Tips to Make Great Writing like Great Sex

I’ll try to put this delicately. Some days sex is like vanilla ice cream, some days it’s like mint-chocolate chip with a little chocolate syrup drizzled over the top.

And then there are those days when it’s a giant banana split with five scoops all different flavors, chocolate syrup, strawberries, pineapple and cherries, whipped cream and nuts!

It’s pretty much the same in writing. We have days when we struggle to keep our butts in the chair. We have days when it’s easier but still have trouble getting a respectable number of words on a page.

And then there are those days when you feel like a superhero-nothing can stop you, it’s effortless! The words flow like water over a dam, the descriptions are as beautiful as a Monet painting. Your brain is bursting with ideas. Your fingers fly over the keyboard.

Well, we would all love to have THOSE days as often as possible, right?

I came a cross an excellent post on Write To Done by Barrie Davenport of Live Bold and Bloom that offers tips to help you in that quest.  I’m offering you an excerpt here:

How Writing Can Be Like Great Sex: 17 Hot Tips

Don’t you wish you could bottle whatever it is that stimulates the mind to open so beautifully and spontaneously? A mental door has been flung wide, and amazing ideas and words come spilling out, just begging to be arranged into a story or poem or article.

Neurons are ablaze, firing left and right. You can write and write, pouring forth words in great gushes, only to finish feeling completely spent. My, oh my.

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.” ~Hart Crane

And just as spontaneously, that door will slam shut again, and your brain snaps closed like a mental chastity belt. Every sentence is a struggle. Ideas and words evade you like a coy mistress.

Have you ever spent hours with your fingers poised on your keypad, staring at the screen like it might tell you what to write? It is so frustrating. You might as well be under water or in a slow-motion movie. Where did all of those darling words and ideas run off to?

If you have to produce something today, and your creativity has rebuffed you, here are some ideas to get the mental juices flowing:

1. Set the stage. You know where you like to write. Clear all of the mess off the desk or table. Put it out of your sight. Be sure you aren’t hungry or thirsty, in pain, or otherwise distracted. If you can write to music, play music that sets the mood for your topic.
2. Walk outside for a few minutes. Get a change of scenery and some fresh air to distract you from your mental sluggishness.
3. Re-frame your thinking. When you aren’t in the mood to write, you begin to think you are a bad writer. Don’t focus on the end product or your lack of inspiration. Just have fun in the process. Write without constraints and clean up the messy parts later.
4. Relax and detach for a few minutes. Close your eyes, breathe deeply and try to empty your mind. Meditate for ten or fifteen minutes if you have the time.
5. Send your subconscious a message. While your eyes are closed, ask for inspiration. Invite the ideas to come forth and the words to flow.
6. Visualize your reader. Think about the people who will be reading your words. What can you say that will inform, uplift, inspire, confound, or humor them? If inspiration doesn’t produce the words, use your intellect and refine later.
7. Do a warm-up. Get your fingers and mind ready for writing by writing mindlessly. Answer some emails. Revise a previous article. Type favorite quotes or paragraphs from other writers. Ease your brain and muscles into readiness.

That’s just a teaser. To get 10 more hot tips and more of Barrie’s advice, you just have to read the whole post: How Writing Can Be Like Great Sex: 17 Hot Tips

Barrie also suggests:

“If you’d like to read more about how the spoken word can impact your writing and your life, read this article.”

This link will take you to Barrie Davenport’s website and you can follow her on Twitter @CoachBarrie.

Davenport’s a life coach writing  inspirational and motivational posts on diverse topics with a theme of personal development.

It will be time well spent to check her out and you might like this article, too: Your Hidden Abilities and Why You Need To Find Them.

Of course, we all know how amazing Write To Done is and here are links to some of my favorite posts by their writers:

201 Ways to Arouse Your Creativity

How an Editor Hammered Me and My Guest Post into Shape

Hiring a Freelance Editor: A Step-by-Step Guide

Thanks for joining me today! Let me know if any of these links and posts turn out to be helpful!

Before you go I want to remind you that Lara Schiffbauer is posting today at the Life List Club Blog today! Please go visit her and offer up some blog luv. Thanks!

One Life Alteration – Positive or Negative Effect?

How many times have you heard the question, “If you could go back in time and change one thing related to your life, what would it be?”

A gazillion, right? That question is old and stale. We’d all change something we didn’t like about ourselves, something we did that was wrong, or something someone else did to us.

