Tag: writing

I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 29 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 165th daily article in a row. 

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CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge April 2021, a Retrospective

We are about at the end of the CREAZEE daily writing challenge. And it’s time to reflect: how did it go?

It was a success in many aspects. I would have never thought I would have created a service to launch on the Internet and get subscribers. So having 15 people writing for one month in this crazy creative challenge is an incredible achievement of mine.

What worked very well was establishing a single clear purpose for this challenge. That was, “write every day.” It allowed me to be focused on the actions to take, the suggestions to make, and the behaviors to maintain as the Challenge facilitator. I’ve supported the group with optional daily prompts. Although most of the challengers followed them, some participants brilliantly achieved writing every day without following my prompts. And I’m grateful for that. Because the idea is not to write what I’m suggesting, but for you to write whatever you want to. If you wanted to have suggestions or stimuli or prompts, well, I provided them.

What excited me was the participants. I was expecting people from entirely different backgrounds. Young people from the West coast of the US, all of them looking for a new start-up to become a billionaire? That was my experience when I did myself a challenge to write for 30 days. I am in a period in which I am very reflective, and sometimes I become philosophical. So the idea to exploit and find the following multi-billion product to sell was not exciting to me. It didn’t happen because I’ve hosted a different public. I created resonance in other minds. And that is quite logical now with hindsight, but it wasn’t not expecting that.

I’m so glad that deep people and bright minds joined me in this writing collective. They surprised me on more than one occasion because they wrote about their lives, something personal. And most of them published it on blogs. That surprised me. They shared things from their own lives, their own experiences, their families, their pains, their losses. I was astonished. Sometimes I didn’t know what to say. I’m not expected to say anything about the content, but something interesting happened –This is the other aspect– there was some bonding between the challengers.

We created a small community of very dedicated and motivated people. And there was quite a friendly interaction between them in reading, commenting, giving suggestions to each other’s articles. And all of that was unexpected, unplanned. It might appear as obvious, now but I wasn’t looking for that.

I was wise to aim at one simple thing, writing every day, without setting any boundary, any limitation, by suggesting prompts and sparks fuel their fire.

In terms of results, it’s astounding. We’ve been writing for 29 days, today, every day. So it’s about 400 articles. It’s an enormous amount of work. So I was planning to read and host approximately 400 pieces, but I was not expecting the number of messages exchanged during the interactions. We exchanged more than 1’500 messages. Yes, most of them are mine, sure, but there were beautiful exchanges and conversations.

Only at the end of the journey, I decided to have some live calls. It was nice to meet people in real online life. It is something so new to me because, this time, I was not an attendee invited by somebody. I was the organizer. So it felt weird. Participants were lovely and available and open to comments and sharing their enthusiasm. It was a unique experience.

It will take time to digest it and reflect upon the whole experience. There’s a lot of learning for me that I need to elaborate on.

I gathered many suggestions for improvement about how to remind every day to participants that they have to write and create accountability groups or partners. 

The collaboration platform, Circle, is working quite well, but I’m not sure that the notification system was the best way to remind people to write. It’s something that needs to be fine-tuned. Maybe a dedicated newsletter with daily prompts would have served better. We’ll see.

The article tracking was a nightmare. I did it by hand, one by one every day, on a spreadsheet. It was a lot of work. I want to change that. I am the facilitator, but I’m not a judge. I can only push you to write. It is not my job to check your article, see that it is in the right place, and put a checkbox or not if you did it. Multiply that by 15: it is hours of work accumulating daily that made me devote more time to management than the leadership—this a capital sin in facilitating a group. I need to either delegate or distribute this responsibility.

The writing prompts were ready before the Challenge began. But I did not use them. I got inspiration from my 200 articles and also on that preparation, but I’ve crafted prompts with clear instructions every day. It was an essential part of the success because I used the “what, how, and why” approach. Not very long instructions but clearly defined. So participants knew what they have to do and where to execute their daily tasks. And that worked.

