Stephanie Cage - Writer

What's the best place to write? Where do you write? Where do you usually write? Where do you like to write? Where do you write best?  There are many variants of the question, and I get asked them often, but I still get a slight jolt each time I hear one of them, because each of them is based on a fundamental assumption which I disagree with: that a writer's ability to write, or the quality of their writing, is fundamentally tied to their writing space.  Popular culture often presents writers this way: Kipling at Bateman's, Dylan Thomas in his boathouse, George Bernard Shaw in his shed and Joyce in his Martello Tower.  But few writers really wrote only - or even mainly - in one place, and although some people do find benefits to having one set place to write, many more find it more useful to write whenever, and wherever, the opportunity arises.  Personally, I would probably never get anything written if I had to wait until I could sit down in the same place a...

It surprises me slightly that I recently felt the need to write a blog post about affirmations.   I used to think they sounded woolly and new agey and I couldn’t imagine them working for me. Somehow, though, I couldn't quite give up the feeling that this technique had something important to offer me.  It had worked for Jeannette Maw and Louise Hay and so many other people I admired, that there had to be something to it. The idea of affirmations started making a lot more sense to me once I read a bit about how the mind works, and realised that the work some coaches I admired were doing with affirmations was very similar to the model developed by Harper and Ellis and espoused by a whole generation of therapists. The model, often described as ABC, provides a framework for understanding how an event (activating event, A in our alphabet) triggers a set of beliefs (B) which in turn have consequences (C). I’m grossly oversimplifying here, partly due to my own limited knowled...

Recently I read a post on one of my favourite sites, mindbodygreen, entitled ‘ Why Affirmations Don’t Work and What You Should be Doing Instead .’  I’d started an argument with the author before the page had even finished downloading. A few minutes later I realised that for many years I’d actually agreed with the author, and in some ways I still do. The word ‘affirmations’ is often associated with new age thinking, get rich quick schemes and unrealistic positive expectations.  If by saying that ‘affirmations work’, you mean that you expect to sit in front of the TV eating junk food and affirming ‘I’m rich, famous and beautiful’ and have it suddenly become true, then it’s perfectly accurate to say that they don’t work. But at its root, the word ‘affirmation’ simply means ‘the act of affirming something’, and affirm has two meanings: to state something publicly, and to offer emotional support or encouragement. So affirmations are simply statements of support, made pub...