Writing: 5 Tips to Nurture Your Creativity

Your creativity is the bedrock of your writing career. However every writer knows that at times you're much more creative than you usually are. Let's look at five tips which will help you to nurture your creativity so that you're more creative more often.

1. Take Walks for Exercise: Go Alone
   Your creativity lives in your right brain, and your right brain "thinks" in images. Your right brain is completely nonverbal, therefore feeding your right brain images tends to prime the pump, so that you become more aware of images as they float into your consciousness. This images are translated by your verbal left brain into words.

   Movement seems to enhance this image-creation process.

   Go for a daily walk. It doesn't matter where you go, you can walk somewhere in nature or you can stroll through your local shopping mall. Here's what's essential: go alone. As you walk and look around you, you're feeding your brain with images. When you return and go back to your writing you'll write much more easily.

2. Take Long Baths or Showers

   I've no idea of why water enhances your creativity, but it does. It can be very annoying. You climb under the shower and before you know it you get a great idea for your writing. Keep a notepad in the bathroom so that you can capture these ideas.

3. Play With Your Writing: Make It Fun for Yourself

   You'd laugh if you could see my office. It looks like a child's playroom. I have coloring pencils, paints, and large drawing pads. I know that doodling stimulates creativity, so several times during the day I take a large pad and doodle. I just relax, have fun and enjoy the colors.

   When I go back to writing, I get an instant rush of ideas.

4. Relax, and Take Deep Breaths Every Hour or So

   Writing is stressful. Without meaning to, you'll find yourself tensing up. This leads to RSI and worse. It kills your creativity. At least once an hour, or preferably two or three times an hour, stand up and take several long, slow deep breaths. Stretch. You be amazed at the difference it makes.

5. Use Your Imagination: "See" Tasks Completed

   Try this. Before you start a writing task, close your eyes for a moment. In your imagination, see yourself writing easily and effortlessly. See yourself enjoying your writing. Then you see yourself completing your writing task and being thrilled with what you've written.

   This is autosuggestion. In a sense, you're hypnotizing yourself. This is very powerful, and it works.