Simple Non-Writing Things to Make You Better at Writing

A writer’s life is unpredictable, and filled with twists. Success or failure can come unexpectedly in their writing journey.

Luckily, there are a few things you can do to keep yourself consistently putting out high-quality work, without writing.

Try these 4 activities before writing to gauge their impact on your creativity, starting from least to most impactful.

1) Tetris

If you don’t know about Tetris I would be surprised, it’s the falling block game where you gotta stack em up.

Playing Tetris helps me overcome writing blocks; when I switch to writing afterward, I’m instantly in the zone.

A dedicated 10-minute Tetris session puts me in a quick flow state, enhancing focus and optimal performance in subsequent activities.

The flow state is residual.

So if you trigger the flow state with Tetris and then get onto writing you WILL be in the flow state when you start writing.

Tetris in this situation acts as a means of getting the ball rolling, the brain working that is sustained by your writing.

Try it out.

2) Sudoku

I’ve just recently got into it but I LOVE sudoku.

This is another game you would find in the newspaper where you have grids of boxes to fill with numbers 1-9, it’s a lot more difficult than you think it would be.

When I play a game of Sudoku I get incredibly focused on the puzzle and all the alternate ways things could go, the process of elimination, and logic.

Similar to Tetris Sudoku primes my brain for deeper thinking, scraping off the crusty bad ideas and letting the golden ones flow.

When I write soon after Sudoku I am completely focused on it and I tend to make much fewer mistakes in the process.

Try a crossword or Sudoku to trigger deadly focus when writing.

3) Sketching

I’m not much of a drawer but I quite enjoy it.

My notebook dedicated to outlining my stories is full of sketches and doodles about what I want to write about.

Sketching out your ideas, characters, and plot makes you look at your ideas in another way where you see the problems with your ideas but also the solutions.

If I could take a pill that would show me the problem with my ideas and the solutions to them I would be filling my house with boxes of the stuff.

That’s the thing here, the sketches don’t need to be perfect to get the benefits.

Using another medium to outline your thinking engages your problem-solving brain with your writing making it smoother and more enjoyable to read.

4) Reading

Reading is THE best non-writing activity you can be doing to get better at the craft.

Read great stories, interesting characters, and fascinating plots and you WILL get some of that rub off on you.

The thing about reading is you can be both the audience and the author, you can see how the story affects you and then analyze the writing for what they’ve done so well.

I’ve recently discovered the incredible benefits of reading fiction and as I am a horror writer I have gone straight to reading the classics, things like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde.

If you’ve got any recommendations I would love to hear them I’ve recently been running out of books to read.

In Conclusion . . .

There you have it the four of my favourite non-writing activities that drastically improve my writing;

1. Tetris
2. Sudoku
3. Sketching
4. Reading

Try out any of them and I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Thanks for reading and Happy Writing 🙂

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I post writing tips every day if you enjoy this post check out this one;

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