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Hey, hi, hello!
If you haven't read this week's Email Paradise (EP), you miiiiight be a lil out of the loop (go read it!!!!) but this is the third (!!!) edition of a bonus add-on where I share the psych behind the creative writing prompt shared earlier in the week.
Reminder of this week's prompt in case you haven't done it yet:
Grab a magazine. If you don't have one hanging around, grab a book instead (fantasy or fiction works best). Read through and cut out words that make you pause. Or hold a meaning to you.
There's truly no rhyme or reason; you're just looking for 'fun' words that pop out to you. (If you're doing the book - pls don't cut lmao - just write the words down)
Spend about 20-30 minutes hunting down the words. Then, glue them to a piece of cardboard in any order that speaks to you!
And if you did the book version, add it to a g-doc so you can challenge yourself to find a way to use the words in your upcoming content!
And now for the Psych Behind It 👇🏼
- Your brain is an associative network. It's not linear. Often times (esp when you're ADHD me like), your brain jumps around. And where most writing practices ask you to start with intention and move toward expression, we're kind of flipping that. Instead, you're finding material and moving to a meaning that way. You're not choosing what you want to say and then writing it. You're letting the words you FIND create the meaning.
- New word banks created. Often times, we're subconsciously using the same words as our peers and competitors just because we've read their work & stored the word choice subconsciously. This is helping you break free from that by hunting for NEW words that make you FEEL something different (and, in turn, SOUND DIFFERENT). Even if you don't yet know why it made you feel. It's teaching you to trust that signal your associative network flagged.
- Physical manipulation changes the relationship to language. Cutting, handling, and placing are acts of embodied cognition. Which is a fancy term for the theory that the mind isn't isolated in the brain but is also shaped by the physical body. Kinda like muscle memory, ya know? The tactile element of placing and rearranging the words slows the process down in a way that screen-based writing simply cannot replicate. Your hands know things your analytical brain hasn't processed yet.
- Removes the confines of grammar or logic. You're arranging for resonance. For ~VIBES~ if you will. It's training the same muscle that knows when a sentence lands VS when it's just fluff. Even if something is grammatically wrong, it can still feel emotionally right. It's your intuition making a point about how incompleteness can BE the point.
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BONUS: The book version. This forces you to use strange, non-obvious words in copy and, as a result, breaks habitual phrasing. I aim to do this practice at LEAST once a quarter to hunt for new words/phrases, and it's been INVALUABLE. It breaks me out of my usual sentence structures, and while it does have a lil more constraint to it (trying to use them in future content), it disrupts the autopilot mode in my brain to help me write more deliberately descriptive copy that stands out. AKA gets the creative juices flowing!
Basically, this creative writing prompt (which involves the least amount of actual WRITING) is a way to get your intentional, audience-aware, optimizing brain out of the driver's seat long enough for the WRITER in you to say something.
Would love to know if you tried this out, and if you want to share what came up, I'd LOVE to read it! <3
Catch ya on the next wave,
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This email was written with my own brain. No GenAI was used to brainstorm, write, or edit this.
If you enjoyed it, please let me know!! This is a labor of love for me & it truly means the world when you reply.
600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
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