The IDEA Method

This signature DIY MFA technique is based on the premise that creativity is not some mystical process. It’s not about magic bullet ideas that you simply pull out of a hat. Rather, creativity is like a muscle that you must exercise and strengthen through repeated practice.

The IDEA Method also posits that idea generation is only a tiny part of the creative process. It’s not enough to have a great idea, you have to know how to put it into action. Idea generation is fruitless without implementation.

There are four stages in the IDEA Method: Inspiration, Development, Evaluation, and Action. As you can see, these four stages spell out the word I-D-E-A. (You know we love our acronyms at DIY MFA!)

Inspiration

This stage is what most people imagine when they think of the creative process. This is the stage where you come up with fresh new ideas. The other stages are where you build out those ideas and put them into action, but the inspiration stage is where idea generation happens.

The key to inspiration, in my opinion, is play. Have you ever watched and paid attention to kids playing? They don’t ever run out of ideas. It’s like an endless font of creativity and they are constantly coming up with new possibilities. They start with those magical words “let’s pretend” and suddenly they’re reenacting all sorts of adventures and playing endless games. The key for us as adults to tap into an never-ending source of ideas is to approach creativity through play. One of my favorite ways to get inspired through play is with the Oracle. I wrote a whole article about this creativity tool here.

Development

This stage is where the rubber meets the road. If inspiration is that initial jolt of creativity, development is where we dig deep and bring that concept to life. There are three components of this stage: imitation, improvisation, and incubation (or what I call the 3i’s of idea development).

Imitation is perhaps the most overlooked part of the development stage, but often the most valuable. This is the reality that we learn and create best when we acknowledge that our ideas exist in context rather than in a vacuum. Most of what we create is going to be a partial imitation of some other work that has come before. In fact, some of the most prominent artists and creatives use imitation heavily in their work.

Consider the impressionist Edgar Degas. Best known for his drawings, paintings, and statues of ballerines, what you might not know is that he was also in the habit of copying his own drawings over and over with slight variations. I discovered this when I went to a special exhibit of his work at the National Gallery in London, where I saw rows and rows of his ballerina sketches, virtually identical to each other, almost as if he had traced and retraced his own work.

Similarly, Vincent Van Gogh painted “First Steps, After Millet” imitating the pastel drawing by Jean-François Millet almost identically, only in a different medium (oil-on-canvas) and with his signature bright colors and swirling brush strokes. Artists of all types are constantly borrowing from each other and writing is no different. Imitation can happen both with an artist imitating someone else’s work or their own.

The key with imitation is that sooner or later, the artist moves from copying other work to improvising and making it their own. And if we’ve tried imitation and improvisation and we’re still struggling for ideas, the best thing is to pause and do something else. This is where incubation comes into play.

Evaluation

Once an idea is sufficiently developed, it’s good to take a step back and evaluate it objectively. This is not about letting the inner critic derail your process. Instead, the point is to take your writing project to a point where you have a critical mass, enough of it that you can determine whether it’s working. Bring your inner critic into the process too soon and you will derail your creativity, but you also don’t want to get so far along with your project that then if you realize it’s not working, you have to go back to the drawing board.

For every writer, the evaluation process will be a little bit different. Some writers have critique partners who provide this type of feedback throughout the writing process. Other writers might get a third or half of the way through their project, then pause and give it an objective look. The goal here is for us to avoid investing hundreds of hours in a project before we realize we’ve written ourselves into a corner.

Action

Finally, after we’ve figured out if the project is working, we simply need a plan for putting those words on the page and getting to “The End.” Here is where I like to do a little writing math and reverse-engineer from the end goal to where I am now.

Suppose you’re writing a novel and you’ve written about 20,000 words already. For a typical novel, the typical word count for most genres and categories is 80,000. This means you have 60,000 words to go before the end. Suppose you want to finish this book in 4 months, that means you need to produce 15,000 per month which amounts to about 3,750 words per week. If you write five days per week, you just have to produce 750 words per writing session to reach your goal.

For some writers, 750 words per session might be easy, but for others it might be a stretch. If you’re in the latter camp, you might need to work your way up to that 750-word pace. This is where I recommend the ten percent rule. Choose a word count number that’s super-easy, so easy you could probably knock out that word count in your sleep. Suppose that easy number is 500 words. Take that number and add ten percent (so 550 words).

