Author: Massimo Curatella

So, you have done a free-flowing writing session.

You waited at least 24 hours to reopen that draft, and now you look at it with different eyes. You are wearing the lenses of the writer, the publisher. You need to evaluate that draft like if it were submitted to you by somebody else, a third person.

Now you are in a different place, different mode, you have the red pen with you. What is this person writing? Is there anything useful?

It’s a  draft. You are not judging a final copy, but you are exploring an uncharted terrain to uncover pearls. Your goal is not to look at the style, at how concepts are expressed. Your goal is to look for exciting ideas: is there anything interesting?

In this second exercise of reviewing, you first highlight interesting things, and then you pick one or two of them or more, you combine them to an idea, to a possible draft. 

Highlight, identify, copy and paste in another document anything that you feel might be further developed or connected, or integrated. Anything worth your attention needs to be extracted. Extract concepts, not the expression forms, and transform that amorphous matter into an article.

To do that, you need to define your objectives. What audience is this article for? And about what?

It might be a journal entry, blog post, or social media. It might be a writing exercise. Then pick a format, a template. For instance, the usual essay structure: introduction, development, and conclusion.

You can do that using the “Panino” template. You start with a strong statement and a possible conclusion. And then you split it into a problem at the beginning and a solution at the end. And then you fill it in with the “companatico,” with mozzarella and pomodoro, you develop the story, the middle.

So you have a final copy, something that could now be a candidate for publication or added to your article archive.
Buon appetito.

In free-flowing writing, you dump your brain in a fixed amount of time. You just write whatever is coming through your mind. There’s no judgment. There’s no preset topic. You just write.

Usually, in the beginning, you will produce mumbling and useless words. The more you do it, the more meaningful things start to emerge. Your goal is to reach a creative flow status where you are entirely concentrated and you’re listening deeply to your inner voice. 

It might be surprising, painful, amazing, especially when you reach a deep communication level with your intimate mind’s voice. The final goal of this exercise is to transcribe your deepest thoughts.

Transcribing means being like a journalist, a reporter. You’re writing down what you hear. You should be asking yourself questions to this voice you hear as if you were another person observing.

You become an observer of your talking mind.

The more you let it talk, the more elaborated and structured thoughts you will discover.

Capture those pearls like a diver in the depth of the sea with limited oxygen. It’s going to end soon. Be concentrated, careful, calm. And, quick! Get those shiny thoughts before coming back to the surface.

It’s a powerful exercise because you have complex outcomes regarding feelings, feedback, and discoveries. If done well, It can leave you quite confused, which would be good.

At the end of this exercise, you won’t have something to publish. You might want to keep it private. You can share it, but you’re not supposed to revise it at all. It needs to be a flow as it is. You won’t fix any mistake unless you realize that the concept you wanted to capture needs to be expressed better because you have a fresh mind about it. So do it. But your goal is not to fix the commas nor to change the style. It should remain raw.

Stop and reflect on the experience

Wrap it up and reflect. The most important questions are about not what you have written but how you feel. So how do you feel about that when you ended? Do you feel excited? Scared? Recharged? Curious? Do you feel like you want to do it again? Do you feel like you will never do it again? And of course, you should always add to those questions the most magical question that is: why? Why do you feel like that? Why do you want to do it again? Why don’t you want to do it again?

Then, reflect on the process. Were you able to concentrate without distractions? At a certain point, were you able to go so deep into a meditation state that you almost forgot about where you were, what you were doing, the environment around you?

The best thing that could happen to you is that you forget you are typing on a keyboard or a pen. You forget about the physicality of your body. You become one with the writing technology. There’s no distinction between your mind, your arms, your fingers, and the keyboard or the pen, and the paper or the screen.

With your eyes, you’re looking at your thoughts materializing on the screen, which is still your inner voice talking. So you need to close this feedback loop and be one with it and forget about the steps and the bridges in the middle. You need to be in the flow. There’s no distinction between your inner voice talking, your typing, and the words materializing in front of your eyes.

This is you.

Were you able to reach the state? Would you like to try again to reach this state and tell me how it went? What does it do to you?  Do you feel better? Do you feel worse? How do you feel? Why? How does this contribute to your focusing skill and the quality of your thoughts?

So there’s a lot to say about this exercise. And I strongly recommend it to you all. It’s useful to repeat it many times. Every day, you should have your ritual of 30 minutes of free-flowing writing. It’s for yourself, it doesn’t matter about publishing or doing exercises or demonstrating something to somebody, it’s for yourself, and you should do it every day.

