Before I get into the heart of today's post, I'd first like to share one of my favorite pictures from over in the UK, both because I'm feeling nostalgic and because I find long, picture-less blog posts boring:
Sunrise in Stratford-Upon-Avon (Shakespeare's Birthplace)
Now that that's out of the way, to business. This week, my classmates and I embarked on a Writer's Retreat, where our tutor provided us with a host of writing and creativity resources and encouraged us to explore whatever caught our fancy. I experimented with several different techniques and tools, some of which worked really well for me and some of which didn't. Below, I've created a list of the activities that I tried this week from least helpful to most helpful. Please note that this list is entirely subjective, and is only meant as a commentary on how useful these activities were to me, not an assessment of their overall quality.
7. Google Earth: In order to get inspiration for a future story setting, I spent some time playing around with the Google Earth app. Unfortunately, I found the program to be clunky and relatively unhelpful.
6. World Anvil: For those who have interacted with wikis before, World Anvil is essentially a site where writers and roleplayers can create wikis for their own worlds. In other words, it allows worldbuilders to write and share articles about their worlds' characters, settings, important historical moments, and much more. For the Writer's Retreat, I created a World Anvil page for the fantasy world from the novel I'm working on. I haven't added any articles to it yet--in part because I'm wary about sharing my characters and settings on the internet. However, the website seems promising, and I hope to explore the possibilities it offers more thoroughly in the upcoming weeks.
5. Meditation: After reading an article about how meditation can enhance creativity, I decided to start meditating daily. At around 2pm on each of the past two days, I have blocked out time to listen to a four-minute-long guided meditation video. I'm not sure if this has directly impacted my creativity, but each meditation session has significantly reduced my stress levels. Therefore, as I write much better when I am not stressed, I can concretely say that meditation has helped me as a writer. Accordingly, I plan to keep doing it!
4. Pinterest Boards: As I may have mentioned in previous posts, during my fall Creative Writing tutorial, my tutor helped me create Pinterest mood boards for the characters and settings from my novel. This was extremely helpful for me, as it enabled me to better picture my characters and their settings. Therefore, this week I decided to create Pinterest mood boards for another story idea that I have. As expected, this helped me to better picture my characters and provided me with a great deal of inspiration for my future story.
3. Character Questionnaire: During our first class, my tutor provided my classmates and I with a questionnaire we could use to explore characters' appearances, backgrounds, hopes, and fears. The original purpose of this questionnaire was to help us create characters for a short assignment, but this week, I decided to use it to chronicle important facts about the characters from my novel. Although I have only filled it out for my main character thus far, it has already been incredibly helpful, as it has allowed me to arrange my thoughts about the character in a clear and organized fashion.
2. Character Walk: When I first read through the list of activities that I could try for the Writer's Retreat, one particularly stood out to me: going for a walk with a character and having a conversation with them (much like one would with an imaginary friend). Although this activity sounds a bit bizarre, it called to me, and I knew that I had to try it. So, yesterday, I went for a walk with one of the side characters from my novel. Not only did I learn more about him than I'd ever hoped to, but I also learned a great deal about my story's world. This was, hands down, my favorite activity from the Writer's Retreat.
1. How to Write Every Day Video: Although the Character Walk was my favorite Writer's Retreat activity, watching this video was by far the most useful one because it actively inspired me to write. I have always struggled to write regularly, so at the start of the Writer's Retreat, I decided to watch this video by Quotidian in hopes that it would help me develop better writing habits. It offered several excellent tips and tricks one can use to write daily, but the one that stood out most to me was the Pomodoro Technique: writing for four 25-minute intervals with five-minute breaks in between. On Wednesday, I decided to use an abbreviated form of this technique and ended up writing for 45 minutes; the day after, I wrote for a full 50 minutes. Given that I have done minimal "fun" writing since the start of the spring semester, this was huge for me. The Pomodoro Technique worked wonders for my writing productivity and I hope to keep using it daily.
All in all, the Writer's Retreat was extremely beneficial for me. That being said, the activities described above are only a small portion of the resources that my tutor shared with me. I suspect that there are many more tools out there that I can use to improve my writing, and I greatly look forward to discovering them.
Thanks for reading!
Abby
Writing Advice: Go for Character Walks with all of your characters. You'll learn more about your characters, setting, and story than you ever expected to.
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