Monday, January 19, 2015

Learning Hack of the Day: Free Write

We have started our journal. Remember that a journal is a personal thing. How you use it is up to you. Most geniuses in history kept journals. It is the one thing Mark Twain, Walt Disney, Leonardo DaVinci, Vince Lombardy and hundreds of other recognized geniuses had in common. Feel free to draw pictures in your journal or write about the days events or to list your new learning experiences. The important thing is to keep a journal. But what should you write in your journal? Free writing is a great technique used by many journal keepers. Free writing is writing whatever comes to mind. It does not matter how silly or redundant. Just write for a specific amount of time. Many writers begin their day with a free-write. They claim it is a way of getting the garbage out of the mind, before starting serious writing. Julia Cameron in her book “The Artist's Way” assigns free writes of three pages long to her students. Many artists swear this makes them more creative. In my own free writing, I often discover that even if I feel I don't have much to write and I think that todays free write will be a waste of time, when I get to the third page, the ideas start to flow and I know what I have to write. I have found it does not work for me every day, but if I do it once a month, or at the beginning of each season or the beginning of each new project, it works. Sometimes when I am working on multiple projects, I will free write between working on one and switching to the next. Try a timed free write or do morning pages one day this week.

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