We don’t just write to express what we think. We write in order to discover what we think.

For many writers, it goes even deeper than that. It’s an itch they keep on scratching, but it never seems to quite go away. This itch is what we call a life theme. It’s a statement or an idea that ties your body of work together.

This isn’t true for all writers. But for most, it is. They write because there is a singular theme that resonates from their soul. It’s a golden thread that ties it all together.

This was true of Maya Angelou. She said, “In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.” That was her golden thread.

Is there a theme or idea that you keep coming back to? Something you’re trying to say, but you never quite feel you get it right?

That feeling of not getting it quite right is not an indication that you’re inadequate. It’s a sign that you still have more to say.

Don’t be afraid of your golden thread. In fact, lean into it. The more you do, the more your writing will resonate with people because it represents the truth of who you are and how you see the world.

And if you have been true to your golden thread, someday you’ll be able to look back on your body of work and see how that golden thread has been woven into a stunning tapestry.

Today’s Challenge: Write down a few ideas of what your golden thread as a writer might be. Share it with a couple of friends to see if they agree.

The post The Golden Thread Running Through Your Writing appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

I’m talking about getting rid of books that no longer serve you.

In the course of my ministry, teaching, and writing career, I’ve moved offices several times. Every time I do, I realize that print books are a huge pain to move!

As a voracious reader, and now as a full-time writer, I love books. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t get a book or two in the mail. Over time, these have added up and I’ve run out of shelf space more than once.

Every year or two, I do a “book purge.” It works like this: I take a couple of hours to go through all my books and set aside the ones I no longer need. I try to use the “moving next month” principle, in which I ask myself, “If I were moving next month, would I want to pack this book and take it with me?”

It’s OK to have overflowing shelves of books right now. However, the fact is that those books will need to be moved at some point in the future. Whether it’s you or perhaps your spouse or kids after you die, somebody will need to figure out what to do with the books.

The older I get, the less sentimental I feel toward books. If you have moved anytime recently, you know the lack of sentimentality you have when actually lugging all that stuff around.

That’s why I believe in an aggressive approach to book purging. Unless you have a particular sentimental attachment to a book, or you’re going to need it in the next few years, you should question whether to keep it.

Using this principle, I have downsized my library by a couple of thousand books over the last few years. I’ve either sold the books on Amazon, or more recently, donated them to Goodwill.

Every time I go through this process, I come across books that were once important to me, but no longer need to be part of my journey going forward. A book should earn its place on your bookshelf.

But if it’s not relevant to you right now, it might be helpful to someone else. That’s why I advocate for liberal generosity when giving books away. Plus, you can always buy another copy or get the ebook or audiobook version, if you need it again.

Please note: A book is just a collection of ideas and stories that represent a particular author’s viewpoint or experience at that point in their life. It might have been important to you at one point, but it isn’t anymore.

But if it is, then keep that book and re-read it! Give it a prized place on your shelf. A great book that helps you is a wonderful lifelong companion.

Today’s Challenge: To get started, take one minute and look at a single shelf of books in your home or office. Select at least one book you no longer need. Gift it to a friend or donate it to Goodwill.

The post Clear the Clutter: Books That Need a New Home appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Let’s talk about the biggest perceived productivity killer: writer’s block.

Whatever you’re working on right now, you’re bound to get stuck at some point. When you stumble upon “writer’s block,” here are ten tips to keep the words flowing.

1. Lower your standards. Many times, we get stuck because we’re trying to make it perfect. Be willing to write garbage just to get a draft done, then go back and revise it.
2. Brainstorm ideas on a whiteboard, legal pad, or post-it note. Changing the size of the canvas will often help you get past your block.
3. Take a nap. You might just be tired. History is replete with examples of famous creative people who took naps to be more productive.
4. Take a walk. When you walk, the blood circulates in your body more, and you’re more alert and attentive. It’s amazing how many problems get solved in your head just by walking for ten or twenty minutes.
5. Play with a toy. I keep a couple of fidget spinners on my desk. One’s in the shape of Captain America’s shield, and the other is in the shape of Thor’s hammer. It’s amazing how playing with these for a couple of minutes helps me solve writing problems.
6. Get up and drink a glass of water. Most of us are dehydrated, and this activity plus water will refresh your body and your mind.
7. Free write for three minutes. Free writing is just letting your hand write whatever comes to mind without stopping or judging yourself. It clears your creative palate and lets your subconscious take over for a bit.
8. Switch locations. Go to another desk or another part of the house. Or you can go somewhere else entirely, like the library or coffee shop. The change in scenery will spark your creativity.
9. Switch media. If you write on a computer, switch to a legal or journal. Use a different writing tool like a marker or crayon. You’re helping your brain to make a switch that will break the block.
10. Read something for ten minutes. Preferably, something in print. The change in media, and also holding something tactile, will give your brain a new input.

