Picture this – you have an incredible idea for a brand new blog post. Or an email. Or literally anything on the face of earth that needs to be written. You are brimming with good ideas today. You’re excited as you rush to grab your laptop. You open your word processor, and there it is:
The Blinking Cursor.
It blinks incessantly, both inviting you to write your piece, and taunting you and haunting you, dimming your idea with every passing second.
It’s the ultimate energy vampire for writers. The longer you stare at it, bracing yourself to write your first word, the harder it gets to write anything at all. Your excitement slowly drains. Your smile fades, your eyes glaze over.
And if you stare at it long enough, you’ll ultimately forget what you wanted to write about in the first place. Congratulations, you’ve secured yourself a plot of barren land on the writer’s block.
How do I know this? Because I have been everything from a student writing academic papers, a short story writer, a content writer, to a grant proposal writer and now a copywriter. The Blinking Cursor has been my constant nemesis.
While I still lose some battles against it, I have developed a pretty good defense mechanism. This helps me stay out of the writer’s block, or to get out of it when I find myself teleported there against my will.
We’re going to divide this system into three stages –
- the ideas stage,
- the writing stage, and lastly,
- the editing stage.
Ideas Stage
Or as I like to think of it, the fun and games stage. This is even before you confront the blinking cursor, and I highly highly recommend you don’t skip this step.
Grab yourself a pen and paper, and pour all your ideas for this new piece from your brain onto the paper. Yes, I recommend you do it with a physical pen and paper, because this way, you don’t have to face the blinking cursor until you’re actually and absolutely ready to write. “But if you’re confident that you can take on this challenge on a word processor, then be my guest”, she said wistfully, jealous of her reader’s writing prowess. It’s me. I’m “she”.
Now that you have the pen and paper with you, this can go one of four ways.
1. Mind Map
2. Freewrite
3. Lists and bullet points
4. Speak and Transcribe
Mind Map
Mind Mapping is taking the tangled web of ideas inside your head and laying them down on paper in the form of a diagram. What the diagram looks like, is up to you.
You can make it a spider diagram, a list diagram, or a flow chart. What it looks like really doesn’t matter, as long as you have all your ideas on paper and connected to each other.
I find mind mapping an excellent tool when there are lot of moving interconnected parts.
For most of my life so far, I’ve done this with good old pen and paper. But recently I’ve come across this app that makes my life so much easier – Miro.
When I do it on paper, I inevitably run out of space. But Miro lets me move around my text blocks or speech bubble wherever I want. Also, because it has infinite zoom in and zoom out, I’m never at risk of running out of space. I can add more ideas to any bit I wish, and I can rearrange them without it becoming a tangled mess of arrows like it would on actual pen and paper.
It’s a free app with paid upgrades. With the free version you can have up to three boards. If you pay, which I totally recommend, you can have as many boards as you want, and you can even create a team and invite them to collaborate on your board.
I know I totally sound like an affiliate for this app, but sadly I’m not. I’m just a raving customer. Maybe someday they’ll have an affiliate program I can join. One can hope!
The only way this app could get any better would be if they would let me dictate my text!
Free Writing
Or as I like to call it – word vomit. It’s exactly as it sounds. Take all the ideas in your head and start writing. Don’t stop even for a split second to assess whether an idea is a good one. Don’t give your brain any window of time to judge, second guess, assess, or censor.
If you are on your laptop, commit to not having the sound of the keys being tapped stop at any point. Let it be the music to keep you going. If you are writing traditional style with good old pen and paper, commit to not pausing, not lifting your pen from the paper. It doesn’t matter if you are writing utter gibberish, and you have to repeat the sentence “I don’t know what to write” five times in a row. Just keep writing.
And once you keep writing, ideas will start to flow. There are no good ideas or bad ideas. We are at the ideas stage, and we want them all!
I find it best to set yourself a timer. This is a practice I first learned during my undergrad years when I took a creative writing course. Our professor would set us a timer, and we would just get set, go!
I think you can tell by how much I have written about this technique in particular that it is my favorite idea generation technique.
I feel like it works as much more than idea generation, because you are writing sentences and paragraphs, and sometimes you can just pick out complete sentences out and add it to your final piece!
Lists and Bullet Points
Super self-explanatory. You just make a list! This one is super handy if you are planning to write a how-to piece. I used the lists and bullet points technique to outline this exact blog post.
