Follow along with my WorldEmber progress!

These resources will help you keep track of my progress through this month-long marathon challenge:

• Haly’s Official WE Progress Report — each participant gets a page that automatically collects their author information and all WE-eligible articles across all worlds into a single, shareable package.
• Haly’s WorldEmber on Argentii Index — an on-the-fly journal page and handy sidebar displaying only new Argentii WE-eligible articles.

Have You Touched Your Words Lately?

I’ve spent most of the evening snuggled into my bed with a lap desk, a college-ruled notebook, and a Sharpie S-Gel 0.7 black ink with the white barrel. My world-building has been done with lazy lines and frantic arrows. It’s been highlighted with funny little sketches and swishes and swashes. I’ve doodled. I’ve underlined. I’ve mind mapped and idea webbed.

Writing by hand never goes out of style.

Wrapping your fingers around a pen (or pencil or marker or crayon) and engaging your fine motor skills to drag vague concepts into a physical world does amazing, happy, and healthy things for our brains. In addition, study after study shows that writing on paper creates more neural pathways than typing. These pathways are key to things like brain connectivity, emotional health, memory, and learning.

Working on paper allows an almost infinite flexibility for exploration. Idea webs, organizational trees, maps, sketches can all be incorporated without breaking the flow of your ideas to switch tabs or open a new app. It increases focus by eliminating distractions (the pull of the new tab is powerful).

“But Haly, writing by hand is sooooo slooooowwww.”

So is going for a walk. So is heating the kettle for tea. So is making Beef Wellington and Baked Alaska. So is knitting a sweater. Good things take time, and you know it; quit whining.

Handwriting as Meditation

Like other focused, fine-motor skills — such as yoga, painting, or Tai Chi — writing and calligraphy can be used as or incorporated into your mindfulness practices. Remember how I mentioned writing helping with things like brain connectivity, emotional health, memory, and learning? Turns out, those are all the same things that meditation can do.

Writing by hand is a practice of mindfulness, it forces you to be in the moment precisely because it is a slower way of communicating. That slowness allows the connections in your brain to become more firmly established. Rather than being thin, wispy strands they become sturdy cables.

As we count down to the winter holidays, many of us will find ourselves feeling anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. These moments are the precise time when having a meditative tool at hand can be of immediate benefit.

So…here’s my idea. When I find myself getting overwhelmed, I’m going to pause, and hand-write a haiku about my feeling in that moment. If you would like to try this experiment with me, I would be keenly interested in hearing your results!

Grab one of those notebooks you’ve been hoarding for a special occasion, and a favorite pen or pencil or other implement of the wording arts, and jot out a few syllables by hand.