in this article, i'm going to discuss a tip for
Anxious writers to help reduce writing anxiety
and that suggestion is to practice exploratory writing
in this series of articles, i want to offer tips that have helped other people write with less anxiety and write more effectively and productively.
Today, i want to discuss a few different purposes for writing and recommend one of those purposes writing for exploration as a good way to manage or reduce writing anxiety.
So, first what are the different purposes for writing ?
The first purpose for writing is familiar and i think we take it for granted it's writing for memory; it's shopping lists, it's to-do lists, it's diaries and journals to record the events of our lives.
When we write for memory we rarely struggle with anxiety and i know many people will say ; well, that's not writing it's not writing like trying to write a book.
it's true that it's not the same kind of difficulty as writing but it does exercise some of the same intellectual muscles- the muscles of taking ideas in your head and construting them into words on the page.
Writing for Communication
Second kind of writing is probably the kind of writing that causes most anxiety for most people and that's writing for communication. But of course there's a huge range of writing for communication, there's social media, there's writing letters to friends and family ,there are also submissions for publication, and applications for grants or fellowships or jobs or scholarly positions
Many of these forms of writing for communication cause anxiety because we think about what the other person will say when they receive it, will we be rejected ?, will we be told that we don't write well ?, will we be told that we don't spell well ?
All of our fears and anxieties are triggered by the thought that somebody else is going to look at it,
Writing for Exploring Ideas
and then there's the third kind of writing that i want to recommend and this is writing for exploring ideas, or exploratory writing. It's notes about what you want to do, it's notes about what your ideas are?, it's outlines of how your ideas might flow it's experiments and exercises where you try different ways of expressing yourself.
it's not the same as just thinking through these things when you put words on the page you're again exercising that intellectual muscle of taking ideas and putting them into words on the page.
Exploratory Writing Can Help Reduce Anxiety
This is a way to explore well, it's as the note exploring, experimenting and it's not trying to get it right and so that's one of the reasons that exploratory writing can help reduce anxiety. So,the main reason exploratory writing helps reduce anxiety is because it's for you; it's not meant to be shared with other people.
You do the exploratory writing so that you can learn from it. so that you can reflect on your work and you can criticize your work and improve it before anyone else has a chance to see it.
Much in the same way that you know a musician might practice their part in private before performing it in public. The exploratory writing is a chance for you to examine your own ideas. It allows you to experiment with variations and alternatives and this experimental sense again reduces anxiety because you're not trying to get it right.
You're just trying to get a look at what it seems like if you do it that way, this kind of exploratory writing can be akin to an artist doing a study sketch before committing oil to canvas, or an architect doing a study sketch of a potential building before they design it in full and before they design the structure they can do a sketch. Stand back from it see how it looks and learn from that and this is the same role that exploratory writing allows, and it's a freedom of experimentation that reduces anxiety
Finally exploratory writing can have a relatively low investment of energy. Every study sketch that the artist or architect does takes just a moment to learn from; you do it, you do it quickly, you try and see what you get from it there's a a sometimes republished interview with i
think Hemingway, i forget exactly but the author in question is being interviewed in some magazine and says;
Well, how many times did you do you rewrite ? and
The author says i wrote the last page of that book 20 times or 30 times, i forget the number
But that kind of i can write at the whole thing 20 times shows that there's no huge emotional investment in any one of those versions and this gives freedom from anxiety, because it doesn't matter what happened to that experiment you're just trying it on for size and then you'll try something else.
So, because you're doing it for yourself, because it's exploratory and experimental and because it should be done with a low investment of energy, exploratory writing can help reduce your writing anxiety.
Conclusion
That's my main tip in this article, if you struggle with writing anxiety try some exploratory writing. Put your ideas on the page without thinking that you're going to share them with anyone.
Just put them on the page to see what you have learned thank you for stopping by, i hope you have learned something and found this helpful. if you like it please comment i'd love to hear what you think. Also i want to give a shoutout to 
