So I’ve been writing for a whole bunch of years now (some years better than others…) and I’ve accumulated a bunch of crazy ideas that I use myself and have shared with others at writing groups. Since they work well for me and some other similarly crazy people, I’ve decided why not share them with the internet as well.
I’ll do my best not to advise you to burn down your house, but I make no promises.
Today’s first Tips-y Tuesday is the “writing warmup.” Sometimes when you’re sitting down to work on your novel that you’ve been looking forward to all day, suddenly you feel all your inadequacies and insecurities stack on top of you one by one, to the exact beat of the blinking cursor on the empty Microsoft Word page.
It’s happened to me more times than I’d care to remember, but one thing that helps get my fingers moving is doing a “writing warmup.” I keep a separate document nearby that’s basically just a random scratchpad of a Word file, and I use it as a place to just write whatever. It literally doesn’t matter what, so long as I’m writing something.
It usually ends up just being a short diary entry about my day, but I’ve written stupid three-paragraph stories, psychotic streams of consciousness, and even shopping lists. Usually somewhere between 200 and 300 words is enough to get my confidence level right at about the kiddie pool level, and I jump back into working on my novel with a little momentum already in my fingers.
The most important part about doing a writing warmup is just to write. No one is ever going to read it (in fact you yourself are probably never going to read it, you’re just going to write it), so it doesn’t matter. Just get those writing fingers warmed up by putting words together into sentences for a few minutes, and suddenly you might find that blinking cursor on the blank page of your novel starts zipping along at a faster pace.
(Featured image via GAHAG, edited by me)
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