Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Posted on March 5, 2010 - by Denis

Quick Tip: How to get yourself into “Writing Mode”

You want to write but find it hard to get started? There is at least some level of inspiration to write that you experience but you’re having trouble putting out the first words and then some to get you into the state of flow?

Try this:

Open up an empty word processor and start typing by answering this question: “What do I want to write?” Don’t think about the answer, just write. Try to not even formulate words, sentences and more in your head but let those things take form only as soon as they go all the way through some part of your brain, through the nerves into your fingertips, onto the page in front of you by travelling as electrical impulses the whole way through the computer’s hardware until your eyes perceive them and bring them back into your brain again which then is allowed to take them in and understand them and reason about them, if it feels like doing so

Type out every answer that you get, drop all hesitation, just observe yourself as you function as a conductor for the ideas that flow from some most creative place that you so love tapping into.
While you’re being “neutral” in a certain sense you also want to make sure that the answers you type out are actually in alignment with your purpose. Bring your purpose for writing to mind before you begin this exercise, if you haven’t done so, and go back to your purpose briefly every time you feel like your answers are not as empowering, positive, supportive and encouraging as you’d love them to be!

Here are ideas for some more questions you can use:

Why do I want to write?
How do I want to feel when writing?
How do I want my writing to affect all the people who are going to read it?

Here’s also a sample of the output that I get from doing this exercise: Writing Mode Exercise Output

How does this exercise work for you? Did you already use this one? Do you have another question you like to do this exercise with? Do you have another favorite exercise or other suggestion for getting into “Writing Mode”? I’d love to hear your comments!

Until next time… follow your excitement!

Posted on February 11, 2010 - by Denis

Exploring Blog Post Formats, Part I

I got inspired to write the next blog entry — yay!

The reason why it’s called “Exploring Blog Post Formats” is that quite a few times I’ve caught myself thinking about rule sets for specific formats for blog posts that would define some kind of nice framework within which it would be easier to express the message that wants to be expressed in the moment of blog entry creation.

(Note: As I’m writing this I’m like… gosh, here goes the software developer within me… those people start generalizing stuff and putting it into “frameworks” before they even get started on solving the real problem at hand… and here I am doing just that again, except that I’m *not* trying to write any software here… but no escape from my geekiness I guess, so I’ll have to just bear with myself… )

These formats I imagine like templates for short yet concise entries. One could call some of them “exercises”, some of them “games” or …

Let’s explore some examples of formats that come to mind… my mind, obviously

Quote Exploration

There are so many great inspirational quotes out there and if you’re following more than a few people on sites like Facebook or Twitter you’ll have come across a lot of those short pieces of wisdom. You might even be at the point where you really don’t want to hear or read more of them, like Anna stated recently:

Maybe it’s just me being a miserable grump, but I find the constant stream of inspirational quotes on Twitter quite annoying. 9 months of non-stop inspiration begins to wear you down.

So yes, of course, too much running inspiring stuff through your head all the time kinda defeats its purpose after a certain point. But if taken in smaller quantities and examined for their true message, implications and applicability quotes can be an awesome source for personal growth.
And this is what I’d love to do with a quote every now and then: Take it, extract some of the multitude of messages that it is able to convey and explore how they actually can be applied to real life. But also I feel that for many quotes it’s important to go even deeper than that, including highlighting the inherent dichotomies and possibly other stuff I can’t verbalize right now… but there’s a lot more to quotes if they should be used as tools for gaining real, lasting and practical insight in addition to just feeling good for a moment.

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Inspiration has left me for now, other things are waiting for me to do them and so we’ll call this the first part of a series of blog entries! Leave a comment with ideas, feedback and anything else you may feel inclined to share.

Love’n hugs,
Denis