in depth.

4. Journal writing will help you know yourself

Writing in a journal helps you self-examine. It is a supreme way to record your thoughts and to understand your own thinking process.

The patterns of your thinking, emotions, and actions start becoming evident very early in the process of journal writing.

Unfolding these patterns can empower you to see what you are giving time and attention to; where your thoughts are taking you; what emotions accompany your thoughts; what insights are there and what changes are needed.

Self-awareness brings acceptance and widens our perceptions. The less aware we are about ourselves the more closed and restraint we become. The more secure we feel about ourselves, the easier it is to open up to what’s around us, including to other people’s views and experiences. Journal writing supports this.

5. Journal writing will help you become an observer

Journal writing will train and hone your eye for beauty. It will invite you into the present moment while also allowing you to roam your past. It will open you to experience awe and wonder. It will let you intensify and renew your pleasure in events and situations that have gone well. It will support your recovery and the gaining of wisdom from the times you wish had never happened.

The habit of journal writing creates the most interesting distance between you and your thoughts. Your feelings change when you write your thoughts down and you are able to change your perspective. Experiencing your own powers of observation, coupled with a greater awareness that you have choices, increases your sense of self-mastery and inner stability.

As your journal writing continues, this means that you become not only an acute observer of your own life but also an acute observer of life itself.

6. Journal writing will help you understand the world around you

Journal writing is a supremely effective way to engage more intimately with the world that is all around you.

It will help you become less judgemental and critical of other people and generally less judgemental and more supportive of yourself.

Journal writing is a self-directed source of inner development, yet it also makes the world beyond your own self more real and more vivid. It can be an interface between you and the outside world.

The change might take place at a glacial speed, but you will find out that your writing will become less and less about yourself and more and more about the outside world even if it is about the palm tree outside your window or the birds chatting to each other.

7. Journal writing makes you an original writer

Only you can write your journal. Only you know most about yourself. And only you have your own perspective. When you write in your journals you are not imitating or copying. You are just being you. In your journals, you find your voice.

The freshness that comes from writing a journal permeates your life.

It is impossible to write a journal consistently and not become more reflective, insightful, and original in your writing.

8. Journal writing helps you silence your inner critic

Journal writing is all about process – not goals or outcomes. It is freeing – not constraining. Journal is the place where you can retire the inner critic. How you write, what you write, matter only to you. You are writing to please yourself, no one else.

Sometimes when I read my old notebooks I get drawn into them like a novel. I almost forget that I have written it. Some insights are so profound that I stop and wonder where that came from. All negativity about my writing ability vanishes and a sense of acceptance of my own abilities surfaces.

Journal is a thinking place, where you are least inhibited. Many writers use journals as the place to develop ideas or reflect on their intellectual work in progress.

It can be a place of discovery, learning, emotional relief, and insight. It can also be a playground, where the everyday rules of writing, reflecting, problem-solving, goal-setting, production, and planning no longer apply.

9. Your journals are the containers for your stories

An empty page in your journal is an invitation.

It is a place to collect your stories. A perfect repository of your anecdotes. This is where you describe things that can’t be captured in pictures. Like your home, what it means for you, how it functions and what comfort it brings you.

In your journals your practice noticing and capturing details to make your writing intense. Through your journal, you learn to see the world in more vivid colors. Widen your vision. Excite your senses.

I was hanging clothes on the clothesline when I took off a pair of socks I had already hung and straightened them by pressing them between the palms of my hands. Then I put them up again my cheeks to feel their texture. I hanged them up again, this time slowly and nicely so that when they dry I can fold them the way Marie Kondo suggested. It was then the realization struck me – I now have time to thank my socks. I laughed when I read that suggestion in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. Now I just did that.

Excerpt from my journal

These stories make perfect reading for rocking-chair days.

Journal writing is a supremely effective way to engage with your own inner world – and to engage more intimately and confidently with the world that is all around you.

10. Your journals itself will become your writing

Over time your journals will become your life’s work, something more precious, truthful, and rich than any book you can write. Many journal writers have left their journals as their legacy. Anais Nin made an art form out of her journal writing. She left behind 150 volumes (about 150,000 pages) many of which got published in her life making her a feminist icon of the sixties.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing or sing in writing then don’t write because our culture has no use for it.

Anais Nin

Start a journal you don’t have one, and for the love of writing keep going if you already have one.

Photo by Essentialiving on Unsplash

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Why have a platform?

Neera 1 Comment

Dear Creative Souls,

I have been writing for twenty years now. In those years, I have filled countless diaries, notebooks, digital files, and online apps. I was writing for myself and never thought of publishing anything.

As I got a bit better at writing, a tiny desire to share some of my writings with others started lifting its head.

But I am too scared to send any of my short stories to the competition. My novel needs at least three for four serious rewrites, and my diaries are personal. What can I share?

That is when I came across Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work in which he describes the importance of having a platform.

A platform is a medium through which you share your ideas and your work. It can be physical (a gallery, a salon…) or digital (blog, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook…), although in today’s age digital is preferred because of its reach and affordability.

Austin wrote:

More than ten years ago, I staked my own little Intrnet claim and bought the domain name austinkleon.com. I was a complete ameture with no skills when I began building my website: It started off bare bones and ugly. Eventually, I figured out how to install a blog, and that changed everything. A blog is an ideal machine to turn the flow into stock. One post is nothing on its own. Publish a thousand posts in a decade and it turns out into your life’s work.

[…]

My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships – they all exists because I have a my own little piece of turf on the internet.

That advice was the inspiration for the start of this blog. Since last year, I started sharing my work and my learnings on this blog. It has completely changed my perspective on my craft. I am writing better, learning faster and feeling a sense of accomplishment I never felt before.

If you are really interested in sharing your work and expressing yourself nothing beats owning your own space online, a place that you control, a place that no one can take away from you, a place where people can always find you.

Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.

Andy Baio, a technologist and blogger. 

Your blog can be your sketchbook, your studio, your gallery, your storefront, and your salon.

It is like a shopfront.

It will be a place where you can be yourself. You can reveal the part of you which not even your family knows about. Your secret yearnings, your desires, your dreams.

Don’t think of it as a self-promoting machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online you can become a person you really wanted to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and stuff you care about. Social media trends will come and go but blog and email have been around since the beginning of the internet and are here to stay.

[…]

Over years you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest, social network. Don’t give in. Don’t let it fall into neglect. Think about it for the long term. Stick with it, maintain it and let it change it with you over time. Whether people show up or they don’t, you’re out there, doing your thing, ready whenever they are.

Austin Kleon

Blogging is a simple strategy that the new age creatives use to build a name for themselves which overtime becomes their most valuable asset.

This kind of blogging is different from professional blogging where you are wanting to earn money from blogging. It is more in line with the advice the great writer and visual artist William Burroughs gave to Patti Smith, a singer, songwriter, musician, author, and poet

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work… and if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

William Burroughs

I am not sure whether you have given it a thought or not yet but you need a platform too. Every creative person does.

Let me know when you build one. I would love to visit it.

Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash