Here’s the spoiler:
The Most Important Thing You Have In Your Writing Career Is You
We know! We know! You were probably hoping for a cool app, or the perfect book about plot beats, but nope. It’s you.
You can’t write if you don’t exist. You write best when you’re doing pretty fine.
So here are the ways to actually invest in yourself.
Stay healthy for your brain
It’s pretty hard to write when you feel like crap because when your brain is all broken. As Harvard Healthbeat says, “First it is important to remember that you need a healthy body to have a healthy brain.”
How do you do that? According to Harvard:
Step 1: Eat a plant-based diet
Step 2: Exercise regularly
Step 3: Get enough sleep
Step 4: Manage your stress
Step 5: Nurture social contacts
Step 6: Continue to challenge your brain
Stay happy or at least okay. Relationships matter.
Your relationships with other people are really important. They help you evolve. There’s a thing called the dependency paradox.
As Kyle Benson writes,
“Our partners powerfully affect our ability to thrive in life. They influence how we feel about ourselves, what we believe we are capable of, and they ultimately impact our attempts to achieve our dreams.
“Even Mr. Self-Actualization (Abraham Maslow) himself argued that without bonds of love and affection with others, we cannot go on to achieve our full potential as human beings.
“Once we choose a partner, there is no question about whether dependency exists or not. It always does.
“Countless studies show that once we become intimately attached to another human being, the two of us form one physiological being.
“Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the level of hormones in our blood. The emphasis of independence in adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective.”
Kyle Benson
There’s a link to Kyle’s post in our notes and it’s just so good, but the part that really rings true for writers and other creatives is this:
“When a partner is supportive, we are more willing to explore and our self-esteem and confidence gets a boost, which allows us to go after our deepest desires. This not only improves the quality of our lives, but it also deepens and enhances our satisfaction within the relationship and our physical health.
“But as many of us know, sometimes our exploration leads to failure, rejection, and painful experiences. When these bad events happen, our biological programming creates anxiety that leads us to seek proximity (physically and/or psychologically) with the person we love.
“If they are supportive during this stage, our stress will go down and we cope with our problems faster, which ultimately leads us to overcome the problem and continue to go after our deepest desires.”
Kyle Benson again
So find those supportive partners and get rid of the rest!
Get some skills!
Carrie resisted the urge to put a z on the end of the word skills in our podcast notes, but here’s the thing: The more you learn, the less you settle. The more you learn, the more capable you become.
Learning and skills come from classes, from reading, and from experience. Mix it up. Learn in different ways.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
There you go. You write best when your brain works, when you’re happy, when you have skills and are learning about how to make the best stories possible. So invest in yourself, people. Take care of your health, your relationships and learn.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
You can go through your life just barking at thing, but you want to expand your brain and your repertoire and really immerse yourself in what makes you and your body happy.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
FREE BOOK? YES! I AM SERIOUS.
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