Word of the Day: Transform your writing in 15 minutes a day

Word of the Day

By Marilyn Horowitz / www.o-books.com

What If There Was One Tool That Would Solve the Problems In Your Writing And Your Life?

After twenty-five years of teaching writers, I’ve concluded that success doesn’t come merely from perseverance or talent. The degree to which you embrace yourself both as a writer and a person is the extent to which your readers and viewers will accept your work. This new tool can reframe the world of your creativity.

In a nutshell, the Word of the Day Practice is a fifteen-minute daily journaling technique that will permanently upgrade your writing. By creating a word cluster as soon as you wake up, you can transform the way that you feel about yourself and manage your time better. You will also notice an increase in your productivity. The goal of the Practice is to help you create at will, write as much as you want, and reframe your writing experience into something exciting that you look forward to. But nothing is free, and to achieve this you must choose to do the work every single day.

From this moment on, please ignore the myth of the tortured artist and instead take on the belief that freely doing what you were meant to be doing—that is, writing—is what will make you the happiest. Writing will lead you to accept yourself for who you are, and that is the truest form of success. The commercial presentation of a writing project and its path through the marketplace must be separated from its creation. 

Another price you must pay, is to learn to accept and trust your own decisions until you reach your destination, the publishing of a book, or the releasing of an episode or a film, whatever your goal may be.

The next element of success is to accept suffering is optional, and here’s the formula.

Belief + Self-Respect = Self-Acceptance

Most suffering comes from over-identification with your writing process and harsh self-judgment on the quality of the work. The Word of the Day Practice transforms your writing experience from self-critical to accurate self-encouragement. 

To achieve accurate self-encouragement is an ongoing process which the Word of the Day Practice supports. It’s hard to dive without a diving board and the daily ritual of the Practice will set your creativity free. Your new feelings of self-worth become the springboard to your success. 

Writers express their creativity through writing, and our fear of rejection and failure stifles this natural process. Therefore, the reason that you must change the relationship with yourself is that you’ll never have the courage to freely express what it is that you need to say.

Another element is that we judge ourselves upon our creativity rather than who we are as a person. The cure is to set goals based on the process of writing rather than the outcome. It is obvious then, that writing as soon as you wake up solves the problem. If you do this every day, your negative concerns will evaporate because you’ll have the proof positive in the form of your daily journal, that you have already written. It’s amazing how when you do a little of something, it encourages you to do more. The time management aspect of the Practice then kicks in to help you organize your time better.

Now that the Word of the Day helps you organize your day better, the next part is that you take a few minutes to review how your day went. Once you can see what is actually going on with your writing life you can objectively assess whether or not you have given yourself enough time to work. What you will begin to see is that the actual time typing is not all the time that you need, you’ll see that you need to schedule time to take walks, go to the gym, do research, talk to other people, watch movies, and so forth. Typically, we are taught that these are distractions from our writing. One of the best parts of using the Word of the Day Practice is the reframe that everything you do contributes to your writing. 

Therefore, the time that you make to actually sit and execute takes on a different resonance, so the necessity of a page count becomes less important because it’s well known that when you make you a list, you don’t ever have to put the things on it that are important to you. By creating a context for your writing in your everyday life, you will do more of it.

Making a choice equals decision and once you decide that you are going to commit to your life as a writer and support your new commitment by the daily Practice, it will be like when the sun comes out on a cloudy day. And because you have written when you get up, you can bask in the imaginary sunlight of living the life of a writer.

Here is some of the feedback that I have received from some of the people who have made the commitment to the Practice. I recently had dinner with a successful Broadway playwright who had written two new plays using the system. Another friend was able to see that the problems with a new book were because he was not taking the time to do a proper outline, and once he did so he was able to hand in his work on time. Another student was able to complete the editing of a documentary to achieve a pressing deadline for the premiere of her movie.

Others have told me that they have solved personal issues because it brings up the core of the problem that you’re having. The reason that I’m sharing these stories with you is that beyond the specific use for writing, the Word of the Day is like a Swiss Army knife that can be used to solve other problems that impact your freedom to create. You can try this for yourself and in the morning decide whether you’re going to use the Word of the Day for writing or for something personal. A further use of Word of the Day can be as a deliberate creativity tool to help you figure out plot elements and create vivid characters.

Think of this Practice as a new tool that you can use when the ones that you already know don’t work. To recap, the Word of the Day Practice is a fifteen-minute daily practice that will transform your writing and your life. By treating the Practice as a new tool in your toolbox ready to be used whenever you are stuck, you will find new freedom and self-confidence.

Try it. Commit to thirty days. By the end of the thirty days, you’ll find that your attention has become focused on the writing itself rather than on your writing performance—the key to Accurate Self-Encouragement and creative fulfillment. 

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Word of the Day by Marilyn Horowitz is available from www.o-books.com and from wherever books are sold.

BOOK LINK: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/o-books/our-books/word-day-transform-your-writing