The best place to be...

 

The best place to be in…

 

The moment when you feel like you have nothing to write, is the very moment you should start writing, because this “nothing” is the gap where a treasure trove of words are awaiting for you to wake them up so they’ll tell you about their pains and stories, and like a diligent transcriber, you’ll take the dictation and copy their dialogues and monologues and whisperings and sweet nothings in your notebook.

 

This “nothing” is the best place to be in. Within the inky abyss of this nothing-ness lays asleep a colony of creepy little monsters, also known as “words.” Some of these monsters had been sleeping in this n-cave for, probably the past billion years. Nobody ever tried to wake them up, partly because they had no idea that they even existed. It wasn’t until these crazy person called “writers” finally slumped down on their desks with their notebooks or laptops perched in front of them.

 

For at least half-an-hour, the writer gazed at the blank page, rolling her sleeves, clenching her lips, tightening her belly, flitting her eyes from side to side in agitation, until, quite suddenly, some blurry images of these monsters starting materializing in her brain. And she was jolted in a shocking curiosity that caused her to become even more restless than she previously was. Who are they, she was left wondering.

 

Her attention kept on flipping between the blank page and the images of these monsters. Nothing seemed to work. Life was approaching an impending doom and her dream of surpassing the success of JK Rowling was already shattering in front of her eyes. So, the writer stood up from the desk, despondently walked to the kitchen, and made herself a glass of coffee. As molecules of dopamine rushed into her brain, she felt hopeful, again.

 

Nothing could be gained by abandoning hope. So, she kept sitting there, gazing at the blank page, her curiosity for knowing the monsters was dwindling away with each passing moment. By the time, the glass of coffee was slurped down till the last bubble, she stood up again. She slapped the notebook cover, shutting the blank page, vowing to never come across it again. The world was always right. Writing was not for everybody. And she was not one of the lucky ones.

 

After this horrifying encounter with life’s brutal hopelessness and a depressing realization, the writer resigns herself into exile. She steps out of the house to wander like a stray dog in the park and sit on the grass with closed eyes.

 

As she sat with eyes closed, all she could see was darkness. It was a place called “nothing.” The writer had already resigned to her hopeless fate, which helped her surrender much more easily to this n-zone. For the first few minutes, nothing remained nothing, nothing but the ever pervading, empty, silent darkness. But then, something happened. The sound of a bird. A bird flitted past her, likely flying towards the nest for the night.

 

In that moment, a word materialized in the n-space, in this boring, bizarre place called “nothing.” A spark flickered in the darkness, dimly lit. At first, there was one word. But as the writer kept sitting there, still hopeless, another word materialized. Then another, and another, and another….

 

Suddenly, the writer’s head was rumbling with an entire forest of words, desperate and agitated to tell their stories, their pains, their lost loves, their unfulfilled desires and terrors. As the words pulled the strings of the writer’s attention, she had no choice but to run, to run fast and reach her desk. So she ran and like a car suddenly pulling the brakes, she hurried to the desk and like someone who has been possessed by a ghost, she began tapping the keyboard keys, taking dictation from these word monsters and collecting their stories in the empty ocean basin of the blank white page. The blank page was no longer blank, thanks to that place that nobody likes to visit, that everyone is terrified to visit, a place called “nothing.”

 

For others, this place is of no particular significance whatsoever.

But for a writer, this is the best place to be.

 

Nothing. The best place to be. 

What is the Objective Correlative technique of creative writing?

 Objective correlative – A visuals-based concept in creative writing that helps writer express emotions more intensely through a character, scene, or visual detail.

 

Objective correlative is a concept made famous by the poet T.S. Eliot.

 

It is the “art of finding a physical object, a scene, or a chain of events that, when described in a story, will automatically evoke a specific emotion in the reader, without you ever having to name that emotion directly.”

 

In simple words, it is a feeling converted into an object that serves a symbolic purpose in the story.

