What can you do to become a more inspired writer? The truth is, writing inspiration is the result of developing solid writing habits. You develop these habits on a daily basis by committing to certain activities each day. If you are ready to take your writing to a new level, keep reading.
Keep a Daily Journal
A daily journal is a great place to record small but meaningful life events, ideas, and even future plans. You can use your daily journal as a source of writing inspiration or simply as a therapeutic way to purge emotionally and mentally so that you can focus on the writing that you need to do. If you find the idea of keeping a regular journal uninspiring, try keeping a dream journal. Some writers use their journals to record one interesting, funny, or inspiring thing that they experience each day.
Spend Time Nurturing and Developing New Writing Ideas
As a writer, it is easy to lose yourself focusing only on the writing projects in your life that have looming deadlines. Unfortunately, if you are constantly chasing deadlines, you’ll never have the time to develop your own ideas. If you have new writing ideas, give those ideas the gift of your time each day. Write outlines, brainstorm, and use mind mapping techniques. Do what you need to do to make sure that these new ideas don’t slip away.
Play with Words
Do a crossword puzzle. Play “Words with Friends”. Download a word of the day app. Write short limericks, haiku, and poems. Find a great poem and work every day until you can recite it from memory. These activities are a great way to get your creativity flowing, improve your vocabulary, and explore the written word from a different perspective.
Challenge Yourself
Give yourself a writing challenge to meet every single day. You could challenge yourself to write a certain number of words each day or to spend a specific amount of time writing. If those challenges are not interesting enough, try a few of these:
– commit to generating 5 or more new story ideas each day;
– write 200 words each day in a writing genre that is not in your wheelhouse;
– pull out at least one earlier work of yours and revise it.
Road
You cannot be a good writer if you do not read each day. Read something new. Reread an old favorite. Read something from an author that you have never heard of. Read something that inspires you or that makes you laugh. Read something that makes you angry. The point is to improve your writing skills and to find inspiration through things that other people have written. Writers who do not read become stagnant.
Disconnect
Your phone, tablet, and computer are all great tools that you can use in your efforts to become a better writer. Unfortunately, such distractions can also be enemies of productivity when you should be writing. Writing is a craft and it deserves your undivided attention for at least a little while each day. This is why you should commit to unplugging for some period each day in order to concentrate on writing.
Carry a Pen and Paper
One of the best daily writing habits you can develop that will increase the amount of inspiration you experience as a writer is to simply carry a pen and paper wherever you go. If this seems clunky to you, feel free to replace the pen and paper with a voice recorder or writing app. Just be sure that it is something that you can open up and access quickly.
About the author
Being a Chief Editor, Julie Ellis writes at Premier Essay about education, self-improvement, marketing, and psychology. Having a track record of academic achievements and a Master’s degree in Journalism, allows her to support students with writing advice and educational life hacks. Find Julie’s on LinkedIn.
