What is a writing project vs. a writing practice?
Hi Witchy Writer,
Have you ever felt bad because you haven’t made progress on your book, article, or essay, but you have spent long and wonderful hours writing in your journal? Have you been taught the only valid way to be a writer is to finish a writing project, and that the writing you do for play and fun has no purpose?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a writing project or wanting to earn a living from writing. But so often, we downplay the validity and importance of the writing we do that doesn’t have an agenda. This is writing where you play with thoughts, characters, and stories. It’s writing that doesn’t have to go anywhere or become a thing. This is the practice of writing, where you show up to the page to engage your inspiration, imagination, and intuition, whether these words become a writing project or not.
Having a writing practice like this, where you come back to the page regularly, is a vital part of the writing life. In today’s Witchy Writers’ Podcast episode, I teach you how to feel empowered about your writing practice, even when you aren’t working on a writing project.
Want to share your thoughts about a writing project vs. a writing practice? Email me at hello@enchantedwriting.com.
Emma
P.S. Join the Dark Moon Free 5-Day Writing Challenge to experience the quietude and self-reflection of the dark moon with five witchy writing prompts. The challenge starts on Saturday September 9, 2023.
Disclaimer: This blog is a resource guide for educational and informational purposes only and should not take the place of hiring a life coach, a therapist, or of seeking medical attention. No information on this blog creates a coach-client relationship between us. You are fully responsible for the decisions and actions you take in regard to your life and affairs.
Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Witchy Writers Podcast, where you will learn about witchy tools, mindset tips, and creative practices to empower your writing life.
I am Emma Veritas.
I am a writer, writing coach, and creative witch.
And today I am talking to you about what is empowering my witchy writing life right now.
And I'm sharing a mindset tip to help you take a little bit of the stress out of your writing life.
But before we get into that, I have a really fun announcement for all of you today that I am so excited about.
So starting this September 14th, the doors will be opening to my brand new membership program called Pen and Hearth.
Pen and Hearth helps witchy writers like you develop a daily writing practice so you can feel inspired in your writing life.
This group is for you if you want to spark more inspiration in your writing.
It's for you if you want to build confidence in your authentic voice.
It's also for you if you would love to experience community and connection in your writing life.
And of course, it's for you if you're somebody who is a witchy person, or maybe you're just kind of witch curious, and you would like to experience a little bit more magic in your life every day.
So what we do in Pen and Hearth, the core and heart of everything we do is we are writing to daily writing prompts that are super fun and witchy.
And every day as a member, when you join, you'll be able to come in to the group, you'll be able to find your writing prompt, respond to it.
If you want to share your writing with the group, you can.
And this is one thing I love, love, love about Pen and Hearth is that people will respond to your writing, but they will only respond with what they liked about it.
They might share a sentence that they liked about it.
They might let you know what they got out of it that was great for them.
And what this does is it can really help you build the confidence you have in your own voice, knowing that your writing, even writing that you just quickly wrote for 10 minutes and didn't even edit and shared with the group, it had an impact on people.
So if you are looking to just have that confidence, if you're looking to build up your writing practice, have some inspiration, create some connection around your writing, then Pen and Hearth is for you.
So like I said, the doors open on Thursday, September 14th, and you can find out when that happens by joining my newsletter.
So if you go to enchantedwriting.com, you will find a signup link for my newsletter on the homepage, and you will be the first to know when the door is open.
Okay.
So I'm really excited about that.
It's just I'm running the pilot program right now.
And it has been really amazing, really powerful.
I think it's going to be great for you if you are somebody who is a witchy writer and you want to experience more inspiration in your writing life.
All right.
So now it is time for our first segment of this show, which is what is empowering my witchy writing life right now.
I know I just talked about this, but the truth is that what is really empowering my writing right now is doing this pilot program of Pen and Hearth.
So a few writers and I have been every day responding to witchy writing prompts that I've been posting in the group.
We have been reading each other's writing, responding with what we liked about each other's writing.
We have been connecting and growing as writers.
I have been having this really cool personal experience for myself with my writing as I have been working on these daily writing prompts.
I have been having this experience where I am really remembering what I love the most about writing or also remembering what is the heart of my voice as a writer.
Essentially when I started writing in earnest, it was about eight years ago when I started my blog, but I've always been writing.
When I was a kid, I wanted to write.
I was an English major.
I always assumed I would be a writer.
I always thought of myself as someone who writes, but I went in and out of having a writing practice, like a sustained writing practice.
Then about eight years ago, I started a blog and I found myself writing in earnest, like really devoting myself to the writing practice of my blog.
I had this way of writing at first where it would be really personal, like personal reflections.
I would be outside in nature somewhere and I would just feel inspired and just start writing.
I went through this really big healing journey with writing online and what it was like to hit publish on my voice.
It was this really beautiful process for me at the beginning of that earnest writing journey eight years ago.
As I kept writing, my writing has gone down different roads, taken different turns.
I've had different writing projects that I've worked on and dedicated myself to.
The way how I write now has changed.
It's just the vibe is a little bit different than it was back then, but doing these daily writing prompts, I find myself writing like I used to write, sort of having a moment, looking at this writing prompt, just connecting to my own inspiration or my own imagination, or just getting curious and just letting anything flow onto the page without any agenda.
And it feels so healing.
It just feels really nice to write and not have to have the writing go anywhere, not have to make it anything, not have to make it so that my writing gets me more followers or gets me more money or that kind of capitalist way of looking at money where are looking at writing where your writing has to become a thing.
It's so healing to write without an agenda and just to do that in community.
And I know that this healing moment I'm having with my voice is going to inform my writing project.