In fact, this actually works really well when planning long form blog posts.
The reason I love this one is because it also serves a two in one purpose. When you are done with making a list of all things you want in your blog post, it’s also almost an outline for your blog post, head to toe. You may need to rearrange some stuff in the list, but then you simply elaborate a little on every point you have, and voila, you got yourself a blog post.
Speak and Transcribe
Where my fellow lazies at?? This one’s for you! This is for the times when you just can’t even with existence, let alone write. Or for those of you who feel like writing is “just not your thing”.
Think about what you want to write about and make a couple of mental notes. Then whip out your phone, open the recording app, and start talking.
Once you’ve emptied your brain of all ideas around your topic, it’s simply a matter of transcribing, rearranging, and editing.
If you’re on your laptop, open up MS Word and click “Dictate” on the menu. That lets you skip the whole “transcribe” step altogether. It auto-transcribes as you speak.
The only hurdle though – it doesn’t automatically assign punctuations, so you’ll either have to speak them for them to be on the document, or go through the document manually after you’re done dictating, and manually assign all the punctuations you need.
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You can also do the same on Google Docs:
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Writing Stage
Shitty First Draft
Yes, that’s the title of an essay by Anne Lamott from her book Bird by Bird. And I recommend it for anyone who’s curious about the art of writing, and looking to up their game.
The idea is that we ALL write shitty first drafts. You can safely expect your first draft to be shitty without feeling the need to put yourself down for it.
Because ALL of our first drafts suck.
Okay, maybe some people strike gold on the first go. But Lamott would agree with me when I say, we don’t like those people very much. And that’s okay.
So take all the ideas you have put on paper in the ideas stage, rearrange them, expand on them, and you’ve got yourself your shitty first draft.
If you’re lucky and you get a good piece of writing at this stage – amazing! If not, no worries, read on to find out how to turn it into a sexy second draft.
Sexy Second Draft
This is where things get… publish-worthy! *heart eye emoji*
I would strongly recommend keeping a day of inactivity between the first draft and the second draft.
No, that doesn’t mean eating pizza in your pajamas while you watch Parks and Rec on Prime for the 5th time.
I just mean don’t fiddle with this specific piece of writing on that day. Do something else – write another shitty first draft on some other topic.
Why? Because our first draft brain and second draft brain are quite different.
First draft brain is still very much in creator mode, and we love our word-babies. Second draft brain isn’t nearly as attached to the piece.
Having a day in the middle helps you move away from creator mode to editor mode. You are able to go through the draft without attachment.
And that way it’s easier to kill your darlings.
Edit and Publish
Kill Your Darlings – The Final Edition
This is where you kill any darlings that slipped your deathly grasp the first time. Delete everything you don’t need, even if you really like that one witty statement that was a total stroke of genius – that’s exactly what I mean by kill your darlings. Take out any words you don’t need. Take out whole chunks you don’t need!
Proofread.
This is one of the things I suck at. No, that’s not exactly true. I am amazing at proofreading other people’s work – I just don’t enjoy proofreading my own. So a lot of the time I’ll publish something without proofreading, and inevitably there will be unintentional repetition of words, missing punctuation, etc.
I’m trying to get better at this.
I recommend taking another short break before you do this. Writer and editor brains are not the same. Have a cup of tea or something before you come back to your piece to proofread it.
The first stage of proofreading is automatically done by your word processor. It will point out any spelling errors, and any sentence structures that may not be the bees knees, grammatically speaking. Yes, I l know I'm being Captain Obvious!
Next, I’d advice that you put your writing through the Hemingway App. You can copy paste your text on the app, and it will immediately show you a myriad of things including:
- What grade level you’re writing at. For a conversational tone, I’d recommend staying at Grade 8 and under.
- If you’re using too many adverbs
- If you’re using too much passive voice when you should be using active voice.
Basically, this app helps you write as if you are speaking to someone. It prevents your writing from being too dry or hard to read, and forces you to abandon jargons.
I would also strongly recommend getting someone else to proofread your writing, because we don’t always notice our own mistakes.
After you’ve done all the editing and the proofreading, when you’re finally happy with (or at least can tolerate) what you have written, go ahead and hit publish.
Congrats bestie, you’ve just put your voice out to the world.
I’m rooting for you!