for my fellow nerds (:

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 I'm starting something new where I share a creative writing prompt once a week and then share the psychology behind it!

It'll be 2 separate sends because 1) I want you to DO the prompt first!! but also 2) EP is already pretty long, so I didn't want to overload you with too much info in one day.

Reminder of this week's prompt in case you haven't done it yet:

Grab a notebook, head outside (or to your local coffee shop, favorite brewery, wherever you'll run into people!) and pick 1 person to write a backstory on.

What do they do for work? Why are they also where you're at? What's their passion in life? What's stressing them out today? Where's their dream vacation?

Get SUPER specific and write down as MANY details as you can until the page is full. That's it (:

And now for the Psych Behind It 👇🏼

You're training your brain for empathy (if you're new here, this is a HUGE core value of mine & at the heart of everything I do). You're essentially putting yourself in someone else's shoes and seeing life through their eyes by looking for the underlying WHY and motives behind their feelings.
You're activating Theory of Mind in a new way. Theory of mind includes the understanding that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own. Kinda like what fiction writers and actors do.
You're lowering inhibitions (the act of restraining, preventing, or slowing down a process) because there are literally NO wrong answers. You can't be incorrect when you're writing a fictional story! It lets you jump into a flow state and become more creative.
You're pattern-matching your own psychology onto someone else's life. The "stresses" and "passions" you invent reveal what you think a full human life looks like. Aka self-knowledge dressed up as imagination.

This is a micro version of what writers who start to find themselves focusing on recurring assumptions do to break out of the same thought processes and introduce more varied inner lives for their characters.

It allllssssooo let's you walk away from whatever setting you were in feeling slightly less self-absorbed and out of your own head.

And, and, and!!! It's one small step you can take to start feeling more confident in your own writing. Plus you hopefully had fun???

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,

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246

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for my fellow nerds (:

saying thank you is underrated 🩵

kinda the same, but different 📧

the one i almost didn't write 😅