#047 - Prime the Pump with Journaling

Hey, friends, welcome back to the Hit Splits Podcast. My name is Shelly Hits, and I am your writing mentor inside ChristianBookAcademy.com and this is Wisdom for writers. Today I want to talk about priming the writing pump. And whether you're writing your first draft, you are writing your final draft, or maybe you're writing marketing content. But how do you prime the pump? Well, I'm gonna talk today about using journaling. So half of the battle many times with writing is simply getting started. And I was reminded recently about this. And there is a book called the Artist's Way. And in the book she talks about morning pages. Morning pages, she says, are just like three pages where you just dump everything outta your brain onto paper and just get all of that clutter and the rubble out. Lately I just feel like the Lord's been giving me that picture of, like, I often just have just a ton of rubble. You know, it's just like an earthquake happened or whatever, and it's just like there's all this rubble hanging around and I just need to clear it out. Or you can imagine like cleaning out the cobwebs of a basement or whatever it is. Maybe you don't want to think about that because you don't like spiders like my husband, cj. Bye. Whatever picture makes the most sense for you. Maybe it's just a cluttered closet and you need to clear out the clutter, but what happens? So all you need to do is take out a paper and pen. I like to do this with paper and pen, but you can do this typing, you can do this even just dictating or using the Otter AI app. O T T E R A I and you can just speak into that app. It will transcribe what you're speaking. So you can, you know, reuse the information later, but however you're doing it, you're just getting the stuff out. But for me personally, God was reminding me this week that journaling and writing it out by pen and paper with my hand is one of the most powerful things for me. So I just wanted to mention this to you as well. All you need to do is get out a pen and paper or whatever, however you're going to do it and just start writing and just start dumping all the things out of your brain. So, like, what is it that you're thinking about right now and you don't want to, you know, you're thinking, oh, I need to go to the grocery store, or, oh, I'm worried about my niece regarding this, or we have this upcoming event or this upcoming trip, or somebody's going to be coming in to stay with us or, you know, I'm. I'm thinking about my dad and what, you know, I mean, it can be anything. What am I gonna wear to this event? You know, or whatever. But you're just writing all the things out, and you're just getting all that junk out, the clutter, the rubble, whatever you want to say, you're just getting it out. If you will do that for just even a few minutes and just start the process. Then once you get all of that stuff out and it's almost like you've cleared space now, you can transition into the writing that you really wanted to do for the day. Whether it's writing your first draft, it's writing marketing material, whatever it is, you can get going. So I hope that you'll try this. It doesn't take very long. I mean, you can even. Sometimes it may just take five minutes, so sometimes it may take a little longer if you have a lot more going on right now. But just clear out the clutter, you know, you can do. If you can do at least three pages, just writing out, you know, three pages. That's what she recommends in the artist's way. Just getting it going and priming that pump. I. Lately, I've been using. I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, I've been using the Rocket book. It's a really reusable journal and I love it because I can just still get that same feeling of the paper and pen. Yet I can preserve it digitally so I can take pictures of it. It will transcribe it, it will send it directly to, like, the place I want it to be sent. So wherever you want it to be sent, your email, your Google Drive, Dropbox, wherever. And then I can just wipe off the pages and start new again. Or if it's something that doesn't really even need to be saved. Right. Like, some of us, there's things that we want to get out of our brain and we just need to write it down, but you don't want anyone else to see it. This is perfect. So you just journal. You write it out to your heart's content, and then you just spray a little water on it and you wipe it clean with a microfiber cloth. And so I definitely encourage you to consider, you know, looking into that. I'll put some links in the show notes for you, but I want you to try this at least once this week, whatever you're working on. Like I said, it can be writing a book, it can be writing marketing material, it could be writing your bio for the back cover of your book or your book description. Just start with journaling for a few minutes, dump all the stuff out of your brain and then transition into the work that you wanted to do and see if that helps. I know a lot of times priming the pump doesn't make sense to our culture today, but way back in the day when you had to pump water, you had to pump it, you had to prime the pump, you had to pump it several times to get the water to then finally come up. And so that's where that term comes from. But let me know, let me know if you try this. If you're a Christian Book Academy member, post in our private group. I'd love to hear how this worked for you. If not, we'd love to have you join us@christianbookacademy.com and I I will talk to you in the next episode.