I have a twist on that question:

If you went back to any moment in your lifetime, and HAD to change one positive thing — one thing you have absolutely no regrets about — what would it be and how would making that change alter your future life experiences? 

Keep in mind, you can change this one positive thing to something different, but positive. Or, you can take this one thing out of your past and not replace it with any other occurrence. Let’s also go back in time more than 5 years.

If you’re like me, the first moments that come to mind are full of regret. Did they have more impact on life than the pleasant, positive times?

In trying this myself, I’ve come up with many positive moments, events, and choices with no regrets about any of them. This is only one I believe would have a major impact on my life were it replaced with something else or deleted.

My moment to change: 1971-1975 I rode with a motorcycle club for four fun and enlightening years.

Impact of that moment in time: During those 4 1/2 years, I learned more about myself than any other time in my life. I had escaped my father’s controlling nature and was allowed to make my own decisions. I met people from all walks of life. I learned to decipher between daring and dangerous. I discovered the pleasure and responsibilities of freedom. I found my strengths and weaknesses.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

What a change or a deletion would mean to my life: If I were to change the activity to sailing, for example, I might have learned the same lessons though likely with  different group of personalities than bikers. Would that have changed who I was?

If I were to delete this episode of my life, I believe my growth and discovery of myself would have taken much longer. I can imagine I would have continued in college as a shy and insecure young woman. I may have stayed on course to become a social worker, been hired to a county office and, maybe, stayed until retirement.

A county retirement would have been nice, but it wouldn’t make up for all that I gained otherwise.

I am currently writing a fiction series about a young woman riding with a motorcycle club and incorporating much of what I learned in those stories.

Try changing or deleting a period in your past and share in the comments what that would mean for you. Could experimenting with this idea help your creativity as a writer? Could it give you some insight to your life today?

You know I love hearing from you!

Before you go, don’t forget…David Walker is posting today on the Life List Club Blog! Please go visit him when you’re done here.

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The Law of Attraction – The Real Thing or A Lot of Hooey?

Have you read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne? It is a best-selling self-help book written in 2006, based on the law of attraction. It’s premise is its claim that positive thinking can create life-changing results such as increased wealth, health, and happiness.

I haven’t read it, but there was quite a lot of controversy swirling around this book. Some thought the ideas were bunk. Others called it pseudoscience. Still others claimed it to be a manipulative marketing tool.

If you’ve read it, I’d love to know your opinion.

You’ve guessed by now that this isn’t a book review, right?

The reason I’ve brought up the topic of this book is that I’ve believed in the law of attraction most of my adult life. Why?

It works for me.

I find more often than not, people are positive thinkers. I think I inherited my optimism and positivity from my mother. She never sees the glass half empty.

The Law of Attraction is more than positive thinking, though.

The idea that “like attracts like” was conceived long before the book, The Secret, was written.

It’s earliest manifestation was likely religious beliefs. ‘Pray to God to receive his grace and everything you need’, for example. Prayer is a form of mediation–focused concentration on a particular thought. Thousands of stories of miracles ‘prove’ the power of prayer and positive thought.

In the early 19th century, The New Thought movement began. According to Wikipedia, “adherents of New Thought believe that “God” or “Infinite Intelligence” is “supreme, universal, and everlasting”, that divinity dwells within each person,…and that “our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living”.

One influencer in the New Thought Movement, claimed that thought precedes physical form and that “the action of Mind plants that nucleus which, if allowed to grow undisturbed, will eventually attract to itself all the conditions necessary for its manifestation in outward visible form.”

What do you think about this concept?

I have two life-changing examples to share with you.

About 15 years ago, my then husband lost his business and, consequently, we lost everything, except our family and our belief that things would work out, somehow. In order to raise money to move cross-country for my husband’s new job, I had the biggest garage sale of my life. I had been holding very successful garage sales for many years and hoped this time would be no different.

The first weekend I chose was perfect weather, but in two days I had 5 customers who spent a total of $20. I planned to hold the sale again the following weekend. All week I focused on what we needed — to sell everything we could part with to raise enough money to move and to buy groceries that week, too. I made a list (no surprise there!) of all of our expenses and of every item I needed to sell. I read the list every night before sleep and fell asleep imagining my garage and my house empty of all that was for sale. No sales at all on the 2nd weekend, not even a friend or family member came by.