The more you do it, the more you change. You will feel you have changed. You will be more aware of your brain functioning, of the things you think, of the things you say. You will be able to get out of the context of those thoughts and to see those concepts from a distance.

Bad, good, interesting. Curious, revealing? You will tell. If you’re not used to this experience, you will have revelations.

Store your draft in a safe place. Forget about it for at least 24 hours.

The next step will be about reviewing your piece in search for interesting things.

Good day, CREAZEE Challengers.

So you want to be part of a group of people building a habit to write daily.

Welcome, I am your host, Max.

There is only one universal rule that you must observe and you cannot violate:

1) There are no rules.

So you are kindly invited to follow the One Rule, I won’t give you any other.

What I do within my role is provide facilitation to you, the CREAZEE Challengers. “facilitate” coming from Latin (and Italian, then) means “to make things easy”. That’s my only responsibility.

Let’s talk about goals, then.

There is only one goal to achieve in the CREAZEE Challenge:

1) You will write every day.

There are no other mandatory goals. Of course, in addition to that you can add any further achievement, desire, need, and want. Although they would be gladly celebrated (and would make me and you proud) they are not mandatory to be CREAZEE.

So, why, if you don’t mind, would I post prompts, hints, tricks, suggestions, directions (never rules) for your benefit, every day (or multiple times per day)?

To make you achieve the One Goal:

1) You will write every day.

This is to make things clear from the first moment. You are challenging yourself to write every day. I will help you do it.

That’s it.

There are no rules but the One Rule (see above).

Oh, and there are no clubs, either.

---

I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 5 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 141st daily article in a row.

I spent more time doing logistics and bureaucracy than doing creative work. And I hated it!

Tomorrow I will officially launch the first group of Challengers in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Habit Challenge. It took me so many years to find the courage and the focus to prepare for this project, and now I am not writing daily alone anymore. I have a group of fellow Writing Challengers that will write with me every day for one month.

And that’s what I want to do. I want to write. I want to explore my thoughts, develop them and share my ideas with the world. But as a group facilitator and challenge organizer, I have other duties coming first: to make things work, to allow collaboration to happen, to prepare the space for collective creativity. That goes in addition to promoting the Challenge, gently cultivating conversations with potential subscribers, and setting up online venues to host them. And I also need to configure all software tools, platforms, plug-ins, extensions, accounts, folders, files, sheets, and what not to allow them to work undisturbed.

That requires a tremendous amount of effort. So, while I wanted to organize the writing prompts, prepare writing paths, and give creative fuel to my group, I’ve spent most of that little time devoted to this project to do the single most boring and uncreative activity: logistics.

I felt frustrated, and I’ve never desired so much to get help or be able to “script” and automate all of the repetitive actions. I’ve spent an interminable time to add a new account, add a new folder, add a new row, add a new email, and add a new item to dozens of lists, multiplied by dozens.

Here’s another valuable lesson from this project before it even begins: automate and simplify your life. It’s a powerful strategy to reserve more time and resources for more creative activities.

If you want to be more creative while avoiding killing your ideas by doing boring (but essential) logistical work: simplify processes, rules, and procedures and automate all the possible. You will have more time to nurture your creativity.

You can think better when you write. You’re focused on putting one word after the other. Sometimes the pen is slower than your thought. Some other your fingers are faster than your brain. You are forced to make sense and to express concepts in a meaningful order. Or to capture that idea in a way you will be able to retrieve in the future.

You can save thoughts for later. You would lose the majority of your thoughts if you didn’t write. Not a big deal. Unless you have a lot of exciting ideas and you keep on losing them. Writing put them in a vault, forever. (Remember to do backup).

You can be more focused when you write. Unless you’re typing while taking the metro or crossing a street in Tokyo. Still, you are in your world when you are writing. Can you listen to that voice inside your head spelling the exact words you are reading? When you write, that voice is not mine but yours. It’s you thinking and dumping words on paper or pixels. It’s a unique relationship between your brain and your fingers. Can you think of anything more intimate than that? (Well, OK…)

You can collect your thoughts when you write. There’s no storm taking them away from you. Not even time would. They have been materialized in tiny drops of inks on dead wood or stored in an unending sequence of zeros and ones kept alive only by physics. (Remember to do backup). And then, you can get them out again, revise, compare, elaborate. You can keep on thinking about it.

Writing is augmenting and expanding thinking through time.

Do you want to think better?

Write.

Write now.