It was crucial to have all contributions in a shared public folder. Everybody could read anybody else’s articles with complete transparency. The nice thing about the Google Doc is that I can see you while you are writing. I frequently went into the personal folder of challengers to check their docs and look while writing. Sometimes we had little chats, and jokes, and or even suggestions. You can suggest edits and can save revisions. It’s a powerful tool to have for this kind of personal writing, but also group collaboration. It was a great decision.

I didn’t force anybody to publish. That makes CREAZEE different from others. This is not “shipping.” This is “writing.” That approach created ambiguity about the prompt of writing because what do you mean by “writing”? That was one straightforward and simple question I received. Is it an article? Is it a journal entry? Do I  follow your prompt and write every day saying different things, or am I refining what I started to write as a draft? I wanted it to be like that. My writing experience, one year of private journaling, and then one year of blog publishing 200 articles, is that the most important thing you have to do is build a habit to write.

In the beginning, it is pretty irrelevant what you are writing and how and for whom. You just have to write. So when I say writing every day, I mean creating that dedicated and focused space in which you look into your thoughts, you listen to them, and you try to capture them. It is not necessarily researching for an essay or explaining something. It is more listening to your inner voice. Sometimes it can be a personal reflective piece. Some others, it’s the blessing of having found the focus and the proper setting in which you can write about your ideas. It’s also finding ideas, collecting ideas.

It’s not easy for me to summarize the entire experience of CREAZEE because I have so many inspirations that it will take me years to express and develop them.

It’s a fantastic start. I am exhausted, but I’m thrilled and proud of the CREAZEE daily writing habit challenge, first edition in April 2021.

Join us in the next:
https://creazee.com/challenge/

How do you live with fear? Find the reasons why you have anxious feelings. Usually, fear comes from the unknown. Or from past painful experiences.

I don’t know what is there in the dark as a child. It could be anything. Fear preserves me, keeps me alive because there might be a hole. There might be somebody who wants to hurt me. So fear makes me stay still. There’s a biological reason for that. If there’s a predator, if I’m not moving, I am increasing the chance of not being noted. When I am scared, I tend to close to myself, I become smaller, so I am less noticeable.

Fear is an important feeling. It keeps you alive. What if you embrace it?

What if you use it as a prompt, to react, not to self-destroy?

Why are you scared? What is scaring you? Asking those questions can be a painful process. You can do it on your own. Or ask a friend. Sometimes you need a professional to help you.

It’s the first step to be more self-aware. The more you know about the context in which you experience fear, the more you can either accept it or find ways to react and change.

So, how do you live with fear? The first answer that comes to my mind is: be brave and face your fear by embracing it. You don’t have to risk your safety. You have to be an explorer. What happens if you research your anxiety? If you do experiment around fears? What does it change?

Think about becoming a scientist of yourself. Hypothesize an experiment, prepare it, execute it and reflect on what happened. By changing your behaviors, the settings in which you’re living, working, and breathing, are there any different reactions in your feelings? If you feel worse, stop and avoid doing that again. Understanding why. If you feel better, try to understand why you feel like that.

How do you live with fear?

Be brave and investigate the causes of your fear and call them by name.

Then, react. Become more self-aware and take charge of your life.

Writing is a powerful technique to reflect on your feelings. Think about journaling and keeping a diary of thoughts. When you write, you track your feelings’ evolution, fear included. Like a researcher, an investigator, you can write the history of your feelings. Writing contributes to making you more self-aware and better equipped to make sense of your experiences. It can be a great tool to research the causes of your feelings.

Write, and fight your fears.

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This article is dedicated to Siddu Tummala who suggested the writing prompt to write it.

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I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 15 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 152nd daily article in a row.

I am a visual person.

Drawing requires time, writing can be quick and efficient, so I used to write frequently.

I always took a lot of notes. I used to draw drafts, diagrams, and abstract scenes, all the time.

About anything and everything. Ideas for Dungeons & Dragons characters and campaigns. Ideas for Computer Graphics Algorithms. Tasks to do. Things I did. Memorable scenes from a movie. Contact names and details. Concepts related to work: how certain things connect, exemplifying complex structures, Things to research further. Nice words. Funny names.

