Increasing Your Writing Output

To make yourself a more prolific and efficient writer, it's important to concentrate on increasing your stores of physical and emotional energy. In the book, The Power of Full Engagement, author Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz discuss the importance of your everyday routine on your ability to handle stress. For writers, a low threshold for handling stress typically manifests itself as a case of writer's block. Simply put, if you handle stress more effectively, you'll be able to write more during a single sitting.

Physical energy is connected to things like how much sleep you get, how well you eat and how often you exercise. It's this last aspect of physical energy that is most directly connected to your stress-handling capability. You need to add strength training and cardiovascular training to your routine to add to your writing output. These activities help you to counteract the very stress hormones that keep your pen from moving. In addition, by slowly but surely pushing past your fitness limits, your brain gets used to pushing past limits in general, such as your limited writing output. Working out three times a week may be just want you need to push from 200 words to 500 words per day.

Emotional energy is connected with aspects of your life like confidence, control and empathy. If you aren't confident that your writing is good enough, you may become too emotionally pessimistic to continue. To improve your stores of emotional energy, you must make an effort to get your writing out to more people to increase your self-confidence. This may take the form of showing your writing to more people, keeping a steady blog and sharing it with your friends, applying to a contest, etc. The strong you can make yourself emotionally when it comes to your writing, the more effective you will be during your writing sessions.

For both physical and emotional energy to increase, you must exert yourself and provide time for recovery. Don't try to go from zero weekly workouts to seven all in one leap and don't stay up all night submitting yourself to 100 writing competitions right away. Improving your writing output takes time and trying to cram in these energy-increasing methods to often and too quickly will be counterproductive. If you can begin to supplement your week with these methods, before long, you might be well on your way to writing as often and as much as you desire.

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