That extra ten percent might not seem like much, but it’s enough to make you sit up a little straighter and lean into your work a little bit more. It’s not so high as to set you up for failure, but just enough challenge to keep you engaged. Eventually that baseline-plus-ten-percent number will become easy. At that point, you simply add another ten percent (now 605 words). Keep adding ten percent as each new baseline feels easy until you reach the goal of 750-words per session.

The point of this exercise is to avoid setting pie-in-the-sky goals to motivate ourselves to work harder. The truth is, though, when we set those high goals, we’re just setting ourselves up for possible failure. By working our way up from an easy baseline to a more reasonable goal, we set ourselves up for success.

Conclusion

The creative process is so much more than just that initial bolt of inspiration. There are three other stages that are equally—if not more—important. There is so much more to the IDEA method than the concepts shared here today. If you’re interested in learning more, check out our on-demand webinar Don’t Wait for the Muse which is part of the HUB lessons archive. You can learn more about the HUB here.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: The IDEA Method: What to Do When You’re Out of Ideas appeared first on DIY MFA.

But then there are those other times when the opposite happens. No matter how hard I try, the words just don’t come. I sit at the computer, stare at the screen, and I’m lucky if I can barely eke out a paragraph, much less a page or a whole chapter. Not gonna lie, I’ve been feeling very uninspired lately and the past couple of newsletters have been a challenge to write.

So, how did I get through it? After all, I must’ve gotten through it somehow or you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter right now. To understand how to get into a state of creative flow, we need to understand where creative flow comes from. Specifically, creative flow is based on four central concepts: the mind-work cycle, skill-based learning, practice, and community.

Mind-Work Cycle

The mind-work cycle is this notion that when we write we create a feedback loop between our brains and our writing. Our thoughts, experiences, and emotions (i.e., things coming from our minds) will naturally influence the words we put on the page. At the same time, when we write we process our thoughts and emotions and we also metabolize our experiences. This means that the very act of writing will in turn influence our minds.

Sometimes this feedback loop has a positive impact on our ability to find creative flow. For example, suppose you are writing a story loosely based on something that happened in your early life. By writing about this experience, you might work through some of the difficult emotions and maybe even “rewrite” how some events played out. This creates a positive experience at the page, which will make you more likely to want to continue working on that story. This feeds the mind-work cycle and increases your creative flow.

On the other hand, suppose that the memories and past experiences impact your writing in a negative way. This might make the writing itself more difficult and you may be less likely to want to continue with the project, thus impeding creative flow. Note that just because a project might bring up negative emotions does not automatically mean it will create a negative cycle. (After all, for some writers, sad stories can be more engaging than happy ones.)

The key here is to be aware of that mind-work cycle, to understand that our thinking impacts our writing but our writing also impacts our thinking. We want to keep track of that cycle so that when it’s going in a positive direction, we can ride that wave and be in that state of creative flow. But we also want to be able to step back and assess that cycle, to make sure we’re not moving in a negative direction and getting in the way of our own creative process.

Skill-Based Learning

One of the biggest fallacies about creativity is that it’s mysterious and amorphous, that there’s no rhyme or reason to it. As my high school English teacher would say: “Bull-honky!” Creative work—like writing—can be as technical and precise as other more scientific fields. And this technique doesn’t just apply to the craft, all those more abstract mindset-related components can be just as skill-based. The key here is understanding how skills are put together and for this I have two major sources of inspiration: Suzuki Method and Montessori Method.

The Suzuki Method was developed by Shinichi Suzuki as a method for teaching very young children how to play a musical instrument. It is based on the idea that all children are capable of learning music and that those skills develop in a similar way as learning language. One of the things that is central to the Suzuki Method is this idea of breaking skills down into their smallest components. Children aren’t expected to simply pick up an instrument and start playing. Each microscopic motion—from hand position to finger moments—is practiced in isolation first, then eventually strung together with skills building on each other. Progress may be glacially slow at first, but suddenly, you blink and the child is playing Bach.

