How to Use Primary School Skills to Effortlessly Craft Your Next Story

Sometimes you need to go back to the basics

Kaitlyn Varin
5 min readMay 1, 2022
Photo by Carl Jorgensen on Unsplash

Writer’s block is an understatement. For the second time in my life, I’d fallen out of love with writing. Storytelling, really, because I’ve always loved to tell a good story. The one skill university took instead of teaching. That was the first time I fell out of love. All the forced writing made me forget how to write for myself or that writing could be fun.

The second time I fell out of love with the craft was here on Medium. In recent months, the stats got to me. I used to celebrate a handful of views and a penny of earnings. I’d made money writing online. My first Stripe payment of only a few cents blew my mind. I stopped writing for myself and began writing for money. Again, I took the fun right out of it, and when my views declined, I began to complicate my craft.

I know this is far from the case for everyone, but writing comes naturally to me most of the time. I wrote most of my university papers without creating an outline. Unless the instructor chose the topic for me, I came up with an idea, typed a few keywords into the library’s search bar, and I was off to the races. I often started without deciding which side of the argument I wanted to support. The less I knew about a topic, the better. I…

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Kaitlyn Varin

Kaitlyn is a yogi, yoga teacher, runner, writer, and book worm. She writes about health and wellness, self-improvement, food, books, and life.