 

For instance, instead of writing that the “character feels sad,” the writer paints a concrete picture using “visual or sensory details,” something the reader can see, hear, or feel, that perfectly matches the internal state of the character. This method adds depth to the writing, while avoiding generic emotional declarations.

 

If you want to convey a character’s grief, you wouldn’t write, “He felt a deep sense of loss.” Instead, you might describe him standing in an empty room, running his fingers over a framed photograph on a dusty mantelpiece. The act of touching the photograph, the emptiness of the room, and the presence of dust on a once-cherished item – these details become a direct representation of his internal sorrow.

 

If you want to show a character’s profound loneliness and sense of being left behind after a family wedding, instead of “telling” that the character “felt so lonely after everyone left for the wedding,” the objective correlative technique shows concrete visual details. For instance, the character is “sitting on the floor of an empty house. The air is thick with the scent of wilting marigold garlands left in a heap in the corner. She absentmindedly picks at a stray sequin from her lehenga, a single, tiny sparkle from the night before, now lost on the cold stone floor. The silence is broken only by the hum of the refrigerator.”

 

 

By using these sensory details like wilting marigolds, stray sequin, and the silence broken only by the hum of the refrigerator, the writer never has to use the word "lonely." The reader feels Amara's loneliness and sense of being left behind because the imagery itself carries the emotion.

Understanding the “Iceberg Principle of Storytelling” With example of “Simi’s Memory Journal”

Let’s take the example of a fictional novel called “Simi’s Memory Journal.” Here are some excerpts from “Simi’s memory journal” a diary in which this character records her memories, feelings, details of everyday experiences, dreams, fantasies, obsessions, ideas, notes, observations, and just about everything.

 

October 17^th – A recurring dream

"The old house again. That creaking floorboard in the attic. Always the same grey light filtering through the dusty window. The hum of the old radio, even though I know it's been broken for years. The same old crow and its same old caw-caw."

November 5^th – An observation

“A woman in the bus caught my attention today. Her amethyst-colored scarf reminded me of my mother. For a split second, I almost reached out to her to ask who gave her this scarf.”

December 12^th – A cryptic note about the memory of a past event

“He said the words, but I heard something else entirely. The way the fierce winds whipped and the way the rain lashed against the window that night, mirroring the storm inside."

January 28^th – A note about an artistic obsession

“Spent hours on the sketching of the peepal tree. Its roots seem to hold so much untold history. Like an old woman's hands."

February 1^st – A fleeting feeling

"A sudden, overwhelming sense of loss today. For what, I can't pinpoint. Like a phantom limb."

 

For the reader, these entries are like the “tip of the iceberg,” while the bulk of the iceberg has been hidden by the writer. The writer’s intention is to leave it to the reader to decipher, decode, infer, interpret, and imagine the details hidden in these excerpts. This, in a writer’s world, is called as the “Iceberg Principle of Storytelling.”

 

The Iceberg Principle of Storytelling, also known as the "theory of omission" or "iceberg theory," was famously championed by Ernest Hemingway. It suggests that the true meaning of a story should not be immediately obvious on the surface, but rather implied through carefully chosen details and what is left “unsaid.” Just like an iceberg, where only a small portion is visible above water while the major chunk of ice remains submerged and hidden from the naked eye, the most powerful aspects of a story are those that the writer allows the reader to infer and absorb on their own.

 

The principle relies on some fundamental elements such as “show, don’t tell,” “Hint, subtext & implication,” “focus on the concrete,” and “trust in reader’s intelligence.”

 

Show don’t tell

Instead of explicitly stating a character's emotions or the story's themes, the writer instead uses actions, dialogues, and sensory descriptions to evoke these emotions and themes indirectly.

 

Hint, subtext and implication

The real drama often lies in what is hinted at, in the unspoken tensions, and in the gaps the reader is encouraged to fill.

 

Focus on the concrete

While applying the iceberg principle, a writer uses specific, tangible details to suggest deeper meanings, rather than abstract explanations.