The Montessori Method is also focused on skill-based learning. In this case, the emphasis is on children working at their own pace (often in groups of mixed ages) and using specifically developed Montessori learning materials. These materials are deliberately designed to help children explore various abstract concepts in concrete, hands-on ways. Students often work in a self-directed way, exploring different stations around the classroom. The hallmark of a typical Montessori classroom is how quiet it often is, with students sitting on the floor with mats rolled out in front of them, doing various activities individually or in small groups. These activities teach children specific skills, like how to do a pincer grip to hold a pencil. 

If skill-based learning can be used to teach very young children how to play a musical instrument or how to understand complex mathematical concepts, it can certainly apply to adults wanting to develop their creative flow. The key is understanding that creative flow is not magic. It’s a teachable, learnable skill. All it needs is practice.

Practice, Practice, Practice

I’ve talked about practice here and here, and I’ve also interviewed experts on the topic of deliberate practice. You could say I’m a little obsessed with the idea of practice. But how does practice relate to creative flow?

In the words of my late, great violin teacher: “Practice doesn’t make perfect, Gabriela. It makes things permanent!” She’d often say this to me after I’d spent a week practicing the wrong notes and had to spend the next two or three weeks un-learning and fixing the mess I’d made.

As writers, we often practice things without even realizing it. For example, I know a lot of writers who practice the art of not finishing a project. They get caught up in what I call Perpetual Chapter One Syndrome, starting project after project but not finishing a single one.

Other writers practice the art of procrastination. They get into the habit of pushing back and postponing their writing, which makes it that much harder to get back on track. Or, some writers even practice the art of not writing. They hang out together in coffee shops talking about their writing projects but they never actually get around to putting words on the page.

As creative people, we need to take a step back and look at our writing practice with objectivity. Have we created any writing habits that are not serving us? Are there aspects of our regular writing process that don’t seem to be working? Where have we practiced problematic behaviors and turned them into bad habits?

If we identify any bad habits, we need to find a way to break them, which often takes longer than it did to create the bad habits in the first place. This is why it’s so important to assess our own writing practice and try to avoid creating bad habits before they become too ingrained in us. It’s easier to avoid a bad habit than it is to un-learn it.

Community

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and it’s one of the three pillars of DIY MFA. Community is an important part of harnessing creative flow. Social accountability makes us more likely to meet our goals, Positive peer pressure of writing in tandem can help us knuckle down and get to work. And having a community’s support can help us build resilience and bounce back from creative disappointments.

Interestingly enough, community is also an important part of the Suzuki and Montessori Methods. In a traditional Suzuki music school, students often participate in group classes where they all bring their instruments and play through the repertoire together. If one student doesn’t know a particular piece, they sit down and listen while their classmates play. This type of environment creates motivation, where students are excited to learn new pieces because they want to play with their classmates. And for the students who know all the repertoire, these classes are a space where they can reinforce their learning.

In the Montessori Method, classes often mix the ages of the students. This means you might have a preschool classroom with children of ages three through five together. From a developmental perspective, these are vastly different ages. Yet, having these children together in the same class serves a very important purpose. When the children work together in groups, the older students set an example for the younger ones and show the younger students how to do the activity. The younger child might be learning from the older child, but the older one is also benefiting from the collaboration because they reinforce their knowledge.

In this way, both the Suzuki and Montessori Methods use community to help students learn. But community is not just for teaching young children. We as writers can use community as a way to learn and grow as well. For example, when we see fellow writers succeed, that shows us what’s possible and can motivate us to keep working, even when we feel discouraged. Community can contribute to our creative flow in any number of ways, which is why it is such a crucial part of DIY MFA.

Conclusion

Creative flow is not some mysterious, abstract thing that you have to figure out through trial and error or guesswork. Creative flow comes from developing concrete, learnable skills and building them into our repertoire. To achieve creative flow, we need to be aware of the mind-work cycle and recognize that our creative work impacts our minds as much as our minds impact our creative work. This means, if we notice a negative cycle happening, we need to break that cycle and course-correct.

In addition, we need to be aware of what skills we are practicing in our creative work and make sure that they are serving us rather than hindering. Practice can make habits permanent, so we need to scrutinize our habits and make sure we are not developing any that might get in the way of our creative flow.

Finally, we need to understand the role of community in our creative process and find a way to use it effectively. Whether we draw on other writers to help us hone our focus, or we use social accountability to help us reach our goals, community can be a great motivator. It can also be a source of support when we run into creative obstacles.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Where Does Creative Flow Come From? appeared first on DIY MFA.

