Day 9 - Writing tricks 

This “NoBreakNovember” series by thinkdeli reminds me of another writing community I was part of, years earlier. We used to post everyday in April under “AprilBloggingChallenge”. I have attempted only once and that itself tired me out. I was out of ideas dang in the middle. Though we completed the challenge, what I realised is there are few tricks of the trade which people do for such challenges. But personally I have different takes on these strategies.

1. Prompt based writing - I personally dislike this because I am very moody when it comes to writing and I can’t tweak my mind to adhere to rules. You are having a sad day and the prompts is about happiest day in your life or what made you smile today to which I don’t have any answers.

2. Theme based writing - This is much more easier than earlier one because you have little more freedom. This is what we did in the bloggers group. The post should be based on A to Z. So we could pick a word starting with A to Z and write a post or poem or story anything based on that. 

3. Free write - My favourite way of writing. Just start writing what comes to your mind. Let the devil in the your mind do the work. It could be junk at first but you could always edit the good part out to form a post. 

4. Opinions - Imagine you are talking with yourself in a room. You would be conversing just like how you meet an old friend. What will you talk about with each other or how would you carry forward the conversations? How did the day go? What’s happening at the job end? How difficult are the co workers? How is parenting shaping you? Did you hear about that Coldplay fiasco? Are you in midlife crisis? Have you tried that Japanese restaurant? An easy way to come up with speeches, because as human beings we have opinions on anything and everything. Atleast I have!

5. Tips and tricks - I do prepare in advance the posts for next 2-3 days so that even if I don’t have time to write I have posts ready to publish. Mind you, this only works when you have the free flow of thoughts in a time frame and not for off season period. If it’s a daily write challenge, I may write something but not post publicly, or if nothing else end up writing things to be grateful for that day(10 or 5 or 3 or even 1). Even to do list matters like grocery shopping, take bath, make dinner etc. The tip is to trick your mind that we are “writing”. Because that’s the hardest part for me. To take time to sit down and write. 

Yet, after giving all this gyan, my blog is dormant for past few years. As I write now part of thinkdeli, I realise the most crucial missing link is that of community. There used to be a sea of bloggers who commented on each others posts those days. There was no like button and if you liked the post you had to write it down, hey nice post, I loved how you connected this and that, I too remember that, so relatable, blah blah… How much ever we validate intrinsically, external validation does give you a kick. 

Though there are million posts on how to get out of slump the truth is it’s upto each one of us, who are different, to get out of it in our own way. What works for others may not work for me. So the search is always on. The max we can do is share each other tips like these. 

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