 

Trust in reader's intelligence

The author doesn't spoon-feed information but trusts the reader to connect the dots and engage actively with the narrative.

 

Simi’s entries are just the tip of the iceberg visible to the reader. It’s upto the reader to interpret them as they like.

 

For example, the small detail of the “Amethyst Scarf” in the above excerpts hints at the character’s profound longing for or a unresolved relationship with her mother. The immediate reaction to reach out to the woman could be understood as emotions like grief, regret, or a yearning for connection.

 

The recurring “Old House Dream” could represent a deep-seated memory or trauma associated with her past, possibly her childhood home or a significant event that occurred there. The creaking floorboard, the grey light, and the broken radio could symbolize decay, unresolved issues, or a sense of something lost or broken.

 

The Cryptic Note "He said the words, but I heard something else entirely" could imply a significant personal conflict, a misunderstanding, or perhaps a betrayal in a past relationship. The rain mirroring the "storm inside" underscores the emotional turmoil she experienced. The reader is left to wonder who "he" is and what "the words" signify, prompting them to imagine the full context of that difficult conversation.

 

The peepel tree obsession and Simi’s intense focus on it could be interpreted as an affinity for endurance, resilience, and perhaps the burdens of history or experience. The comparison to "an old woman's hands" might allude to her own feelings about aging, wisdom, or the weight of her memories.

 

The bit about the Phantom Loss could be taken as an "overwhelming sense of loss" that she can't pinpoint, likened to a "phantom limb," implying a deep, pervasive grief or unresolved emotional wound that continues to affect her, even if its origin is buried. It hints at a past trauma or significant absence that has become part of her identity.

 

The Iceberg Principle of Storytelling, therefore, transformed an ordinary narrative of Simi’s memory journal into a portal that can potentially take an attentive reader into her vast, complex, hidden inner world, where they can catch a glimpse of her deepest desires, fear, loves, and all things she said or didn’t say, her unspoken fantasies. This makes the simple chronicle of her journal into a compelling narrative and a powerful, emotional story.

 

 Today morning, I recalled these amazing lines from Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird" and I think, they encapsulate just the perfect POV to look at writing, perfectionism, and all the things that inhibit a free flow of writing. Read it below:

“When we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation and from infection, and that I would need to use these muscles if I wanted them to relax again.

I think that something similar happens with our psyche muscles. They cramp around our wounds – the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both – to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So these wounds never have a chance to heal.

Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases, we don’t even know that the wounds and cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in naked and immediate way.” - Anne Lamott

Good day!✍

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Keeping a Writer's Journal or Diary | Famous Writers Journals | Podcast ...

When I was a child, I had an ornamental wooden box in which I used to collect trinkets and knick-knacks of all kinds – broken hair clips, bracelet beads, scraps from newspaper and magazines, paper poems, jewel pieces, glitter ribbons and likewise. As I grew up, I started writing poetry and making lists and jotting down diary entries and creating art journals.

We humans have a deep-rooted appetite to recording our thoughts and experiences. Just look at the famous collections of poetry, at the great monuments and at the things and inventions. Everything is someone’s way to record and capture their innermost thoughts and experiences.

Everyone has their own way to capture their thoughts, feelings and experiences. And journaling is a writer’s way to do this.

Many of the famous writers including Anne Frank, Susan Sontag, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ruskin Bond, CS Lewis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Didion and others used to maintain their writer’s journals and diaries. For most of them, their diary entries and journal jottings were converted into books.

Inside the journals of famous writers, you’ll find chronicles of their daily experiences, time capsules of their deepest emotional encounters, portraits of anguish and shame, secret codes, accounts of melancholiness, bedlams of confessions and innermost expressions, dingle-dangles of sensory material, curios of memories and insights and reflections from the point of view of the eye of their life’s storms. There is so much going on inside a writer’s brain.

