Writing Wednesday episodes explore the outer work of writing: craft, structure, revision, publishing, process, and the practical steps that help you finish your book.

Have you ever walked into a stationery shop and felt that little spark of possibility wake up inside you?

The coloured pens. The highlighters. The sticky notes. The beautiful notebooks. The fresh blank pages.

And maybe you’ve wondered whether you’re just procrastinating, or whether there’s something about those tools that genuinely helps your creative brain come alive.

In this Writing Wednesday episode of Write The Darn Book, we’re exploring how coloured pens, handwriting, notebooks, highlighters, sticky notes, and messy handwritten pages can become practical tools for unlocking creativity, especially when your writing feels stuck, flat, tangled, or too much like a task.

This is not about abandoning your laptop or hand-writing your entire manuscript. It’s about understanding how colour, handwriting, and physical stationery can help your brain access your story in a different way.

• Why stationery often feels so creatively energising for writers
• How handwriting can shift your brain out of stuck, screen-based thinking
• Why coloured pens and highlighters can help you make invisible story threads visible
• How to use colour without creating an overwhelming colour-coding system
• How notebooks, pens, and sticky notes can become writing-state cues
• The difference between stationery as a creative doorway and stationery as avoidance
• A simple three-colour practice to help you work through a scene, chapter, character, or idea

Choose one writing problem or creative question you’re currently holding.

Take a notebook or blank page and choose three colours:

• One colour for what you already know
• One colour for the questions
• One colour for the sparks, meaning the words, images, ideas, or emotional truths that make something inside you lean forward

Give yourself ten minutes. Write messily. Draw arrows. Circle things. Highlight the sentence that surprises you.

Then ask yourself:

What is the colour showing me?

If this episode made you realise that the way you brainstorm, plan, organise your ideas, and reconnect with your creativity might be deeply connected to your writing personality, you can book a Writing Personality Blueprint Session at:

maddisonmichaels.com/blueprint

And if you’d like to begin by discovering more about your own writing personality, you can take the free Writing Personality Quiz at:

maddisonmichaels.com/quiz

⭐️ If this episode resonated with you, I’d be so grateful if you took a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your review helps Write the Darn Book reach more writers who are ready to honour their stories, trust their creative process, and keep showing up for the book they’re meant to write. 💗