This is one of the reasons I am such a huge fan of the Pomodoro Technique. If you’re not familiar with it, this is a method designed to help you eliminate distractions and get your work done. It originated in Italy in the 1980’s, where a young college student, Francesco Cirillo, was struggling to get through his studies. Using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (hence the “pomodoro” in the name) he broke his study sessions down into short sprints where he would focus on the subject at hand until the timer went off. After experimenting for several years, he eventually found that the optimal length of time for each “pomodoro” (i.e. sprint) was 25 minutes with five-minute breaks in between.

The idea behind the Pomodoro Technique is that you set a timer and then focus on one thing until the timer goes off. After this focus session, you take a break, then come back for another one. You can keep doing this for as long as you like or until you have finished the task at hand. Every four or five sprints, you can also give yourself a longer break.

Why the Pomodoro Technique Works

There are two primary reasons why the Pomodoro Technique is so effective. First and foremost, it enables focus and helps you avoid multitasking. It also forces you to take much-needed breaks, which can have major health benefits.

(1) It Helps Avoid Multitasking.

The main reason the Pomodoro Technique works is because it eliminates multi-tasking, since you have to focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking may seem productive, like you are knocking out multiple tasks at once, but that is actually not the case. When you multitask, your brain can’t focus on multiple things at once so it’s constantly toggling between the various tasks. This leads to context switching.

Context switching is the phenomenon where, when you alternate between multiple tasks, your brain has to “reboot” every time it makes the switch. This might only take a split second but if you switch tasks enough times, those seconds will add up. You lose time whenever your brain has to switch tasks, which means multitasking is actually less productive than focusing on one thing at a time.

In addition, multitasking can lead to errors and can affect your brain health. When you multitask, it requires using more of your brain, which means that multitasking is less efficient than doing focused work. Multitasking can also create other health problems, like increased blood pressure or stress. Even if these problems are short-term, they can still have significant effects.

When you use the Pomodoro Technique, it forces you to focus on one thing at a time. Each pomodoro sprint is only 25 minutes long, meaning that if any distraction comes up—phone message or email ping, you can easily postpone attending to it until the 25-minute sprint is over. After all, it’s only 25 minutes. Then, when you have finished the sprint, you can catch up on anything else that may have happened while you were working.

(2) It Forces You to Take Breaks.

Another reason why the Pomodoro Technique is effective is because it forces you to take breaks. Many writers (myself included) love to immerse themselves in their writing, working for long stretches of time. But if you work for too long, you can end up injuring yourself. I speak from experience.

When I was in grad school for my MFA, I spent so much time writing that I eventually gave myself “golfer’s elbow” and ended up with my right (dominant) arm in a brace for several weeks. That definitely put a damper on my writing. If I had been more careful and taken more breaks during my sprints, I would not have injured myself and wouldn’t have had to postpone my writing for quite so long.

With the Pomodoro Technique, you take breaks every 25 minutes. This gives you time to stretch and move around, as well as rest your eyes, wrists, and hands. It may feel like you are wasting five precious minutes of writing time, but prolonged typing or staring at the computer screen can have adverse health effects. If you take care of your body, you will be better able to keep writing for the long term.

Not only that, but sometimes a break is just the ticket to help you get unstuck when you’ve written yourself into a corner. A short change of scene or activity can help your mind recharge and when you come back to your writing, you’ll be refreshed and more creative.

How to Use the Pomodoro Technique

Here’s a quick step-by-step on how to use the Pomodoro Technique.

1. Choose a timer. This should preferably be a dedicated timer that you only use for Pomodoro sessions. There are several Pomodoro apps out there (I like an iOS app called Focus Keeper) but you can also use a good, old-fashioned kitchen timer.
2. Set the timer for 25 minutes. During that pomodoro session focus on nothing else except your writing.
3. Take a 5-minute break. When the timer buzzes, stop and take a 5-minute break.
4. Rinse and repeat. Every four pomodoro sprints, extend your break to 15 minutes. 

Just remember that while you are in a pomodoro session, you should not do anything but write. No checking your email, no sending a text message, no logging into social media. All of these things can wait until the pomodoro session is done and you are on your break. If something comes up that is truly important—for example, you have a brilliant idea for another story—jot down a quick note to yourself, then get back to your focused work.