Carrying forward in this vein, many famous writers suggest the exercise of journaling for aspiring writers. Journaling is a written and visual version of our deepest thoughts, emotions and experiences. And as it turns out, keeping a writer’s journal is one of the best ways to enhance our writing practice. It is the cream on the cake of our writing.

Ideas. Descriptions. Adjectives. Emotions, Conflict, Character, Phrases…Writing is a complex process. To be able to write, one needs to put one’s mind together and then write while standing at a little distance away from it.

The key to a good piece of writing is practice. While the sun may shine not everyday, practice ensures that it will shine atleast someday.

One way to record our writing practice is to capture the creative process we employ for writing. How do we write the descriptions? How do we create characters and spin scene after scene? What styles and voices do we connect with while we read others’ writings?

Fiction writer Stephen King suggests a Noun Verb Fiction Exercise in which you write a noun followed by a verb. Form a sentence and then use it as a writing prompt to journal or write.

Author of Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury, uses a Word Association technique in which he writes a list of words, writing them one after the other as they come to the mind. When a list is complete, he jams the shapeless list into a story.

Similar to Mister Bradbury’s technique, Edward de Bono, in his book How to Have Creative Ideas, provides many Random word lists and uses many processes to use these words as writing prompts.

But even if you don’t wish to follow any particular technique, freewriting is something that every writer should do, must do. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’’s Way offers the idea of writing Morning Pages, which is stream-of-consciousness writing or freewriting. Write without any filter and without any grammatical boundary, just write it out.

A writer’s brain is an enigmatically strange thing. No one knows what creeps and slithers in there. But there is so much to write out. Unless you churn and dig it, how are you ever going to discover the gold buried in the subconscious?

Write letters to and from anything and everything. Write character sketches and dialogues and scribbles. Pen down a diary entry. Take support with visual cues such as doodles, sketches, collages, wordboards and word clouds just the way Leonard da Vinci used to do in his journal diaries. Open the windows into your soul and gaze at what you see without any filter of thought, opinion, judgement or belief.

Ending with, here are some views of famous writers on writing a daily journal or diary.

“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts – like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal, I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather – in many cases – offers an alternative to it.” – Susan Sontag

“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is the good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus must lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. ” – Virginia Woolf

“In diary you find the proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.” – Franz Kafka

“I never travel without my diary.” – Oscar Wilde

“It was while writing a diary I discovered how to capture the living moments…” – Anais Nin

Indeed what I have learned from reading about these famous writers has only re-enforced my curiosity and desire to persist in the practice of writing a daily journal or penning down a diary entry, for I too am waiting to unfold new doorways to self-discovery, intriguing fictional worlds that reside in my subconscious, and insights that stem from the serpentine stillness that creeps and crawls within my bloodstream and cellular trajectory. What about you?

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A Writer's Life | Podcast #10 by Neha's Notebook

Every day I sit at the typewriter. With the keys of the typewriter, I spin galaxies and labyrinths. I paint colours and create memory books.

 

I split into fragments, disappear and reappear in a new form. I carve castles and fortresses and loose myself in their dingy explorations. I evoke fairies and demons and dinosaurs from the pandora’s box, and pack them in my bag once they have uttered their spells.

 

With every piece I write, I delve into a journey of treasure hunt. Sometimes I end up discovering mines of gemstones while sometimes I have to make peace with a trunk full of crystal baubles.

 

As the typewriter scroll rolls and pulsates, I paint new landscapes with watercolours, I draw crayon portraits and sketch ink doodles.

 

With every description I write, I open the cupboard consisting of jewellery boxes of words, and like wearing an ornament, I decorate my pieces with the rhinestones and sequins and pearls of aesthetic words.

 

While other people have two eyes, I have infinite. I hop from one eye to the other, seeing things that most others miss and discovering worlds that no one had heard of.

 

Sometimes I write because I am falling in love, and I have a desire to paint the picture of my lovable sweetheart with the words. Whereas at other times, I write to talk to my shadows and bring them to the light of my sun.

