8 Key Strategies for Effective Mindful Writing: Establishing Consistent Daily Disciplines

This week we will explore the nature of establishing consistent daily disciplines for effective mindful writing. If you are new here, please check out 8 Key Strategies for Effective Mindful Writing: Orient, Organize, and Prioritize and Establishing Initial Disciplines. Also, check out the weekly writing challenges. These challenges will help writer’s focus on practicing mindful and creative writing with 50 writing prompts.

For us who love to write, we owe it to ourselves to ever increase the quality of our expressive medium through practice. Our audience will grow as we grow. 

Cameron Robinson – The Discipline of Writing daily

Consistent and effective mindful writing means we are dedicating ourselves to express our ideas, beliefs, values, and understanding to our audience. How we accomplish this depends on our level of motivation and commitment toward our love to write. Without consistency, we may continue to struggle with our ability to adequately express our thoughts. Writing quality and thought provoking content occurs when we take the time to follow through with our consistent efforts in writing daily.

Chris Brogan shares 6 disciplines to help write daily:

1. Writing daily requires stillness
2. Writing daily requires a practice of mind
3. Writing daily requires curiosity
4. Writing daily requires framing
5. Writing daily requires a fall-forward mentality
6. Writing daily requires confidence

The challenge writers may experience is balancing daily life with daily writing. Remember, consistency is the key that doesn’t lead to perfection. Consistency is the key that leads to making something permanent. here are seven strategies to establish daily consistency in writing mindfully.

Maintain an Organized Writing Space

If you have not already done so – establish a writing space where you are able to spend some time writing. Refer to Orient, Organize, Prioritize for ideas on how to do this. A place where there is privacy for research, studying, and writing. Typically, this may be a desk. However, it may be the dining room table, or a small place in your room. Make sure it is quiet (unless you enjoy listening to music while writing) in order for you to focus. Have good lightening, a comfortable chair, and your space is not cluttered.

Establish and Maintain a Daily Writing Schedule

Identify at least 60-minutes of free time that you are willing to dedicate to writing. This may take some initial inventory of how your time is spent. One suggestion is to look at how often you spend searching social media (where you are not promoting or marketing your work, content, etc.). Look at how much time you spend watching television (while it is good to spend time with family watching a movie). Utilize time-management techniques (which will be the next installment in this 8-week series). Along with this dedicated time – make it a daily habit of carrying a notebook with you in order to keep track of thoughts that come to you, observations that may be inspiring.

Setting aside a dedicated time of 60-minutes may help you focus more on the task and becomes a natural part of your routine. Remember, effective mindful writing is not about spur of the moment writing frenzy. It is focused, meaningful, and purposeful. It provides us the opportunity to be in the moment. And, this does not actually mean we spend the time actually writing. It is time dedicated to writing. Meaning, if we are looking to develop a character, investigate ways to write particular scenes, researching information, outlining, and other aspects of the writing life.

Not only dedicate 60-minutes of time for writing daily. Break this up with the following structure to receive the greater benefits of writing every day:

1. Meditate and free write to detox for 10-minutes. Meditate and free write to detox for 10 minutes will help release the writer’s critic and disable the propensity for experiencing writer’s block. Think of this as a warm up prior to physical exercise. We stretch out our muscles and get our bodies ready for the stress and impact physical fitness demands. Without this, we may end up causing injury. With writing, if we do not warm up and free our mind will most likely injury our ability to write.
2. Complete a 10-minute writing challenge (more focused). Engaging in a writing challenge helps us utilize our mental capacity to sharpen and maintain focus. These writing challenges may be based on prompts, or observations we’ve taken note of throughout our day.
3. Focus on your writing project (novel, short story, web content) for 30-minutes. This is the bulk of our writing time. Now that we’ve warmed up and completed an initial writing exercise, we are primed to pick up where we left off. Plot out what we want to write next.
4. Plan out your writing goals and tasks for your next session for 10-minutes. Without planning out what we are going to accomplish in our next writing session defeats any effort toward effective writing. Establishing tasks and goals, we are setting up and planning out our next writing session.

Again, this may not be for everyone, these guidelines may help you devote time to writing daily.

Maintain Writing Priorities to Write Effectively

Mindful writing requires our ability to maintain focus and establish priorities. This is important to understand because we want to focus on what writing tasks are going to be more time consuming. A frequently asked question being asked in groups is that concerns whether it is good to write two different stories. For example, is it a good idea to work on writing two or more different novels? Personally, I believe it takes away the effectiveness of focusing our writing on one story. It does not mean we don’t write three different novels. Our priority is taking the necessary time and diligence in completing the first one. Then, we are able focus our attention on another novel.

Same with writing content for blogs and websites. Prioritize those that have deadlines where greater attention is needed. Keeping our writing priorities in order helps us lessen any sense of feeling overwhelmed and stressed.

Writing consistently and on a daily basis is not difficult to establish. It is a discipline that takes time to develop. A discipline requiring patience with one self. Want to set yourself apart from those who say they are writer’s compared to those who actual engage in writing is an admirable goal. Following these strategies may assist you in achieving your ability to write mindfully and consistently on a day-to-day basis.

Keep your space organized and free from clutter. Focus on establishing structure for writing 60-minutes per day. And, maintain writing tasks and priorities to utilize your writing time efficiently.

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