Whenever I sit down to write something, I’m often uncertain where it is going to lead. This is certainly true with any fiction piece (including flash fiction) and more and more it seems to be true for any blog posts that I write. I’ve been blessed with a sharp titling sense (IMHO) so a lot of times a post or even a fiction piece of mine will start with a title. Where it goes from there is anybody’s guess.
To entertain the write idea, you do not need to have the whole work flushed out in your head from the get-go. If you are one of those lucky people who have that ability then I say good on ya and sally forth. For the rest of us, starting with an idea is plenty good enough. Either method is okay, and the important thing is that if you are not writing because you haven’t been able to complete the idea then you need to give yourself permission to just go ahead and start. Have faith that the words and the concept will develop, because they surely will.
If your blog is a WordPress product, then there is a really great tool that you can use to help you through the rough patches of completing a post. Even if you just have a title and a sentence or two you can just hit the “save draft” button and then each time you log in to your dashboard, there it will sit, staring you in the face and reminding you that you have a job to finish. Right now, my dashboard has the titles: Going Mobile Nearly Killed My Writing, The Blog Model Is Broken, I’m Not A Big Copyblogger Fan, and I Will Not Work For Free.
Will those titles ever get published? Hmmm. Maybe. it depends I guess. I’m not too inspired to complete any of them at the moment although I will say I was all hot and bothered when I first started them. I reserve the right to finish them. Or not. So there. 
An important point about entertaining the write idea is that you never really know how any one article is going to be received. I’ve written stuff with the intention of sleeping with my phone until the Pulitzer people called. Others, I’ve thought “Oh well, at least it’s a blog post.” Wanna guess which ones generate the most traffic and comments? Hehe. You guessed it. The point here is to not not finish something because it is not your masterpiece. What you think may be useful and what the audience thinks may be two different things entirely.
Finally, it’s best to keep the thought of entertaining in the back of your head while you are writing most anything. I know that some are more adept at the entertainment aspect of an informational post and for others it’s a real struggle. I recommend trying to spread your wings just a bit. The best way to help make things entertaining is to remove a bit of the formality out of your writing. This is almost always easier said than done but what the hey, it’s worth a try, right? What’s the worst that can happen? Comments encouraging you to not quit your day job? I love those.
How is your writing process working for you? Do you entertain your writing ideas or do things just kinda fall in place?
Hi George!
I find that my short story ideas tend to rattle around inside my head for weeks, months, heck, in some cases even years before I decide to unleash them.
Generally, I have a title in mind, but I have been known to change titles after proofing the initial manuscript. One thing I do, and many others do, is to just get the words onto the screen and not be too concerned about word count, fact-checking and the like. I will say something like this: “Mary boarded the bus on ‘X’ street,” flushing out the details later.
I know my target audience pretty well now (from feedback I have received) and I try to write new themes, new backdrops, new ways of looking at old things.
It may sound cliche but once I am on a roll in a writing session, my protagonist almost tells me what he/she/it wants me to write. That’s the tipping point when mere writing becomes fine art and it is a wonder to behold.
One final point. I have my wife critique my initial stuff and we go back and forth about certain things, mainly technical. And then I sleep on it for a day ot two, polish things for the final viewing and then put it into PDF and post it to the LongShort Stories autoresponder on my Web site.
Cheerio,
Wayne
Wayne,
See, one of my roadblocks is that I absolutely cannot write without editing and proofing as I go. If a red squiggly line shows up, I go through the trouble of pulling out my Howitzer and blasting it to smithereens. I know it kills my process but I can’t seem to make my self stop. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s OCD Man!!!!
I highly recommend the sleeping on it a day or two before publish. I always find a boo boo or something else I’d like to change.
George
Hi George,
I’d love to read your posts about the titles you shared here. They all look interesting — seriously.
About your question, my approach is basically a hodge podge. Sometimes I have everything carefully planned and outlined ahead of time, other times I just shoot from the hip. It’s interesting, though, it seems the times I just let ‘er rip are my more popular posts. You’d think that’d teach me something, right? But, nope, not yet.
Thanks for your tip about using WP to catalog ideas as draft posts. I should do that more often.
Bee good.
~xo
Lori´s last [type] ..Your Body is a Fortress- Part 10 – Training for Old Age
Hey Snookums.
Some of those posts could shoot me even lower in the popularity polls, but I promise to have a little closer look at them
Aha! Yup. Letting them rip means that the words are flowing from your heart and not your head. Absolutely the best kind of writing there is, no?
Hope you’re doing well. Soak up some Cali rays for Alaska man. We are having a suck summer up here.
