Back7 Life Hacks for Writers
Who doesn’t love a good life hack? You know, like the ones you see on TikTok showing you the easy way of peeling fruit or mending a rip in your clothes sans needle and thread? Well, here are some hacks to make your life easier as a writer. Not all of them will work for you, so pick and choose and see which ones will best motivate.
Life hack 1: Set clear writing goals
This will depend on your whether your creative project is big or small (novel? feature article? essay?) but if there is a deadline, make sure you work towards it incrementally, giving yourself enough time to conduct research and interviews if required. Buy one of those large planner diaries in poster size, so you can future map your goals and actually see it in front of you instead of using your phone diary as reminders.
Life hack 2: Break it down into small, achievable tasks
Following on from the first suggestion, it can seem insurmountable at first when completing a writing goal, particularly if the project is a complex, many-pronged affair, but if you give yourself permission to focus on a little bit at a time before quilting the whole thing together, then you won’t feel so disheartened at your seemingly snail-like progress. As that aphorism goes, ‘focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase’.
Life hack 3: Read your work out loud
This tip is particularly applicable for poets, but it works with any type of creative writing. Sometimes, if you are in a blockage situation and nothing is working, try reading out a passage that is giving you grief and see how it sounds when uttered out loud instead of remaining on the page. Just the combination of certain words together may feel awkward when you sound it out, requiring you to try a different formation.
Life hack 4: Don’t edit while you write
Many writers have a perfectionist streak; we like it right the first time, so often there is an inordinate tinkering of words before we are happy enough to move to the next sentence, paragraph or chapter. But this microanalytic way of working can suppress your imagination. It’s best to get everything down as fluidly as possible before the brakes of punctuation and grammar stop you from going further.
Life hack 5: Try handwriting instead of typing
There’s something organically delicious about the glide of pen on paper that you won’t get from the tap-tapping of a keyboard. And pen and paper are far more portable too, so if you are in the mood for brainstorming, take a notepad into your favourite café or local park and see what ideas percolate.
Life hack 6: Set deadlines
If you aren’t given deadlines by an external organisation, then give them to yourself. Go back to your planner and note down the date on which you hope to have finished a story, chapter, poem or journalistic piece of work. Just seeing it written there will hopefully guilt you into completion.
Life hack 7: Seek community accountability
It can be desperately lonely if you are forever writing by yourself with no one around to bounce off ideas, so consider joining a writing group. Not only will you make friends with like-minded folk, but you’ll also have a ready-made community that will inspire and encourage you, as well as keep you accountable for your writing goals. If you meet monthly for instance, you’ll have to make sure you have something to show the group at your next catch-up.
Written by: Thuy On
Source: ArtsHub