 

My notebooks are filled with jottings of moments and descriptions of monuments, quotes from books and notes from everywhere. I write down anything and everything. I make wordbooks for vocabulary, ideabooks for ideas and flashcards for thoughts. My notebooks are decorated with sticky notes, washi tapes and stickers for inspiration.

 

Talk of a writer’s notebooks, and you’ll find chronicles that relate to everything from mundane concepts of physics, mathematics and chemistry to expository worlds of fantasy, magic realism, vintage vibes, hot advertising and science fiction. Look at a writer’s search history and you will be puzzled and surprised at the same time.

 

Writers spend their days filling notebooks and curating documents of their researches, story ideas, descriptions and swipe files. They keep an eye and an ear open and dedicated to nibbling the tidbits of everyday life and secretly slipping away to scribble down their thoughts that arise in their mind like wavelets and ripples from their subconscious storehouse.

 

Writers carry ghosts on their shoulders, and they let these ghosts dictate their pains and sorrows and concerns which they, quite sincerely scribble down in their notebooks, just like a curious child writing an essay on their first school picnic, writing about the school bus and the sandwiches packed in the tiffin box by their mother.

 

A writer’s life is full of medleys of glitz and glamour and oodles of whims and fantasies and dreamlike worlds. Here they create constellations with words and spark fire with the words too. With poetry I direct an orchestra and with a prose I create a new world. With a description I paint layers on a canvas and with expositions I open my third eye to let my mind wander into enchanted magical forests.

 

A writer is a toddler who uses pen and paper to cry and laugh. A writer is a child who imagines new worlds and takes others to tour these worlds. A writer is an adult too, who inspires and educates and shares their greatest inspirations, and trigger joys and ecstasies into people’s hearts.

 

Every day is a new day. Each moment is a fresh moment. A writer’s life, though, is not free of sorrow and grief, but it is also full of wonder and marvel and playfulness and gusto.

 

A writer’s life is uncertain and unpredictable. One moment there is stillness and in the very next moment, there is a gushing storm. But a writer keeps on recording every transformation, every resurrection in their log of words and notebooks of worlds. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that a writer’s life encompasses the infinity, from stillness to storm and everything in between.

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40 Insightful Quotes About Fiction from Famous Writers-Storytellers!

A work of fiction, in writing or otherwise, is a creative concoction of characters, settings and scenarios which are all, but only illusory formations carved by the function of human mind called as ‘imagination’. Yet for most humans, storytelling forms the make-up of majority of our life’s time.

Stories!

These fabricated vistas, slapped with wodges of tremors, trepidations and sensations; trammeling with shams of ideas and waves of emotion lapping through…Stories are those quirks of tricks and lies, in the backdrop of which, lurks a still quietude of the emotional center that hums and rustles in the heartbeats of its truest readers and listeners.

Discover below, a collection dazzling with forty insightful quotations from some of the greatest writers-storytellers, on the topic of ‘fiction’. To read all of these in one go (with background music!) begin straight from the following video, or skip through this to read them one by one. Yowzers!

#1 Fiction is the truth inside the lie. – Stephen King

#2 Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't. – Neil Gaiman

#3 Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. – Khaled Hosseini

#4 When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction. – Steven Wright

#5 Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6 What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. – Stephen King

#7 Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. – Albert Camus

#8 The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. - Tom Clancy

#9 This moment will just be another story someday. – Stephen Chbosky

#10 After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world. – Philip Pullman

#11 The universe is made of stories, not of atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

#12 The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. – Jean Jacques Rousseau

#13 Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible. - Francis Bacon

#14 Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ― Arthur Conan Doyle

#15 There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. ― Doris May Lessing

#16 Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.” ― Patrick Ness

#17 Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream. ― John Cheever

#18 Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. ― Hilary Mantel

#19 That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. ― Tim O'Brien

#20 Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. – Haruki Murakami

#21 Fiction is the truth, fool! – John Waters

#22 A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. ― Diane Setterfield

#23 Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ― David Foster Wallace

#24 Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. ― Virginia Woolf

#25 Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. ― Gabriel García Márquez