3 Bonus tips:

11. Do a mundane task. Take a twenty-minute break for a mundane chore like dishes, yard work, or folding laundry. This is similar to walking in that it will give you something physical to do. The new energy and change of pace will give you new ideas and solutions to your writing block.
12. Write your content as an email. If I’m feeling stuck, sometimes I’ll open my email app on my computer and write in that. That way, it feels like I’m writing an informal message to a friend rather than something with higher stakes like a blog post or book chapter. It sounds crazy, but it really does work.
13. Use a timer. On my desk, I keep a little 5-minute hourglass timer with sand inside. When I feel blocked, I make a game out of it by turning the timer upside down and seeing how much I can write before the sand runs out.

If you’re feeling blocked or a little stuck, these tips can make a big difference!

Today’s Challenge: Choose one of these tips to help you conquer writer’s block today.

The post The Productive Writer: Conquer Writer’s Block appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

It might be blog posts, book chapters, social media posts, podcast material, or in the case of myself, I’m sorry to admit, entire books you have written but never released for one reason or another.

I call this my personal slush pile. The slush pile can be a great source of material when you’re looking for ideas or get a little short on time.

The term “slush pile” came from the days when writers would send manuscripts to publishers and agents through the mail. They would get far more manuscripts than they could possibly use, so they would put them in a big heap called the slush pile.

The more you write, the bigger your personal slush pile becomes. I recommend keeping all your work on a location, or locations, where you can easily get to it. You need to have some kind of organized filing system, even if it’s just a document that’s title “unused ideas.”

The slush pile is not the same as a trash pile—not by a long shot. I don’t believe in trash piles for writers. Anytime you write something, it’s fair game as a spark for another idea, or to be revised or updated later. Never throw any ideas, or any writing, away because it might come in handy later.

C.S. Lewis said, “When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.”

If a writer the caliber of C.S. Lewis lived by this advice, surely it’s good enough for me and you also.

Question: Where do you keep you personal slush pile, and have you looked at it recently to search for ideas you can use?

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We have a plethora of ways to gain knowledge today, including podcasts, ebooks, audiobooks, video courses, and so much more. But none of these learning sources compare to good old-fashioned books. When you engage with a great book, you enter into a sustained dialogue with the author. You take a journey you cannot get any other way.

So make reading books a habit. The mode doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you are reading them. Ebooks, print books, audiobooks—they all lead to the same result.

Reading will help you connect the dots, spur new ideas, fill in the gaps in your knowledge, and inspire you to keep writing. Aside from consistent writing, reading is the habit that will nourish and expand your seeds of ideas into a bountiful harvest later on.

Question: Are you making time to read each day?

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We writers deal with thousands of seeds. Those seeds are ideas. They are scraps of stories, articles, books, speeches, or workshops. Ideas come and go by the dozens every day. It’s hard to tell in the moment which ones are worth keeping, and which we should discard.

That’s why we need to make a habit of planting those seeds—in other words, keeping track of them. Much has been written about different systems to organize your ideas. You can use printed journals, computer apps, a notecard system, or any of a dozen other ways to store and organize ideas.

The system doesn’t matter as much as your consistency in recording those ideas and keeping them somewhere you can retrieve them. A good option is to use a combination of tools—perhaps a small notebook you carry with you, plus apps where you transfer ideas and then search for them later.

If you want a harvest of good writing, you have to plant your ideas in some kind of system where they can take shape. Don’t trust your memory. Many great ideas have been lost because people forgot to write them down.

If you don’t have a good system, ask three writer friends what they use and start implementing a system within the next day.

Question: Do you have a system in place to record and retrieve your ideas?

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Your creative mind works the same way. It can’t just receive ideas and then cause those ideas to sprout. Your mind must be prepared. So how do you “till” your mind, so to speak? How do you prepare your mind not only to receive ideas, but also create an environment for them to grow and flourish?