The Pomodoro Technique works best when the task at hand is big and overwhelming. If you choose a task that’s too short, you run the risk of completing the task before the pomodoro session is done. Doing pomodoro sessions is especially helpful when you need to break down a big, scary task (like writing a novel) into smaller, more manageable chunks.

For example, let’s say you are working on a novel or a memoir. It can feel daunting to crank out those 80,000 words, but with the Pomodoro technique, you can break that project down into smaller parts. Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope math and see how you might map out those incremental steps.

Suppose that in a 25-minute Pomodoro sprint, you can crank out 500 words.That means you’ll need 160 Pomodoros to reach your 80,000-word goal. This may seem like a lot, but if you can do two or three Pomodoros in one day, that brings the number of writing days down to around 64. If you can work on your writing three times per week, you could have your first draft reach “the end” in around five months! Suddenly, that 80,000-word goal might feel a lot more doable.

I would also recommend, when applying the Pomodoro Technique to your writing, that you keep a log so you can track your progress. At DIY MFA, we are big fans of iteration and the best way to tweak and improve your writing process is to log your writing sprints. After all, you can’t modify what you can’t measure.

Make Adjustments to the Technique

As we wrap up this discussion of the Pomodoro Technique, I want to encourage you to give it a try, but also make adjustments as necessary. I find, for example, that for my own writing process, a 25-minute sprint is far too short, but 45 or 60 minutes gives me more time to immerse myself fully in my writing. If I was writing for longer stretches, though, I would also give myself slightly longer breaks, anywhere from 7-10 minutes.

In other contexts, 25 minutes might be too long. For example, in the past I used the technique with my children while helping them practice their instruments. (Little Man plays the piano, Lady Bug the violin.) What I found, though, was that 25 minutes was far too long for them to sustain their focus, so we dropped the length of the sprints to 10 or 15 minutes instead of the typical pomodoro sprint. We took shorter breaks between sessions (sometimes just 2-3 minutes) but they were able to sustain their focus for longer.

This is why I encourage you to experiment with the method and find the format that works best for you. There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to the Pomodoro Technique, so try some things out and see which combination of sprint and break lengths are most effective for you. Track your writing sprints and use the data to help you identify which variations work best.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Why You Should Try the Pomodoro Technique appeared first on DIY MFA.

I think the thing that got me tied up in knots about dictation was the tech. I had this idea in my head that the only way to dictate my writing would be to use some fancy microphone or elaborate software. In actuality, right now I’m just using my phone—regular old smart phone—and a little app called Bear. (It’s a notetaking app that’s super bare-bones and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles other apps might have).

The other thing that had me hesitating about dictation was this idea that I had to get it right the first time. I’ll admit it, I am a major perfectionist. If I can’t do something right then I often give up and try something else. It’s uncomfortable to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, but if you ever want to learn a new skill, you have to get past that hump.

Finally, this whole idea of dictating my work felt a little… weird. Not gonna lie. The idea of sitting around and talking out loud into my phone and then somehow ending up with a newsletter… that’s just bizarre. But now that I’m doing it—now that I’m on a roll—dictation’s actually pretty cool.

Let me share a few reasons why I’m enjoying dictation.

1) Anytime, anywhere.

The great thing about dictation is you can do it anywhere and you’re not stuck sitting at your computer. Right now I’m lying with my feet up, with office cat 2.0 curled up next to me, and I’m writing a newsletter all at the same time. How cool is that?

For a lot of writers this freedom can be game-changing. You can write while you’re walking . You can write while you’re doing dishes. You can write while you’re sitting with your feet up relaxing. This ability to write anywhere is especially important for writers who can’t sit at their desk for long periods of time.

By the time you read this newsletter I’ll be recovering from reconstructive surgery on my foot. At the time of this writing, I’m still a ways away from this surgery and I have no idea how I’ll be feeling when this newsletter goes out. Yet, now that I’m trying dictation, I have a hunch that I’ll be doing a lot more of it during those weeks when I can’t sit at my desk. Dictation may very well become my go-to during recovery.

2) It’s fast.

Dictating your work can go a lot faster than typing at a keyboard. For example, I’ve been at this dictation for about 10 minutes, and already I have almost 500 words on the page. This is mind-boggling. Keep in mind, I’m a reasonably quick writer at the keyboard. I can usually average about 1,000-1,500 words an hour, which I’ve been told is a respectable pace. But 500 words in 10 minutes? That’s almost twice as fast. I could never crank out this many words when I’m sitting at my computer.

