avatarMarjorie J McDonald

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Use Real Life to Increase Your Writing Skills Quickly

These activities are an excellent source for writing.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Use Real Life to Increase Your Writing Skills Quickly

Because most negative thoughts concern the past or the future, the author Mark Twain said, “I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

That could have come from a natural human ability to catastrophize, which means worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet and might not happen at all. By its very nature, worry means thinking about the future and what may or may not occur.

On the flip side of worrying is ruminating, thinking bleakly about events in the past. What you wished had been different or what you could have done or said to get a different outcome than the one you got. Worry can be quite a time waster if very much time is spent on running the different results and comparing them to the outcome you got.

You can take these two skills that are part of your everyday life and expand upon them to create some compelling stories using the what-if model in the story process. You can use these skills to the extreme or to add some spice to your story-line for your fiction characters.

That will leave you more able to remain in the present in your life, savoring the things that you are experiencing and being able to do that without distraction. Releasing worry is a space that will increase your happiness significantly as you are not able to add things that are not there and can give your full attention to what is there. That can change if need be to allow you to enjoy in the present: more joy, happiness, and other positive emotions, which can also then be added to your story-lines.

Using these techniques can quickly increase your writing skills and let you add to your story-lines more believably. It can take those real-life skills and put them to better use than worry or ruminating. Just the energy savings alone from these shifts can open the way for you to become a more effective and productive writer.

This was first published on my website https://creativewritingmadeeasy.com

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