Hello, we are on our last strategy hard to believe, isn't it? strategy eight is habits and attitudes comes before habits in our lives. And so I thought it was good and important to incorporate habits last here as well it just makes a lot of sense to take all of the things that we've learned and talk about how to put those good techniques into practice, attitudes create habits. And the first the last strategy is create healthy habits in your writing life. That's one of those that's obvious but create healthy habits in your writing life. The explanation, good writing habits incorporate specific daily practices and choices.

They incorporate specific practices and choices. Technique one states do free writing to tackle writer's block and stay in practice. So free writing is basically where you write a stream of conscious Anything that comes to mind on a specific topic or prompt, most of the time, you do want to have specific questions or topics or prompts in mind. And then you just get a pin, you could type it on the computer. And it's sort of a speed riding, you don't have to write fast, the most important thing is to keep your hand moving, keep your hand moving and don't stop. If your mind gets caught, or you panic or you go blank.

It's good to actually write whatever your last sentence was again and again and just kind of relax and drop back down into the process. And then continue, you're free, right? You're not worried about what you're saying. You're not worried about it being perfect. You're not even worried about spelling or grammar or anything like that. If it's incorrect, that's okay.

As long as you can make out what you're saying. And then it gives you something to work with. It's not even a draft, but it might be a paragraph or a sentence or an idea. It might give you clarification on your topic, but Free riding is a great habit to have. For riders that are constantly trying to generate ideas and generate material. It's a great idea to great way to do that.

And it's sort of a backdoor approach so that you're not overthinking it. The explanation for this free writing involves writing stream of conscious, anything that comes to mind on a specific subject prompt or question. Imagine a current flowing from your mind or from your brain to your hand. And so this current goes from your brain through your arms down into your hand. And basically, you write whatever comes to mind, honest uncentered and unedited you can always do that later for your audience. making this a daily practice is a powerful tool.

And when I was a beginning writer in my first creative writing class, it changed my entire perspective on writing. So, free writing is something that you might want to consider making a daily practice, or maybe doing it before each time you sit down to write just to get your mind clear, or to come up with ideas or think about what you need to focus on in that particular writing session. Afterwards, there is time to go back, see what you have and work with it. So this isn't the process that you do on the final draft. This is what you do early on, this is what you do to have a daily practice to generate ideas. You may have a line, a paragraph or a section that clarifies or creates material for a potential piece, or part of something you're already working on.

And it's also important not to worry, like I said already about spelling or grammar at that point in the writing process. And that is a specific way to silence that internal critic. If you write steady and you write what comes to mind and you let it be messy and you let it be what it is and that's okay. That gives you an opportunity to silence that An internal critic, and you can get those ideas out better waiting inside of you to come out of you so that you have material to work with. Then you go back and shape, refine, throw some of it out, whatever you need to do. And then in the later drafts, you start thinking about looking at it with a more critical eye in the sense that you're improving it not that you're being mean to yourself or anything like that.

And so free writing is strategy eight technique one do free writing to tackle writer's block and stay in practice.