Writing Prompt
Feeling Better with DIY: A Prompt (and Some Big News)
The DIY Diaries invites your submissions
If you’ve been reading my work and/or the stories in The DIY Diaries, you’ll know that I’m pretty into slow living, creativity, self-care, and related topics. I believe that by slowing down and being really present with something we’re doing, we can start to feel more grounded in our life, even for a moment — and that can help us to feel better overall.
With that in mind, here’s a new writing prompt for you to consider: share a story about a DIY project or practice that helps you feel better in your life.
Maybe making art helps you relax. Maybe cooking helps you pay attention to your health. Maybe you started a walking practice or a daily meditation time. I want to hear about the stuff you do yourself that helps you out with your mood or your health or just the overall feeling of being alive.
If you want, your story can be about the tiniest stuff. Or it can be about a major change. It can be something daily, or something you only did once. It can be anything in between. :)
As an example of what I’m looking for, here’s a story I wrote about how my mom taught herself to do watercolor on YouTube, and then I started painting with her, too. Painting became especially helpful to both of us during the pandemic and is something my mom still does multiple times a week — she has been teaching my nephew to paint, too.
As always, the prompt is meant to be a springboard, and if you come up with something that goes in a different direction, I invite you to share it, too.
And of course your work on other DIY-related topics is welcome at any time, too. :)
And now for the big news
I just got added to Medium’s boost pilot program, with the specific task of recommending DIY-related stories for boosting. That means I need you, my DIY writing friends, to write and send me stories to publish in The DIY Diaries that I can recommend to the Medium curation team to boost.
Bear in mind that I can only recommend a limited amount of stories to boost each week, and the stories have to fit in with Medium’s quality guidelines.
A cool thing about these guidelines is that they specifically say that Medium wants the author to write from “relevant knowledge and experience.” I’ve talked about that from day one with The DIY Diaries: I want to hear your own stories about how to do stuff, not generic advice.
Another thing I’ve noticed about boosted stories is that they tend to be at least three minutes long. I would say to aim for the 3–6 minute mark for your stories, though longer can be OK if you’re going for a lot of details.
We have a good opportunity here to get DIY-related content some wider exposure on Medium, and I hope you’ll help me with this!
If you want to be added as a writer for The DIY Diaries, check out the welcome/guidelines post linked below and leave a comment there.