Writing Your Vows, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I gave an overview of writing your vows. We talked about the difference between writing a love letter and your pledges. We’ve discussed how to bring your history and your promises into action. I gave you a couple of frames to use as you organize your thoughts into words

Now that we’ve laid a foundation, let’s make some bricks and sticks for the walls! Let’s get to writing. Get a pen, and download and the PDF, Vow Writing Exercises.

We can get your creative juices flowing with the following exercises. You may want to save your work because the words and ideas from these exercises will help when you consider the prompts in the next section. Bonus, these are excellent notes for your birthday and Valentine’s day cards.

Limbering Up

Do you have the worksheets or some blank paper? Excellent! The next paragraphs go over the rules of this writing game.

Time each exercise as you might do at the gym. One way to build muscle is by completing as many correct repetitions as you can in a set time. You can apply the same principle here. The idea is to complete the drills quickly, without putting too much conscious effort into finishing them. 

Two Options

Your first option is to download the workbook, Vow Writing Exercises. You’ll find eleven pages of exercises, along with instructions.

Alternatively, look through the list below and choose five prompts. Write one prompt ten times on a sheet of paper. Remember to leave space for your answers!

And go!

For each page of prompts, set a two-minute time limit and come up with one- to three-word responses that complete the sentence. Try to make each response unique, and shoot for finishing the page.

At first, you may find it difficult to be unique ten times in a row, or to finish and an entire page in two minutes. That perfectly fine, and expected. Do your best and don’t overthink your answers.

Don’t stop to evaluate your responses! We are looking for volume, not quality. Just keep writing one to three words on the paper. The more responses you write down, without looking at them, the easier your writing becomes.

So, set your timer for two minutes, choose a drill to start on, and GO!

The Exercises

Each one of these sentence fragments is an exercise. Pick five and begin with any you like, set your timer for two minutes, and write as many up to three-word responses as you can until the time expires.

When the timer beeps, stop. Reset the timer, breathe, relax, take a sip of water. Don’t look at your responses! Choose the next exercise and repeat.

1. They are the one I want to spend the rest of my life with because of __________.
2. I can be the best spouse by ___________.
3. They make me feel __________.
4. I love them more than __________.
5. They are cutest when __________.
6. They helped me when __________.
7. I will cheer them up by __________.
8. We go well together because __________.
9. They’ve taught me to __________.
10. They make me laugh when __________.
11. I am grateful to have them because __________.

What’s Next?

Now that you have completed one set of five repetitions take a good long break. You still are avoiding looking at your answers. Go back to work, or better yet, go outside for a while. Let your brain settle back down and put a little distance between you and the exercises.

Before bed, you may look over your responses if you like. Remember that you aren’t judging them for quality, yet. And if a couple of them really resonate with you, that’s great! Save a couple of the more interesting ones. 

How many times should you repeat the exercise? That’s up to you! You may stop after one complete round or repeat it daily until the words pour out. One set of five prompts takes about 15 or 20 minutes. I suggest finishing three sets of five exercises to give you enough building blocks to make the next part of writing your pledge easier.

Evaluating Your Responses

If you completed the previous section, you might have quite a collection of three-word sentence endings. Now is the time to look at them. We aren’t evaluating whether they’re “good” or “bad.” As far as we’re concerned, they are all excellent.

Instead, I would like you to look for themes among them. Print them out if you want and grab a couple of differently-highlighters. Again, go for your first impression rather than deliberating over each statement. Run through each time as quickly as you can.

Sort Your Responses

During the first run through the list, take one of your highlighters and highlight statements about things you think or remember about your loved one. These are your “thoughts” bricks.

On the next run, pick up the other highlighter and mark the ones that talk about your feelings, like Love, Happiness, Safety. Of course, these are your “feelings” bricks.

It’s okay if there’s overlap between thoughts and feelings. It’s also okay if you have a few that you haven’t highlighted, we’ll look at those later.

Compile Your Lists

Now, make four lists and quickly group your responses by headings: Thoughts, Feelings, Blended, and Other. As you move your answers under their titles, check your gut. It might be easiest to cut the pages apart here.

• If something from the Thoughts list gut-checks as a Feeling, move it.
• If something from Blended feels more strongly of another heading, move it to the new list.
• If any of the “Other” items check out as a Thought or Feeling, go ahead and transfer it.
• If anything wants to move to the Other or Blended lists, ignore them! They’re trying to distract you.
• Only look at each statement once. No backsies!
• Take very little time when you sort them.

Okay, the lists are sorted and set to the side. We’re going to let them set for a little while. In a day or so, look at your piles again. See whether any of the Blended or Other statements want to move to a different place. Again, if they don’t want to move to the first two piles, leave them alone. You’ll use those in your cards and love letters down the road.

What’s Next?

In this part, we have built walls and windows using some simple exercises to get the creative juices flowing. We’ve done a little sorting to get piles of ideas to help us when we write our pledges. You are starting to get the ideas you want together in your head. Fantastic work!

• Some of you may have enough material from these exercises to depart from the course and build your first draft. Terrific! When you get that written, send it over and let me have a look at it.
• Some of you are still working things through and would like a little more prompting. I have just the thing for you.

In Part 3, we start building useful paragraphs around the themes we’ve developed here. Follow the link to continue your journey.