#26 If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. ― Richard Bach

#27 The point of stories is not that they are objectively true, but that the soul of the story is truer than reality. Those who mock fiction do so because they fear the truth. ― Cassandra Clare

#28 Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different. – Neil Gaiman

#29 Escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. – Neil Gaiman

#30 I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time. ― Diane Setterfield

#31 Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too. ― Nicole Christie

#32 Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. ― Michael Scott

#33 As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ― Slavoj Žižek

#34 It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. - Gao Xingjian

#35 Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. - Simone Weil

#36 Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction. - William Blake

#37 It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. Mark Twain

#38 Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. – Paul Theroux

#39 Beyond the fiction of the reality, there is the reality of the fiction. ― Slavoj Žižek

#40 Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. – George Orwell

Thank you & Good day!

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51 Witty & Trippy Mockup Project Ideas To Enhance Your Writing Quality &...

#1 Build a dictionary/encyclopedia on Youtube
#2 Create your own thesaurus and style guide for your occupation or profession
#3 Make Your Personal Question Bank – A glossary of various types of questions
#4 Build Your Personal Brand QR Code
#5 Don't add Page Numbers in Contents while self publishing books on Amazon [To prevent poor formatting]
#6 Create an editorial calendar for yourself
#7 Make a folder for research material while content writing
#8 Make a quote calendar – a quote for a day
#9 Make a video glossary of your favourite writing project
#10    Make checkerboards and grids for tracking project days [project goal grid]
#11    Make a collection of creative writing phrases
#12    Divide your time between ‘Research Time’, and ‘Writing Time’. Further divide your Writing Time between various categories of writing – freelance, short story, free writing, etc.
#13    Craft your own little writing zines or chapbooks
#14    Add audio files for newsletters and mail replies than text files!
#15     Make research-time ideabooks
#16    Make a collection of Quotes by Famous Poets/Authors
#17    Collect some interesting Youtube descriptions in your swipe file
#18    Write and create a mock corporate zine
#19    Make a folder of submissions, participations and commissions
#20    Make a Stream of consciousness writing Notebook

#21    Set chunks of research time and writing time to fix the writing schedule
#22    Make your own invoice system
#23    Make a logbook, workbook or registers to track your daily free writing
#24    Publish your documents and ebooks on Google books to promote
#25     Publish and sell your articles on Kindle
#26    Practice Word Associations
#27    Write 1000 words a day for a month
#28    Make a Word box – Pick a word prompt and free write on it
#29    Create audio poetry in your voice. Publish it on Spotify, Youtube and/or Soundcloud!
#30    Greeting Poems For different occasions
#31    Make a world record in memorizing words
#32    Write and design an Interactive Textbook
#33    Make a pocket book of rejuvenating words, quotes and phrases
#34    Make a pocket book of topical quotes
#35     Take one prompt/experience and fill the entire notebook, writing each day on the same prompt!
#36    Publish low-content books on KDP!
#37    Brainstorm and jot down a list of ideas to make typical books appear visually interesting
#38    Discover new words – of your own – made up words
#39    Write Letters to Anything and Everything – people, things, animals, flowers etc.
#40    Write food poetry
#41    Write fashion poetry with washi tapes
#42    Write mock captions for various occasions
#43    Write one-line stories using Twitter moments
#44    Write a heart-touching poetry in Hindi
#45    Write mock-ups for Product Stories/Product Copies
#46    Write recipe mock-ups for food bloggers, vloggers, photographers, yourself and likewise
#47    Create a shoppable or ready-made content package
#48    Practice writing witty/creative/quirky resumes
#49    Make a visual poetry book – one long poem spread out in one little chapbook
#50    Write a collection of Riddle Poems
#51     Make a notebook for character sketches for fiction