So right now I have a writing project called A Year of Nature and Magic at Home that I'm writing on Substack at emmaverytus.substack.com.
And in that project, I am really trying to return to like that kind of writing I used to love to do this nature, reflective, personal essays that are really the heart of my voice.
And so I'm finding that these daily writing prompts, this practice of writing things that don't have to be published, don't have to be edited, don't have to become a thing.
It's really helping me find my voice again.
And I know it will inform a year of nature and magic at home.
So anyway, it's really beautiful.
I'm kind of like, wow, this really works, right?
Sometimes you put something out into the world and you hope, you hope that it helps people.
You have to try it out.
You have to experiment.
That's what this pilot program of Pen and Hearth has been.
And it's so beautiful to see it working and to see it working in my own life and having this kind of beautiful impact for myself.
So that is what is empowering my witchy writing life right now.
And now I'm going to share a mindset tip to help you take some of the stress out of your writing life.
So I was already kind of talking about the mindset tip that I'm going to share with you today.
But the mindset tip is to start to discern and understand the difference between a writing project and a writing practice.
I think it's great to have these two terms in your, you know, glossary of writing life words for you to really understand where you're at in your writing life and why it's awesome no matter where you are right now.
A writing project is something you want to write that will at some point become a thing.
So no matter how long it takes, like you want to write a book, a blog post, a poem, there's like a project you're working on and you want there to be some writing thing to exist at the end of the project.
And your writing project has a beginning and an end.
So there's a moment where you start writing your book and there's a moment where you stop writing your book.
Right?
So there is a project that you are actively working on and crafting.
It might be a short story.
It might be a zine that you want to write.
Any of these things are writing projects, maybe a magazine article, something like that.
And it's where you dedicate yourself to this thing and writing projects are amazing.
They're great for craft, right?
When you want to really dig in and devote yourself to creating a thing, it can be a really, really beautiful experience.
But what I have seen and noticed is that I think just with living in a capitalist society, I have noticed that the people I work with, um, sometimes are people I just talk to in the world about writing.
They feel like their writing isn't valid unless they are working on a writing project.
So they think the only real way to be a writer or the only way to call themselves a writer, or the only way to feel like they are actually writing is to be writing a project and for that project to be about creating a product, right?
It's the idea that someone might have that they're only really a writer if they're creating something with their writing that can create money and like generate an income for them at the end.
There's nothing wrong with that, right?
That's a totally cool thing to do, but also you can have a thriving, beautiful writing life, even when you are not working on a writing project.
And this is where you need to start thinking about the term writing practice.
So a writing practice is when you have an ongoing, regular experience of writing where there might not be any agenda, just like I was just talking about with what's empowering my writing life right now.
You might not have any agenda with the writing.
Um, there might not be any product you're creating from your writing.
There might not be any particular project you're trying to work on, but still you return to the page on a regular basis and you practice writing.
It's kind of like if you're somebody who's familiar with having a yoga practice, right?
Where you return to the mat and you practice your yoga or with meditation, you return to, you know, the meditation cushion and you just keep returning to that space to practice meditating.
You can do this with writing where you can develop a writing practice in your life.
That is you returning to the page again and again on a regular basis to open up those channels of inspiration, of curiosity, of imagination, to just keep your writing feeling fresh to you, right?
You just keep practicing your writing.
Okay.
So that is the mindset tip for today to really understand what a writing project is and what a writing practice is and to kind of lessen some of the stress in your writing life.
If you're somebody who thinks the only valid way to write is to have a writing project going on, it's not true.
Like both a writing practice and a writing project are wonderful parts of a writing life.
And you can have an incredible writing life for your whole life.
Even if you never do a writing project.
And of course I love a writing project.
I really enjoy writing projects and it helps kind of lower the stress for me.
When I think about my writing project, it lowers the stress around that.
When I know that I have this writing practice that sustains me over the long term.
Okay.
I would love to know what you think about that.
You can email me at hello at enchantedwriting.com and let me know your thoughts on that.
Is it helpful?
Is that something that de-stresses you or does it not land for you at all?
Everyone is so different.
What de-stresses someone might stress someone else out.
So I'm curious how this lands for you.
And if you would actually just love to get started on developing a writing practice, then I want to invite you to my upcoming free dark moon five-day writing challenge, which is going from September 9th to 13th.
So that's Saturday, September 9th to Wednesday, September 13th.
And this is a very witchy free writing challenge.
The dark moon.
I really love it.
It's a cool witchy moment in the lunar cycle.
It's technically the two days before the new moon and the new moon this month in September starts on September 14th, but we're going to stretch it to writing for the five days before the new moon.
And the idea is that this is part of the waning moon.
It's a quiet time.
It's that dark time.
Like the moon is losing light quickly every day.
And it's that time of the month where you can really see the stars.
If there are no clouds in the sky, because the moon is not lighting up the sky and we're going to do five witchy writing prompts to celebrate the dark moon and to just kind of get into that vibe.
It should be really fun.
I hope you join us.
You can go to enchantedwriting.com forward slash dark moon to take part in this free writing challenge.
When you do it, you will learn a lot about what is happening in Penn and hearth because what we're doing in this challenge is what we do every day in Penn and hearth.
And you can kind of use it as a little trial to see if Penn and hearth might be a membership for you.
Okay.
So that is my show for you today.
In the next two episodes I have, they're coming out tomorrow and the next day, I'm going to share more about two different kinds of writing practices you can have in your life, like two different kinds of writing prompts that you can really dig into and enjoy as a writer.
And I hope that helps you a lot.
And until next time, may your writing life be enchanted.