There are perhaps many answers, but the most important one is getting into an environment that encourages growth and creativity. Join a mastermind. Create a community. Go out with some positive and creative people for coffee. Start a club. Make social media posts about creative ideas and ask for feedback. Write blog posts and make videos and engage with people who comment.

It is impossible to prepare the soil of your mind by yourself. It is essential to be in an environment that encourages new ideas and creative thinking.

When you consistently do this, the seeds of great ideas and effective writing will have an opportunity to grow into something meaningful.

Question: How are you preparing your mind to receive new ideas?

The post Preparing: Till the Soil of Your Mind appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Today I want to remind you of an obvious truth, but it’s a truth we like to avoid: You’re going to die someday.

When you die, what happens to all those ideas you’ve been storing? All those books and stories you wanted to get to someday, but didn’t? What happens to all those plans and dreams?

The truth is that all those things will die with you unless you do something with them while you’re still alive. The exception, of course, is if you’re one of those authors who leave notebooks full of amazing ideas, and publishers turn them into books years and decades after your death, or they have other writers flesh them out and list you as a co-author. But I digress.

The fact remains that for most of us, our creative ideas will have no value once we are gone.

Here’s another way of saying it: It all goes back in the box when YOU go in the box.

So make use of those ideas now. Don’t wait around for the perfect time because it will never come.

Great ideas are like money. They must be spent in order to have the greatest value. Money in circulation does far more good than just sitting in your bank account piling up.

Your ideas are the same. Put them out there in circulation on blogs, podcasts, social media, books, articles, or workshops. Just get them out there and see what happens. You might just be surprised what happens.

After all, your life has an expiration date. So make use of the time while you still have it.

Question: Are you making a habit of getting your ideas out there, or are you storing them for the “someday” that may never come?

The post In the End, It All Goes Back in the Box appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

In the musical “Hamilton,” Aaron Burr sings a number called “The Room Where It Happens.” He is upset that his rival, Hamilton, has been invited into the inner circle of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to help make decisions that will impact the future of the country. All the while, Burr is left out in the cold.

We all want to be around influencers and decision-makers. However, you don’t have to wait for an invitation. You can create your own “inner circle” by starting a mastermind group.

The general idea of a mastermind group is that you have a set purpose and you meet on a regular basis. Most mastermind groups meet once a week.

A major factor in the success of a mastermind group is the members themselves. They have to be positive and want to grow and learn. They need to want to help other people succeed. They can’t be in it just for themselves.

Why not start your own writer’s mastermind group? Invite a few friends to meet weekly. Each person sets goals and gives an update each week. The whole idea of a mastermind is to share ideas and resources—instead of individual minds, you create one “master mind” that is greater than the sum of the members.

Don’t sit passively by, waiting for an invitation to someone’s circle. Take initiative to create your own mastermind group of writers who are making things happen.

Daily Question: How could a mastermind group help you and a few other writers you know accomplish your goals faster?

The post The Room Where It Happens appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

Once you make the decision to start writing, and you do it on a regular basis (hopefully every day), over time you will build up quite a collection of half-baked ideas and unused pieces of material.

It might be blog posts, book chapters, social media posts, podcast material, or in the case of myself, I’m sorry to admit, entire books you have written but never released for one reason or another.

I call this my personal slush pile. The slush pile can be a great source of material when you’re looking for ideas or get a little short on time.

The term “slush pile” came from the days when writers would send manuscripts to publishers and agents through the mail. Of course, these individuals get far more manuscripts than they can possibly use, so they would put them in a big heap called the slush pile.

The more you write, the bigger your personal slush pile becomes. I recommend keeping all your work in a location, or locations, where you can easily get to it, and where you have some kind of organized filing system, even if it’s just a document that’s titled “unused ideas.”

The slush pile is not the same as a trash pile—not by a long shot. I don’t believe in trash piles for writers. Anytime you write something, it’s fair game as a spark for another idea, or to be revised or updated later. Never throw anything ideas, or any writing, away because it might come in handy later.

C.S. Lewis said, “When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.”

If a writer the caliber of C.S. Lewis lived by this advice, surely it’s good enough for me and you also.

Daily Question: Where do you keep your personal slush pile, and have you looked at it recently to search for ideas you can use?

The post Go to the Slush Pile appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.