Don’t Write Without Doing This First
Warm your brain up by typing out other people’s words
I often write in very broken chunks of time: during the 20 minutes between meetings, with hard deadlines, or late at night (not by choice). In these moments, there’s a lot stacked against me: distraction, despair, and time pressure—it hardly looks like the author Neal Stephenson’s “four quiet hours.”
I’ve responded to these challenges by developing and refining one of my favorite techniques, a warm up exercise for my writing. It’s called copywork.
(Note: Beth Pickens’s Make Your Art No Matter What solidified the idea of warming up before creative work for me. I would never lift weights without a warm up, why wouldn’t I do that for my brain as well? It’s best to gradually transition my brain into a deeper level of processing, allowing for creative wellness, and perhaps unlocking a deeper level of creativity.)
Copywork is a prompt I included in my book Creative Doing. Here’s an excerpt briefly explaining the idea:
Copywork is a technique in writing. The idea is to get better at writing by typing out a piece of writing you like. Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby just to get the feeling of what it was like to write that way. The idea of copywork has been applied to UI design and…
