I recently came across a new writing technique that I am using as part of my personal development work, but I’ve also found it has some interesting applications for writing magic. This technique is called sentence stems and it was developed by psychologist Nathaniel Branden. The way the sentence stem works is you are provided a partial sentence and then you fill the rest of the sentence out with your own answer. Below are a few examples of sentence stems:
If I were to take 5% more responsibility I would…
Taking care of myself means…
I am becoming aware of…
The sentence stems provide the core of the sentence, but require you to finish the sentence. Ideally you write out a few sentence stems around an area of your life that you want to work on and then you fill them out each day. A month is typically suggested for working with the same sentence stems. This is a repetitive process, but the benefit of the repetition is you get to see how your answers evolve. A couple of examples of filled out sentence stems would be:
Taking care of myself means I am exercising each day, eating nutritious food and getting the sleep my body needs.
If I were to take 5% more responsibility I would write enough content to be scheduled out for several weeks.
I’ve been applying sentence stems to my magical practice as well. I use a sentence stem as a foundation and then complete the sentence. I use it for several purposes. The first purpose is to refine my awareness around the specific result I want to manifest. By continually writing out the sentence stem over a period of time I get the opportunity to drill into the result that I want to manifest and consider the different iterations of that expression. This process helps me develop a precise awareness of what I want, and allows for more effective targeting of magic.
The other purpose I use it for is sigil generation. After I write out the sentence stem multiple times, I can pick out the best expressed statement of desire and then use the classic method of sigil development, where you get rid of repeating letters first, and then vowels or consonants, if you still have too many letters. The sentence stems make it easy to come up with different statements of desire that you can turn into sigils around whatever you want to work on magically.
I’m also experimenting with using sentence stems in my writing magic practices, with the idea being to pick a specific them and use the sentence stem in my journaling to write that theme into reality. I’ve done some similar journaling practices in the past, but what makes the sentence stem different is the deliberate repetition. The repetition conditions your consciousness to focus more on the theme you are writing about and this in turn allows you to be receptive to how that theme shows up in your life.
Sentence stems is another example of how a writing practice can be taken and applied to magical work in order to get consistent results. It’s also an excellent method for doing internal work on yourself and having an objective record of the work.
