Are you like me and you use writing to figure out your life? To figure out how you feel about things, how to decide about things, and how to move forward – or not- on the most important things in your life?
Writing for ourselves and to ourselves is a powerful practice. It’s true for me and the many hundreds of women I work with each week in The Writer’s Oasis.
Yes, sometimes writing for yourself can keep you stuck in unhelpful thought patterns or prompt you to rehash your same problems and fears and stories over and over again. Ugh. Exhausting. And the opposite of expressing a growth mindset.
But that’s not the kind of writing I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the kind of writing that brings to the forefront the things you need to see. Writing that helps you to choose where to put your time and creative energy, to map out your priorities, to wrestle with where you’re out of alignment, or to call BS on yourself when you try to put ten pounds of flour in a five pound sack… as my daddy used to say.
This kind of personal and expressive writing has been well documented to have all kinds of mental health benefits, which frankly is a good enough reason in my book to do it more often. But if that weren’t enough, I’m always reminded of what Carl Jung said, “What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.” Think about that for a moment!
So I’m all about the power of personal writing… AND also sometimes we want to move beyond writing for ourselves and write for an audience.
But how?
Well, the truth is, I get this question so much when I work with people that I knew I had to make this video for you. I hope it will help you if you’re considering inviting an audience to your work.
Listen in as I touch on…
- How and why to tap into your desire to write for others
- Why to pick no more than two projects to write into
- How to “stretch to connect” and two micro practices to help you do that
- Why sensory details and scenes are such useful tools to make the passage
- When you want and when you don’t want to keep your just right reader in mind
- And the single biggest thing I see get in the way of making the transition from writing for your self to writing for others
Now, I know it can feel scary to go from keeping all of your words locked up safely in a journal or on a password protected document to broadcasting your ideas and stories out into the big and scary world, but what might happen if you experimented with it? With sharing your work and letting your voice be heard? What might happen for you then?
