Breaking Our Writing Patterns, Bit By Bit

Write Better Now

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

Harvard University professor Michael Puett has a book,The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, co-written by Christine Gross-Loh.

According to Pruett, things like mindfulness and meditation were about more than acceptance and self-love.

He told the Huffington Post, “They were developed to help us overcome the 'self.’ "

If you can recognize your patterns, you can move beyond them, he believes.

Or as the Post quotes:

“If we get angry at little things or find ourselves acting irritable, bored, or defensive, Puett said that's an opportunity to ask ourselves: ‘Is that just me, and I should love myself for being that? Or are those just patterns I’ve fallen into?’ ”

As writers, we have patterns to our creativity.

We write (or stare at the screen) every day at noon, at 5 a.m., at 11 p.m. We write 500 words (or not) each time. We write about basically the same characters often following the same three-act patterns time and time again.

But what if we don’t?

Free writes and writing prompts are things that help shake us out of our writing patterns. I’ve been experimenting a bit about how to move beyond the patterns of my writing, and a lot of the big daily February posts of awesome (that is such a bad title that I’m definitely not trademarking it) is about just that: finding joy, breaking free, and building our writing toolkits all at once.

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JUST A REMINDER!

I’m going to be starting daily posts for the month of February for paid subscribers. You’ll still be getting the free parts of the post and normal free posts. But it would be cool if you come hang out. It’s sort of a boot-camp of a month of writing prompts and thoughts and exercises and journeying. Cool, right? I’ll also have a lot of places for you to submit your story/poem/novel/nonfiction.

BEYOND THE PAYWALL

This rest of this post is going to be a bit about the Stoics’ approach to journaling and how we can use it as writers, a quick exercise involving a playlist I made, and some links to help.