3rd weekend. It poured rain.  Buckets. I sat there anyway, garage door up and snuggled into a warm jacket–focusing all the while on what we needed. Hours went by and not even a car drove down the street. At 3 pm, I was chilled from the dampness and ready to close the door til the following weekend. The rain let up a little and, from across the street, a neighbor I’d never met ran toward me carrying her umbrella. I stood to greet her and thanked her for coming over.

Over coffee, she asked why I was selling so much. I gave her the short version of our plight as she looked around at my offerings. It turned out that her son was in the process of moving out of her house and into his own, but had nothing but his clothes to take with him. I brought her into the house to see what furniture I had for sale. Two hours later she was hugging me and offering to do whatever she could to help, then she ran home through the rain. I stood there in awe and holding $2000 in cash. This angel of a friend helped me a few more times before and after we moved away.

You can call this coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe the power of visualization and positive focus, letting no negativity into my thoughts, were responsible.

Several years later, I was a single mother trying to support my two kids alone. I managed financially, but emotionally I was having a difficult time. I was so damn lonely. I joined a club, started going to church again, smiled and tried to appear outgoing whenever I was out on my own.

Finally, I screwed up the courage to try online dating. That was an experience for another blog post. Suffice it to say, it was fruitless.

I joined a group for folks over 50 online and had a great time making friends. This wasn’t a dating site, but a place to meet people all over the world for online conversations and to travel together.

To shorten what could easily be a very long story, I’ll jump to the good part. I met a man from California (I live in New York). We’d talked on the phone for several weeks, then he decided to fly out to meet me. He was with me for 24 hours. When he landed in California he called to say he wanted to be just friends because, if this went any further, one of us would have to move across the country. He didn’t want to come east and didn’t feel it was fair to ask me to go west. I was very hurt and gave up any hope of ever having a relationship.

For the next few months, I did a lot of soul-searching and realized I was satisfied with my life for the most part. Yes, I was lonely for the company of a good man, but I had some great friends, a good job and wonderful kids.  I started going to a gym where my son acted as my trainer, I read more, I painted, I started a website. My life was filling up with things that made me happy.

I came to realize that I would be okay if I never met a man and fell in love again. I could manage to make a good life without a man in it.

I felt refreshed and more enthusiastic about what may lie ahead for me.  I had regained my optimism. I still wanted a relationship so I made a list (!) with 100 requirements for my perfect man. My list covered everything from being honest to not wearing socks with sandals. I read that list every night. I began to have dreams about this man. Whenever I wasn’t happily busy with all my activities, I visualized my life with this man.

Two months later, I met him. He found me online, we spoke on the phone for three consecutive nights. He lived 2 1/2 hours away, but he wanted to take me to dinner. I finally knew what the term “soulmate” meant. He surely is that. We married two years exactly after our first phone conversation. He met every single on of the 100 requirements on my list.

My visualization, my positive focus, worked. Be aware that a negative focus is just as powerful.

Click here for more description of the law of attraction from life coach, Martha Beck.

I invite you to dish it up in the comments. Do you believe in the power of thought? Do you think it’s all just coincidence? Is it all just a little to Woo-Woo for you?

(Disclaimer: This is my opinion based on my experiences and those of people close to me. In no way am I attempting to sway the beliefs of any reader, but hope to instigate a healthy discussion.)

Don’t forget to stop over at the Life List Club today. The lovely Sonia Medeiros is posting today –go see what she has to say about wasting time.

Marital Infidelity – What Would You do?

Cheating is considered one of the worst affronts to a relationship. It’s right up there with physical/emotional abuse and substance addictions. It causes a massive rift between partners and shoots holes in the trust the couple thought would get them through all of life’s trials.

You thought you were  knee-deep in love, that your relationship was bullet proof.

We all know in the backs of our minds that anyone is capable of making such poor choices, but admitting out loud that your relationship is seriously flawed is as painful as smashing your own finger with a hammer, on purpose.

Infidelity is a threat to marriage, but is it an insurmountable issue?

Can a good marriage survive infidelity?

ROW80 – 4/29/12 – Syonara/Au Revoir/Arrivederci/Cheerio!

Hello, fellow ROWers!

As my title suggests, this will be my last ROW80 update…for now.

I need to grab every moment available and shut the door on every possible distraction in order to get my writing done. I have a few short stories and the first book in a series to finish.

I’ve been feeling, lately, that I might be incapable of finishing anything. I have to prove myself wrong.

My plan to complete the first drafts of 3 short stories and a novella: