What can you use writing for in your everyday life?

For many, writing is confined to their to-do lists, but there are many ways you can incorporate writing even if you don’t think of yourself as “creative.”

For one thing, look at the plethora of status updates and tweets that go around the Web on a regular basis. These bitsy life updates speak volumes about the people who make them, just as much as writing a long blog post would.

Today, I want to encourage you to write every day, even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer, even if words come with difficulty. Writing can be helpful, soothing, invigorating, and even cathartic. Try the following tips to incorporate a little bit of writing in your day:

Just a Word, a Sentence or Two

• Leave a little positive note for yourself to discover in the morning. Just as you take time to write out or type up a to-do list, which can be more negative in tone, take a few minutes and make a happier-sounding note. Something like “smile, it’s almost Friday 🙂 ” or “don’t forget your awesomeness” can make you grin long enough to face your day with a little more happy.
• If you hate writing (and reading) your to-do list, add jokes or hilarious phrasing. One of my permanent to-do lists is titled “THINGS I GOT TO PWN TODAY OMG LOL”, and it’s full of Internet and LOLCat references. (“I can haz chek in the bank?” XD) It makes me laugh every time I read it!

  It also casts my to-do list in a new light; each part of the list is something I have to pwn (defeat) rather than just drag myself through. I can pretend I’m a to-do list warrior!

• Try a Twitter account, and post one short thought of yours, once every day. It can be a random philosophy you thought of, a question for other users, a grumble about something bothersome, or even just a statement about your day. The 140 character limit forgives those who don’t care to write a whole lot every day (one reason it’s called a “microblog”).

Step Up to a Paragraph

• If you have a lot of worries running marathons in your head like I do, try writing them down in paragraph form. These five questions will help you shape your worry paragraph and get that worry out of your head at last:
  1. 1st sentence: What am I worried about?
  2. 2nd sentence: Why does it bug me so much?
  3. 3rd sentence: What is the worst-case scenario for this worry?
  4. 4th sentence: What is the best-case scenario for this worry?
  5. 5th sentence: What can I do to make the best-case scenario come about?

  Here is my example “worry paragraph:”

  I’m worried about my hard drive being unrecoverable. I fear losing 8 years of very hard work that isn’t backed up. At worst, I’ll have to restore data from my old laptop that died in June 2010, which means losing a year and a half of irreplaceable work and purchased digital content. At best, I will get all my data back. I can’t do anything personally to get my data back, but I can have it shipped to a data recovery company who can potentially take care of it.

  What this does is to quantify the worry. Instead of formless thoughts whirling about constantly, you can refer to this worry paragraph every time you find yourself thinking about it, and the paragraph details everything about the worry you need to know. Soon, you find comfort in what you yourself have written, knowing that the process need not be thought about anymore. (Mine’s already working for me!)

• Along the same lines, if you’re sad and anxious, write a “5 reasons to smile” paragraph. All you have to do is find 5 answers to the question “How is my life going well today?” No matter how big or small the reason, if it makes you smile, it’s worth writing about.

  Here is my example “smile paragraph:”

  The headache I had yesterday is all gone (woot). So is the swelling on my ankle (yay!). I got all the gift wrap I need for under 12 bucks today, spending almost $20 less than I thought I was going to. I was able to fix the family laptop’s software problem. And I get to sing with my church choir today and tomorrow.

Try a Series of Paragraphs

• Try an old-fashioned journal entry if you don’t want to post things on the Internet. Grab any size piece of paper and pen/pencil, and just start writing your thoughts down. Anything that’s on your mind, written any way you want to state it. Own the fact that you ARE writing! You can do this!

  Once you’ve written it, you can either read it over right away, hang it up somewhere prominent as inspiration, or file it away for later–just make sure to return to it within a week, and see how your writing affects you. You have to love your writing first before the passion for it seeps into its very substance, and to love it, you must experience doing it and reading it afterward.

• Do you have a strong opinion about something? Write about it! Just like I write my opinions in my blog posts each week, you too can write a blog post or Facebook note about whatever you wish to.

  The following structure is something I go by to help me form my posts. It’s largely based on the five-paragraph essay style; you can take the girl out of English classes, but you can’t take the English-class training out of the girl. 😛

  1. Introduction/Hook: Make your topic sound interesting. Rhetorical questions about the topic (see where I used that in this very post? :D), or a personalized anecdote referencing the topic really makes me want to read about it.
  2. Background Info/Basic Concepts: For those who don’t know very much about the topic, give a little bit of basic information. This also gives you a chance to talk about the big concepts behind your opinion.
  3. Your Opinion: The meat of your blog post. Explain why you think what you think, in as plain language as possible.
  4. Others Who Agree or Disagree: Gather information from other bloggers or just other people about why they agree or disagree with your position; this gives your user a broader view of the topic than just your opinion. Quote the other people you’ve consulted, and link to them if possible within this paragraph.
  5. Sum It Up: Condense down your points into short sentences for a good summary. One sentence to describe the main point of each paragraph before your summary works very well.

Summary

Writing need not be intimidating. In fact, if you get a little bit of practice with it and accept your writing as it progresses, you can find yourself surprisingly expressive. Trying some or all of these various writing tips can give you the experience you need.

Start out small, maybe less than 140 characters at first; then, as you get more confident, try writing paragraphs, and then series of paragraphs. Who knows, you may be the next blogging sensation!