Writing Affirmations
In the course of my research for a ghost-writing project today, I ended up on a couple of sites devoted to positive affirmations. Buried deep on one of them was a reference to "affirmations for writers."
Hmmm, I thought, and clicked on the link. Which just so happened to be dead. But now my curiosity was piqued. (By the way, that is piqued, not peaked, as many people who know better seem to think. It's one of my pet peeves, right up there with people spelling the term "Voila" as "Wallah." Oh lord, no wonder the French hate Americans.)
I was curious as to what lists of affirmation for writers might contain. I'm kind of a fan of affirmations. I know a lot of people thing they are silly, trite, and woo-woo. Worse, lots of people think they don't work. That's probably because they say them a couple times and when nothing shifts immediately, they decide they don't work and give up.
But to me affirmations work as sort of the back beat of a song, the song being your life. They drive the energy. I've noticed that they can drive me to action, and that is perhaps their most useful function. For instance, if you decide you want to repeat the affirmation, "I am a bestselling novelist" (not that I know anybody who would repeat that affirmation, I'm just sayin') you might then, after a few days, realize that you cannot be a bestselling novelist without a really great agent.
So then you might start affirming, "I have a high-powered New York literary agent representing me" (again, not that I know anyone who did this). And then after a few days of repeating that, it might occur to you that perhaps you need to go looking for a high-powered New York literary agent. Which would then get you out of your funk over your novel and onto the internet to do an agent search. And then you might even get a couple of them who were willing to read the first three chapters of your novel and you'd then have to write new affirmations as you stayed up all night repeating them while also sacrificing everything that's ever been of any importance to you, first-born children, beloved pugs, your Vaio laptop....okay, maybe not the Vaio.
But I digress.
Affirmations not only get your butt in gear, but they also can make you believe great things about yourself. That's what I love best about affirmations. You don't even have to believe them for them to work. If you say them often enough, you form new neural pathways in your brain and then you automatically start believing them. (I learned all this from Louise Hay's new movie.)
And so, all that being said, I thought I'd link to a couple of sites that list affirmations for writers. Steal them whole hog, or adapt them for your own uses. I can't get Leanne Banks's site to fully load, but she writes a nice little bit on affirmations and how they have helped her and then features a good list of them, so I'm including it.
This page reminds me of one of those old-school webpages of the sort you rarely see anymore. They were once all that populated the web, and I miss them. Anyway, its a good overview of information about affirmations in general.
I suspect there might be some overlap here with Leanne's site, but Robyn Amos has a cool site and another good list of affirmations.
And now, go ye forth and affirm what a wonderful writer you are. I'm going to do the same.
Hmmm, I thought, and clicked on the link. Which just so happened to be dead. But now my curiosity was piqued. (By the way, that is piqued, not peaked, as many people who know better seem to think. It's one of my pet peeves, right up there with people spelling the term "Voila" as "Wallah." Oh lord, no wonder the French hate Americans.)
I was curious as to what lists of affirmation for writers might contain. I'm kind of a fan of affirmations. I know a lot of people thing they are silly, trite, and woo-woo. Worse, lots of people think they don't work. That's probably because they say them a couple times and when nothing shifts immediately, they decide they don't work and give up.
But to me affirmations work as sort of the back beat of a song, the song being your life. They drive the energy. I've noticed that they can drive me to action, and that is perhaps their most useful function. For instance, if you decide you want to repeat the affirmation, "I am a bestselling novelist" (not that I know anybody who would repeat that affirmation, I'm just sayin') you might then, after a few days, realize that you cannot be a bestselling novelist without a really great agent.
So then you might start affirming, "I have a high-powered New York literary agent representing me" (again, not that I know anyone who did this). And then after a few days of repeating that, it might occur to you that perhaps you need to go looking for a high-powered New York literary agent. Which would then get you out of your funk over your novel and onto the internet to do an agent search. And then you might even get a couple of them who were willing to read the first three chapters of your novel and you'd then have to write new affirmations as you stayed up all night repeating them while also sacrificing everything that's ever been of any importance to you, first-born children, beloved pugs, your Vaio laptop....okay, maybe not the Vaio.
But I digress.
Affirmations not only get your butt in gear, but they also can make you believe great things about yourself. That's what I love best about affirmations. You don't even have to believe them for them to work. If you say them often enough, you form new neural pathways in your brain and then you automatically start believing them. (I learned all this from Louise Hay's new movie.)
And so, all that being said, I thought I'd link to a couple of sites that list affirmations for writers. Steal them whole hog, or adapt them for your own uses. I can't get Leanne Banks's site to fully load, but she writes a nice little bit on affirmations and how they have helped her and then features a good list of them, so I'm including it.
This page reminds me of one of those old-school webpages of the sort you rarely see anymore. They were once all that populated the web, and I miss them. Anyway, its a good overview of information about affirmations in general.
I suspect there might be some overlap here with Leanne's site, but Robyn Amos has a cool site and another good list of affirmations.
And now, go ye forth and affirm what a wonderful writer you are. I'm going to do the same.