Quotes from books or songs.

A Never Sleeping Brain

Ideas come to my mind while sleeping or taking a shower—dreams about saving the world. Being a better person, understanding reality.

I would write about everything and everywhere before the Digital Era.

I have one great regret: almost all of those writings are gone, forever. What remains is mostly useless now. I have lost its context. What was I thinking? Whose phone number is this? Why was that relevant?

A massive amount of thoughts was wasted. Those thoughts are part of my life and made me who I am right now, but I have no memory of them and no proof of their existence.

Writing as Self-Reflection

When I have some intense feelings or experience important events in my life, I feel the urge to write them down from time to time. They’re private.

Until I can’t contain them, so, here is the magic, I write about them.

Where? How? When? for Whom?

Instead of conceding them to the fate of flying papers, I have my double-backed-up document folder in which I can keep a digital document for more than one year and, hopefully, for more than one century.

It’s private, and it’s a safe place to think on my own. Nothing is forbidden. Everything is allowed. Of course, I am talking about thinking and writing, don’t get me wrong. Nobody can read my private thoughts. I can think whatever is flowing through my mind. I fear no judgment besides my future self when I will reread it.

A Safe Space to Change Yourself

Establishing a safe, secure, comfortable space to store your thoughts, in addition to creating a safe space in the real world to dedicate your focused time to think and write, is something that can change your life forever.

We’re social beings, but if we don’t have our intimate, safe mental space, we risk never emancipating ourselves, or at the worst, our sanity.

That is why I write.

Writing is Thinking and Remembering

Writing for me is thinking. How can you not think? You are thinking, right now.

But in a few moments, it’s lost. It’s water flowing in a stream. You have only your memory to help.

And your memory is severely tied to you being a wonderful but limited human being, with a lot of biases and forces pushing you to adapt your memory to your physical existence. Meaning, you can trust your memory up to a certain point.

Stop Repeating Thoughts

One simple consideration bugged me in all of those years: I discovered I used to frequently and repeatedly a certain set of thoughts, since forever.

Isn’t this a waste of time? How did I evolve? How are my thoughts improved and grown since the first iteration?

Not as much as if I could keep track of them! Combine them! Evolve them by connecting them!

Freeze Your Thinking Sessions

You could develop a fantastic memory and live in a mental palace allowing you to retrieve thoughts and concepts with absolute fidelity. Like when you suspend your working session on your computer, and you resume it precisely from where you were.

Or, you just write.

Free your Brain and Keep Track of Your Life

What happened yesterday? Was it helpful to remember that statement? What was the chain of thoughts leading me to have that breakthrough? What did that client say about my work? How should I change it?

Think about another thousand questions about moving to the next step of your life.

Shall you start each time from scratch or trying to make an effort to remember everything?

Neuroscience says the opposite; the more your brain is clear, the more you can focus on the present time.

You cannot put everything into your brain.

That is why you need another place to store your relevant memories. You need an external brain, an augmented one!

That is why I write.

Think Better Through Writing

I want to evolve my thinking. I want to put my thoughts on trial. I want them to become more powerful, more creative, more original, more connected. More!

What’s the best way to do it?

Writing.

It’s only after many failures in trying to build writing habits that I finally succeed.

I have a lengthy collection of incomplete diaries. Up until 2019. The magic year. On the 24th of September 2019, I started with a commitment to write every single day, for one year, at least 500 words or for at least 30 minutes, and I’ve ended up writing half a million words.

Write to Live Better

And then there is life. Making you feel bad, hurt, resentful, angry. You can decide to react according to the moment and, possibly, smashing the first thing at hand. Besides all the possible outcomes of your impulsive reactions, there is a way to learn to be different and better.

What really can help you in being more conscious and self-aware?

Writing about how you feel and why.

Writing about what happened to you and how you reacted.

Live better. Write.

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I am Massimo Curatella, and this is my DAY 11 Article in the CREAZEE Daily Writing Challenge and my 147th daily article in a row.

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.

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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.