Distractions are everywhere in our lives. Smartphones, kids, relatives, pets, all chirping away as you try to chisel your masterpiece from scratch. Frustration sets in, since progress is lacking. However, it's pointless to get upset at yourself, because you might be making the process harder than it needs to be.
Why not try a writing exercise that can make your masterpiece much easier to craft?
When you start working out, you don't just go over to the biggest weights in the gym to see if you can crank them high into the sky, while busting out a Hulk-like roar. We typically understand that higher levels of success require higher levels of training. You need to know how to steadily reinforce productive, habitual behavior, without overwhelming yourself in the process, if you really want to see steady improvements.
Free-writing is the ultimate training grounds for your blogging. It's just you and your document, and there are as many documents as you can possibly imagine, just waiting out there for you to 'save as'. Take advantage of your unlimited stack of paper and start getting your ideas down. The best part is, your life distractions can be a welcomed sight, as you can pick right back up whenever you'd like, typing as little or as much as you'd like in the process.
You can free-write however you'd like, since it is free, after all. Type about your day, type about a trip you went on, type about anything up until your fingers hurt. The main thing is, don't stop. You must keep your brain wired into your thoughts that you're expressing through your hands. Stopping your fingers is akin to stopping the expression of your thoughts, which is the opposite of what this exercise is trying to help you with.
Everyday, inside your brain are amazing, beautiful thoughts that can slip away, if you don't take a moment to express them. Can you start to see some of the ways that this exercise can help you?
What if you made a free-write about some of the ideas that you had in the past 24 hours?
You may want to judge yourself and question every line you type, but if you do, you're doing it wrong. There can be no self-censorship barrier. If there is, then it's not a free-write. So be honest, be open, get down your thoughts that you can recall from the past 24 hours and don't think twice.
Are you done? Good job!
Now, read them back. Ok. What do you think? Anything interest you in there? Find the ones that did and make a list. Now, free-write about each topic separately. Spend a good amount of time on each one and even take a little break in between them in order to reset a bit, if needed.
Great!
Now you have a handful of free-writes all from stuff that you thought of in the last 24 hours. Cool. Now, get ready to hack them shreds! I'm kidding, but really the next phase is to start to cultivate your thoughts and turn them into something that someone else will want to read.
After a good free-write, I will tend to flip it into a rough draft by rewriting most of it so that it reads how I want the ideas to sound. Sometimes, I will make an outline beforehand, in order to make sure that I cover each topic I'm talking about. This helps when you are going into a discussion that is rather nuanced. Through this process you are fostering your ideas by diving into them headfirst, in order to make them clearer and more presentable later.
I hope you see how these tools will benefit you in the long run. In order to demonstrate how I use them, I kept my free-write that I made for this post below and turned it into the content you just read above. Hopefully that will best display the usefulness of this exercise:
Free-write for This Post
I may free-write differently than others, but I tend to think what works for me is to keep the keys moving as much as possible. You want thoughts to flow from your brain to your hands and you don't want to focus on your misspellings or grammar mistakes.
If you are free-writing to form the base of the post, then you will likely end up rewriting everything, which is great. That's what you want. You want to get ideas down quickly and then complete them later.
I often find it useful to take a free-write and then make an outline covering the main points I end up actually making. This gives me my first chance to start to question the things I want to focus on. Was there any sense in this pile? Is there any reason to follow one of these ideas? Can it get flushed out further perhaps with another...free-write?
That's right, you can piggyback your free-writes once you identify a topic you want to hone in on. Each time, by reviewing and questioning you are making the content more and more interesting, while potentially opening up more and more avenues to explore later. It also just gets you used to typing without cranking the delet button throughout every other sentence. I still do it in free-writes out of habit, and that delete is killing me right now, but I'm getting to that point where you get it. Great!