I’ll admit, dictation does require some thinking. The words don’t just spill out on the page like magic. I have to pause from time to time to think about what I’m going to say next. Sometimes I lose my train of thought and have to backtrack. Even so, the writing still goes a lot faster when I dictate than it does when I type.

I’ve heard some pretty amazing stories of writers cranking out three, four, even five thousand words while dictating their work. But even if your word count doesn’t quite reach that level, there are some other big benefits of dictation. It’s easier on your wrists and your posture. It gives you flexibility to write whenever you want. Plus it exercises a different part of your brain, helping you to tap into other aspects of your creativity.

3) It’s easy.

Truth be told, dictation can be in some ways easier than writing on the computer. I don’t know about you, but I have a secret habit of talking to myself when I need to work out my thoughts. There’s something about hearing my thoughts out loud that gives me a different perspective and allows me to think more creatively than I would otherwise. Sitting at the computer is all silence. The thoughts stay isolated in my head, bouncing around kind of like they’re in an echo chamber.

Dictation is a way of tapping into that same creativity that comes from thinking out loud. You hear your ideas in a different way, and it helps you gain a new perspective on what you’re writing. So, here I am sitting with my phone, talking out this newsletter. Not only has it gone pretty smoothly and quickly, but I’ve also gotten ideas after the fact that I’ve been able to insert into this essay during revision. A lot of these insights have come from being able to hear my thoughts out loud.

4) It’s good practice at being a beginner.

Perhaps the best (and, in some ways, also the worst) part of dictation is that it forces me to sit with the discomfort of not doing things perfectly. Like I said before, I am a huge perfectionist, so this idea of being a beginner at something and having to learn a skill from scratch is really uncomfortable. And yet it’s only when we do uncomfortable things that we’re able to grow. If we stay perpetually in our comfort zone, we are never going to stretch ourselves and build new skills.

Here’s the funny thing about the comfort zone: it’s not a fixed space. When I think of the comfort zone, I think of a circle with me at the center. That circle represents everything that’s comfortable and familiar. If I want to stretch myself I have to move to the edge of the circle. That’s the edge of my comfort zone.

But here’s the weird thing about the comfort zone. If we stay by the edge of the circle long enough, that comfort zone expands and starts to look like a gigantic peanut. In other words, if we want to stay at the edge of our comfort zone, we can’t stay in the same place forever. We have to push ourselves constantly to the new edge, wherever that may be. We can’t stay complacent in the middle. We have to challenge ourselves to dance on that edge of discomfort.

One Caveat: It’s just the first draft.

As I’ve written this newsletter, I’ve gone back-and-forth between dictating portions of it, and then refining those segments on the computer thereafter. Sometimes I realize I’ve missed something, so I go back to my phone and I dictate a new segment. It’s been an organic process, moving from the computer to the phone and back again.

I share this because a lot of us have a misconception that when you dictate your work, it has to come out perfectly, with no revisions necessary. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. When we dictate, we stumble. We misspeak. We repeat ourselves. And that’s OK.

The whole point of dictation is to get the words down on the page so that we have raw material that we can come back to later. Dictation is where we crank out that messy first draft—Draft Zero. Then at the computer, we can go back and clean up what we have. It’s not supposed to be perfect. It’s just supposed to be. The whole point of a messy first draft is to exist. Nothing else. Every other refinement happens in revision.

Knowing that I could go back and revise my words took a lot of pressure off of trying this dictation experiment. Not only is it okay not to be perfect, but the whole point of trying dictation is just to get those words down as quickly as possible so that I can revise them later. That’s exactly how it has played out for me. 

I’m still getting used to this technique and it will likely be a while until I feel fully comfortable dictating my writing. Still I’m glad I tried it out this time. I might not use it in every circumstance, but having a new technique in my repertoire makes me a more versatile writer and that’s always a good thing.

Until next time, keep writing and keep being awesome!

P.S. For more info on Gabriela Pereira, the founder and instigator of DIY MFA, check out her profile page.

The post Writer Fuel: Trying Out a New Technique – Dictation appeared first on DIY MFA.