Let It Brew, Just A Little While Longer.

As I continue through my journey of writing, I have started to see cues for me to slow down and let story ideas brew for longer. Noticing typos, grammatical errors, lacking in plot or enough detail to convey the full scene. To illustrate what comes to mind is something I read about a while ago: How to brew tea. It’s something so simple and we all believe we can do it without any guidance, so why would you even bother with reading something so rudimentary? However that's the point I'm trying to make today, and that is there’s some fundamentals if you skim over, you can really miss out on a lot.

And like writing, it’s something I think we all know how to do; but whether we can write well and write well creatively is another matter entirely.

Let me share…

Hey Mister Tea, Let it Brew

Did you know that in order to get the most out if your tea, it’s recommended that allow it to brew for anywhere between 5 to 7 minutes? When I discovered this for the first time, this was a lot longer than I thought growing up; I’d simply wait until there was visibly enough brown flavour floating in the liquid. Allowing it to brew longer is a mini lesson in what things can be if you wait a while longer.

The trade off

• You have to wait longer whilst this little thing brews

What you get in return

• A richer flavour and fuller body of the tea leaves
• More caffeine for those who need that hit
• More antioxidants (the good stuff for your body)

And if you want to take it further, you can spend time weighing tea, being precise with the water volume used and then using degree perfect water for the tea leaf. And lastly you let it rest after the brew for maximum enjoyment (so you don't just burn yourself).

In short, good shit takes time and you can't rush it. I'm sure that you can apply this to almost anything else, relationships, exercise, discipline, exploration, hikes, dieting and of course yourself.

Adjusting My Ship's Course

Last year when I realised that I wanted to write, I was so excited to just get out there, and since then I’ve published a number of posts. I know a part of me did this to challenge a common blocker for writers; sharing work publicly. A natural fear of putting things into the world. However whilst I've proven that this is not a hurdle for me, during my rush to attack this beast head on, I've left my base unattended and without much establishment. So now I need to steer the ship back; back to learning and developing my base.

I still intend to post and share as frequently as I can, however I may switch gear and be more regular I’m posting about my journey and the lessons learnt than the creative stuff pre-maturely.

The Building Blocks

I juggle many responsibilities in my life, however instead of making excuses or blaming some lack of time I know that I just need to be smarter about how I learn how to write. I know that I don't have the time to attend a full time writing course, instead though I can absorb bite size pieces or be intentional with the environment and people learn from.

Here's a few of things I do to help build my base in becoming a skillful writer

• Masterclasses in creative writing - I get to be taught by some of the worlds most  best writers in 10 minute chunks. Authors I've learnt from so far include Margaret Atwood and Walter Mosley.
• Morning pages - every day for the last 101 days and counting, this is an open ended playground for me to write and practice my abilities to express myself
• Engaging with other writers - I don't know many writers personally but this is something I hope to change. I connect with various other writers online and learn about their journey and understand those who've already gone before me.
• Creative writing practice - I turned my backlog of short stories which I intended to publish almost every week or so on this site into more of an incubation tank. I spend nights breaking down a story, the characters, the plot, the timeline and drafting paragraphs. I write, delete, edit, cut, paste, reword, get writers block and breakthrough and keep on writing.

I love the twists and turns which writing can be sometimes. Here's a quick visualisation of how some of my writing goes at this stage.

I hope this has been an enjoyable post and that I hope you are too taking the time to cover the fundamentals for any new skill you are cultivating!

Thank you for your reading

Reach out to me if you ever want to chat about writing or all things self-development at hello@richardning.com