Essential Writing Habits for Stress-Free Creativity

On Writing Procedure

Why should you write?

I fell into writing out of necessity, admittedly — my mind went everywhere, and writing seemed the only way to settle things down. It’s paradoxical, but so the Stoics say: Freedom is discipline and discipline is freedom.¹

So to help you write and live a relatively stress-free lifestyle doing so, I’m going to give a breakdown of my writing habits, which not only contribute to no stress, but are necessary in me functioning.² These habits are the following:

• Morning pages
• Bullet journaling
• Capture
• Review (which I do consider writing)
  

In summary, this is how I continue developing ideas and, later, execute them.

Morning Pages

Each day begins with morning pages, a method from Julia Cameron’s the Artist’s Way — three pages, no censorship, first thing that comes to mind. As she writes, morning pages act as “windshield wipers, swiping away anything that stands between you and a clear view of your day.”³

To supplement this, I read two meditations: one in the Daily Laws, and another in the Daily Stoic. I don’t think I’d show up to the desk were it not for them — they ensure I learn something new each day. Or in a weird, not so way of putting it: If it was just me at the desk — timeless wisdom of philosophers is a great morning comfort, in addition to contributing to the sense that I’m growing as one.

I started writing morning pages in college, but it was as though I were a broken record. Pre-written meditations keep my mind on the straight arrow. Because even reading them year after year, life is constantly changing, so what can be learned can be applied in new ways; what has been learned can be looked at differently after the passage of time.

Furthermore, my morning pages help beyond the morning of writing, as I’ll speak on later.

Bullet Journaling

There’s an unparalleled relief in bullet journaling.

I developed my own system for bullet journaling at 16, but since 25 adopted Ryder Carroll’s method.

What my system focused on is separating observation and opinion — a practice I couldn’t have foreseen aiding my study of stoicism, which is the separation of what you can and can’t control.

In my prior system, a dash bullet point symbol (“-“) meant it being as close to a fact as I could muster; the line represented line of sight. A circle bullet point symbol (“O”) meant it was an opinion; the circle represented a mouth.

Someone might be wearing a particular set of garments, for example, or hanging out with a particular person (observation), but it’s my opinion on whether those things are good or bad. So using arrows and hierarchies along with these bullet points, I dissected how I felt and what I thought since a young age.

Carroll’s method of bullet journaling is capturing context (or events), notes, and tasks. Without context, something I missed in my method, my notes often sounded of gibberish after a few days or especially a couple of weeks. So now I no longer separate observation and opinion — observations I treat as events, and any note is technically subjective.

For especially subjective notes, jokes for example, I’ll add “J” before the dash. (You can guess why.)

Capture

Capturing is turning any paper or napkin, pen or pencil, into your weapon.

Take that piece of paper or napkin into an inbox. Then, schedule time to process through what you capture, organizing and, in the process, stringing notes together or casting them aside. While this might seem time-consuming and difficult implementing, the benefit of writing things down for later review, so you can stay focused on the task at hand, is an invaluable skill. And once it’s experienced, it’s impossible to go back.

Holding everything in your head… Well, I don’t wish it on anyone.

I wrote about Capture in practice in my blog post How to Write Jokes (Or Anything Else). A system I learned in Getting Things Done, I prefer to call it non-linear note-taking.

Being confined to linear note-taking, what I consider any notebook-based writing, is a limiting medium to grow and evolve ideas. There’s a power to shuffling papers around to figure out new angles, so long it’s controlled by paper clips and folders, either the analog or digital variety. (What are digital paper clips? Cut, copy, and paste.)

Review

Which brings us to Review: a vital component to each of these facets.

I’ll take a black pen, originally writing everything in blue, and scrutinize what I write, from grammar to my values concerning a subject. To paraphrase Robert Greene, the passage of time reveals the truth.

For morning pages, I’ll review as many as eight entries a week (I’m a couple of months behind, admittedly). It also acts as a double application of study; more than half of each of these entries refer to the meditations read that morning.

For bullet journaling, before I go to bed and around 80% of the time, I’ll take a black pen to my pocket notebook. I’ll work out the mess of the day, filling in blanks and adding details, using a process called annotation, which will need its own blog post to cover.

Doing this leads me to wake up refreshed, as though my brain works out the rest of what I wasn’t able to determine, or cements what I was able to. And, almost a reverse to morning pages, I’ll read a bit afterward so present circumstances aren’t the last thing on mind.

Finally, for Capture, Review is vital because without it means a most menacing stack of paper or items. Without Review, processing and organizing, Capture can’t work.

Speaking of, better get back to it.

1. Alfred Adler, the psychologist behind Adlerian Psychology, gave a different definition of freedom I look forward to writing about another time. ↩
2. It’s briefly described in my second and fourth blog posts. ↩
3. These past few days, in particular, MP have been invaluable to my thinking through completing WASDE. ↩