Writing can be quite a
hair pulling, blood boiling, and head banging experience, and honestly, this
happens to all of us, even the best writers will feel like throwing their
computer against the wall every now and then. Many dub this ‘Frustrated
Writer’s Syndrome’. While Dan Brown copes with his writer’s block by donning a
pair of gravity boots to hang upside down, other writers, like Jonathan
Franzen, play white noise in the background to get the work done. It doesn’t
matter what approach is applied, as long as you don’t start lashing out your
frustrations at someone within proximity.
Finding the Zen in your writing isn’t a difficult process; it only
requires a little touch of patience, some amounts of practice, and heaps of
passion for what you’re writing. If you find something that is contributing to
a growing aneurysm, don’t waste the hours that you’ll never get back by getting
exasperated by it. Simply remove it from your system; put a muffler on that
Schnauzer that won’t stop barking, fix the dripping tap that annoys you to no
ends, or suspend your internet connection so you’ll stop ogling at everyone
else’s perfect lives.
Patience
Let’s acknowledge from
the very beginning that great work takes patience. Patience is becoming an
increasingly rare virtue to have, especially since the Y-generation is
accustomed to getting instant gratification. But what makes you think that the
best ideas developed over night? Even God, who could snap his fingers and
create entire continents, took seven twenty-four-hour days to create the world.
Evidently, even the big man up there valued perseverance and fortitude.
Practice
Ever heard of “good
things come to those who wait”? Well, it might be time to burst your bubble,
because waiting without any action is simply being a sitting duck. Practice,
practice, and only practice can make you any better than you already are.
Imagine running a full marathon with two miles of training under your belt;
it’s a pointless tease. Don’t procrastinate and put off writing any longer; it
doesn’t matter if you don’t have the full idea mapped out in a complex web yet
-- get some writing, any writing, done. You just have to decide to start. It’s
almost like muscle memory; some days will be easier than others, but with
persistence and consistency, your brain and fingers will miraculously decide to
cooperate with one another. Slowly but surely, you’ll find your equilibrium,
and it only gets easier.
Passion
The difference between
writing that is full of love, gusto, and fun is vastly different from one that
is uninspiring and created out of necessity. Surely, we don’t want to end up
with a book that is only good as a coaster, to prop up a short table leg, or to
build a fire. One thing you should be while writing is excited; otherwise, you
might as well be doing manual word counts for authors; it might just be better
for your sanity. Another thing about passion is that the more passionate you
are about something, the more effort you’ll want to put into it. It’s a simple
concept really: do what you love, and the rest will follow.
Eliminate the Enemy
You know the funny
thing about humans is that no matter how seemingly intelligent a person is, we
are all governed by one thing that plagues us all – irrational behavior. If the
remote control ran out of battery, no amount of slapping it against your palm,
or pushing down on the button with all the might of your index finger, is going
to do anything to solve the problem. Walk down to the store, buy a pack of
batteries, and change it. Voila. Applying this to writing, if grammar check and syntaxes are making you lose your marbles, calm down; you don’t
have to go back to grade school, and the world isn’t coming to an end. If the
efforts of having an error-free manuscript usually turn you into the night of
the living dead, eliminate your frustration completely. There’re so many
solutions out there to ensure a 100% accuracy rate on every document. Tools
such as Grammarly can scan your entire document for errors, from conspicuous
grammatical mistakes to subtle
sentence structures and spelling mistakes. It picks out on errors even word
processing programs often miss out. You might have just found the solution to
your sleepless nights and hair loss.
So now, I guess it’s
time to stop venting your anger on innocent pens, paper, and God forbid,
another poor soul. Keep your sanity and apply the art of being Zen in your
writing.
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Bio:
Nikolas
discovered his love for the written word in Elementary School, where he started
spending his afternoons sprawled across the living room floor devouring one
Marc Brown children’s novel after the other and writing short stories about
daring pirate adventures. After acquiring some experience in various marketing,
business development, and hiring roles at internet startups in a few different
countries, he decided to re-unite his professional life with his childhood
passions by joining Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the
pleasure of being tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and
others about how they use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to
improve their writing. His free time is spent biking, traveling, and reading.
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