Dr Rachel Knightley and Ashley Lexine - Building Creative Confidence at the Writers' Gym

The Writers’ Gym is not just a podcast: it’s a membership platform, supporting writers (and writers-to-be) in buildingcreative confidence, growing their writing life and beating the inspiration addiction. Membership of the Writers’ Gym puts you in charge of your writing. It means creative confidence for life, work and art. It also means being part of a writing community with group and one-to-one sessions and personal support available throughout the week.

 

Founder and Writers’ Gym PT Dr Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, lecturer in Creative Writing and a qualified business and personal coach. This series, Rachel will be talking to award-winning authors across the genres. She kicks off this new series by introducing its producer: Writers’ Gym member, freelance writer (featured in Take a Break, Woman and Good Housekeeping) and Healthy Metal Hippie podcast founder and podcast editor extraordinaire Ashley Lexine.

 

For a writing workout based on each author’s interview with Rachel this series, visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series. See each workout below in the show notes.

 

Find out more about Ashley at https://healthymetalhippie.com

 

Join our mailing list at drrachelknightley.substack.com or get in touch at thewritersgym@rachelknightley.com

 

Writing Workout based on Ashley’s interview

 

Warm-up: Ideal week

 

1. Imagine your pen is a magic wand. What you write is going to happen. Not only is it going to happen, it’s going to happen without upsetting or offending anyone. What you plan is going to be absolutely fine.

 

2. Write the days of the week in the middle of a page. Put times at the side. Place writing time exactly where you want it. Then put in whatever else is important, around that.

 

3. Just look at it. Breathe it in. What does ideal look like? Imagine it happening. What does it feel like?

 

4. Take one small step. If there were one step you could make today, to make your week look one step more like the week you’ve just designed:

-What would it be?

-Who would you need to speak to?

-What would you tell/ask them?

 

 

Main exercise:

 

Assumption-identifier

Whether or not you’re a nine-to-five person, pick one of these three promises to gift yourself every workday this week:

 

-I promise my writing self I’ll take five-minute (or ten-minute) ‘writing breaks’ whether that means a locked loo door, or going outside like a smoker. If smoking breaks don’t destroy a working day, my writing breaks won’t either.

 

Or

 

- I promise my writing self I’ll write down my ideas as they happen. I’ll always have a pen, or my phone notebook. Wherever I am, I’ll make sure I write down key words to get me through that door later when I return to the thought. Or maybe I’ll ‘vomit draft’ the scene I think of right away.

 

From the show:

 

For creating time:

 

“If I go to the loo at work for five minutes, no one's going to be like, where were you? I'm going to take out my notebook, sit on the floor, and it's five minutes… the way other people do smoking breaks.”

For creating confidence (which is really curiosity!):

 

To get yourself out of ‘telling’ the reader and into ‘showing’ the reader what it is to be human… I dare you to jump into their head for five minutes or 10 minutes.” Transcribe what they think, feel, see, hear, the thoughts in their mind, the feelings in their body.