When you write, you use words. However, thinking in words when you write is limiting because you’re not using all of your brain power. Your right brain thinks in images -- it’s non-verbal, and your memory is recalled via images, emotions, and body sensations.
When I coach writers, I encourage them to go beyond words.
How do you go beyond words? Start by paying more attention to your current emotion(s) and your body. First ask yourself what your current emotion is -- and it doesn’t matter what it is. Is it boredom, excitement, irritation? Next try to locate the emotion in your body. If you’ve never done this before, this seems odd. Try. Where in your body do you feel the emotion: is it heaviness in your chest? Tightness in your throat? Fizziness in your head?
Whatever sensation you feel in your body, stay with it for a few moments, and wait. Just feel.
As the physical sensation/ emotion dissipates (emotion moves), you’ll get an “idea” which is not an idea -- it’s an impression. Write. You may see an image. Write the image.
Keep writing.
This process takes longer to describe than to do. When you’re in “flow” you’re doing it unconsciously -- you’re plugging into your entire body/ brain complex.
For some background on this, read Candace Pert on The Molecules of Emotion:
If we accept the idea that peptides and other informational substances are the biochemicals of emotion, their distribution throughout the body's nerves has all kinds of significance. Sigmund Freud would be delighted, because the idea that the body, in its totality, is also the unconscious mind, would be the molecular confirmation of his theories. Body and mind are simultaneous. I like to speculate that the mind is the flow of information as it moves among the cells, organs, and systems of the body. The mind, as we experience it, is immaterial, yet it has a physical substate that is both the body and the brain.
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