#37 - Beginner's Reflection(4) - Challenge Yourself, Write Under Bad Conditions

Hello, everyone!

Hope you all have a great day!

Today, I have a very interesting subject to talk about and I think it's very important.

Last night, as I was watching a documentary about training in the military, I got an idea - why don't we writers do some training stuff like those soldiers to make us stronger and more tough?

In the military, soldiers, new or old, have to practice regularly to maintain and improve their military skilles, and sometimes under extreme conditions, cold water, hot day in ruins or complex wild environment, etc. They have to stay as strong and agile as they would be under normal conditions, because they don't know in what places and under what conditions they would fight against their enemies.

So I thought maybe we writers could do the same as these soldiers, practice our writing abilities under bad conditions, which would be very beneficial for our writing adventure.

Of course, we are not going to dive into cold water in winter to practice our writing toughness, but there are many bad conditions and situations we would have in our daily lives.

In this episode, I'll list some common bad conditions we all experience time to time and see how we can overcome them and can still have a good writing performance.

The most common bad condition is tiredness. Almost everyone has a school or a job or both, sometimes we study or work more than 10 hours a day, when we get home, no energy left. Few people would write when they feel tired. It happens so often that we have to overcome it or it would hurt our writing career badly. There is a very simple exercise we can do, we sit down, take some deep breath and relax our body, clean our mind, and then write down simple and easy things first to warm up, make it slow and rhythmically, until we feel very comfortable and get into writing mode.

The second bad condition is noisiness. We can't always find a perfect time and a perfect place to do our writings, we have to write every minute we get in any place, such as workplace, bars, cafeterias, etc. where people are talking, walking around and music playing in the background. We have to adapt it or we would never write much. There is a trick that will come in handy, we do some warm ups first, we look around and watch what are happening in the environment, write down something about what we see and hear, such as what people are wearing, their behavior and what they are talking about, until we are ready to write your own stuff.

The third condition is deadline. Every project has to have a deadline, you can't take forever to complete your writing, the fast you get it done the better. This practice would make you more productive. There is a great exercise and it is simple, set a timer on your mobile phone to 5 minutes and then write down anything coming out of your mind non-stop in 5 minutes and then make this piece of writing as meaningful as possible, like you are writing an essay.

The forth condition is bad mood. This bad condition has been affecting so many writers so much and hurt them so badly. Life sucks sometimes, we would have a fight with our lovers or families, we would lose our jobs, or misunderstood by other people, we feel sad and stressful, don't want to do anything. If we can't overcome these difficulties, we will put ourselves in a very bad position, and if we can, we would be unstoppable. There is a good exercise, write down positive and encouraging words, and do some positive thinking and talking, you could write like this "I am not perfect, I have faults, but I can change, I can learn and I can improve. There are some things I can do tomorrow to make myself be a better person and I would buy some books to learn things from great people." Let all these positive words calm you down and get you refreshed, and then go back to continue your masterpiece.

The last one and the most dangerous one is distraction. It is so sweet that we usually don't think it is bad. We are living in an age where so many interesting things there to allure us, they are so accessible, most of them cost you nothing but time, Youtube, Twitter, Tv, video games, etc. Countless brilliant people defeated by them, even they are the most talented and having the greatest idea and getting enormous potential for writing, but if they are trapped in these distruactions and can't get out, there is no hope for them. Fortunately there is a very good solution to keep them on right track, it is this: write comments on those social media to share opinions with other people, or write about things you are passionate about, such as video games, tv shows or music, etc. Writing about things you love would be a great way to practice writing, remember that what you write doesn't matter, writing itself matters.

Under those bad conditions, we would feel frustrated and unmotivated, but if we do some writing exercises to enhance our mind and body to fight back, we will find that they are not that hard to overcome, and if we keep doing these exercises often, after a while, writing would become a part of ourselves and very easy to do, like breath.

If we can be doing great under bad conditions, we can do even greater under normal conditions.

I really hope you guys are happy every day, doing your writing in good environment and in good mood every day, but it is impossible, we have to overcome all these obstacles and difficulties to do our writings or we can't go very far in our writing journey.

Thanks again and let's get started to do writing exercises!

Be well and be tough!

^