George
Every post that i write starts with an idea the popped my mind. Though I may become doubtful if I’m able to put the necessary words on those ideas, I just go on and write. At first I entertain the fact that I cannot finish what I’ve started but later on I’m surprised at my ability to come up with the right words.
Writing will always be a challenge. The more we exposed ourselves to challenges, the better we become. More than a year ago I cannot even finish a paragraph. Now I’ve learned that I can make anything possible if I allow it.
Hey Walter,
Nice to see you here. Your point is well taken. I hope that I will always consider my writing to be a bit of a challenge. As soon as I don’t, I’m probably too big for my britches or I’m asleep at the wheel – neither good options.
George
Hi George – I agree and it’s way easy to remember what you’ve learned from a post if it’s entertaining. But writing informally takes a lot of practise and it’s harder than it looks.
Running out of ideas is rarely a problem for me – but I love some of my ideas a lot more than others.
Like you, I use drafts in WordPress and I’ll put in an outline, a partly written post, or a title. Trouble is, I’ll always come up with another idea I want to write first and the drafts get forgotten about.
I went through my drafts yesterday – I had 159 posts. So I deleted any that I didn’t feel like writing about in the near future and left myself with 34. At least I know that I have things in there that I really want to write, instead of stuff I will probably never look at again.
Cath Lawson´s last [type] ..New Business Mistakes- The Hidden Startup Killers
Hi Cath.
There definitely is an certain art to writing informally if that is not your normal writing voice. Informal is my natural voice so I’m certainly comfy and thus far it has worked to my disadvantage only once. A person who I write for asked me to do articles for a fairly well known blog. I was excited and did my first few in my usual style. As it turns out, she had to do severe re-writes as the client was much more stuffy about what they wanted. I hated the fact that someone would have to re-write my stuff to make it acceptable so I begged off. She understood and I’m happy I didn’t make her life a nightmare.
Wow. 159 posts? You are indeed prolific and it sounds like you make good use of the drafts feature. Culling the herd can be kinda tough but it sounds like you were in the mode.
Cheers
George
My Muse has this way of slipping ideas in my head when I least expect them. They are usually in form of a character, or an event; and from there a story would form and build until I have no choice but to write it all down. To not write them would be insanity
I usually do these in outlines or summaries, and then I put them away for another time. I need to let them sit and simmer a while. Some of my ideas could simmer for months or even years at a time. By the time I pick one up, I am ready to get to business. For my shorter works and blog posts I usually only let them sit for a few days. Overall, I guess I would entertain the ideas in order to let them take root and grow before I begin to write.
Carrie
Hi Carrie. I love the simmering method. Like letting the wonderful ingredients in a crock pot melange all day, the result is a mouthwatering treat. I love going back to something I’ve not looked at for a while. It’s almost always like looking at it for the first time and often the direction will be different from what I originally intended and that’s okay with me.
George
George, great topic. You’ve got me thinking, trying to figure out if there’s one way I usually do things. But if this is just about writing blog posts, I would have to say I start with either a title or a list entry and jump in blind.
The list entry refers to having a whole bunch of ideas for blog articles–but I know I can’t write them all that day so I list my ideas in Backpack and then try to work my way through them. For my travel blog, I had a list of 17 articles I wanted to write after a recent trip to Ontario . . . and I’ve completed and posted three of them. Gulp. That’s one big bummer about being an Ideas Person. I have waaay too many for my own mental stability.
But I love that juicy feeling of opening a blank text file with only a title or an idea. And then seeing what comes out of me!!
~ Milli
Milliver’s Travels´s last [type] ..The Chifley Home- Bathurst- Australia
Hey there Milli.
Nice to have you here. Hey, I like the list idea. It really appeals to my left-brainedness. Shucks, you have the lists so the ideas will always be there, right? When you’re ready to write them, they will be there waiting!
I’m always a little frightened by the blank page. Even with a killer title it intimidates me a bit.
George
George, I hear ya.
“I’m always a little frightened by the blank page. Even with a killer title it intimidates me a bit.”
I’m helping a newbie writer write her first travel article for Milliver’s Travels. I had suggested a topic she was enthused about and she dove in. But she got bogged down with it and told me that writing a story about what happened to her was a lot harder than using my Fear of Writing prompts.
So I wrote a special prompt for her that got her to drop her original approach and write the article as if writing it for a particular audience. In the prompt, the audience was a fictional person, and it was someone who would benefit even more than the average bear from her topic. She wrote back all excited and said, “That’s exactly what I needed!!”
With you, it should come easy. You’re probably already doing that every time; thinking about your blog readers as you write. But next time you get that fear of the ol’ Blankie, try thinking of one particular person your blog post would help. Even dramatize it by imagining the fictional person who most needs your help (it can be fun to imagine someone with a “worst-case scenario” and only you know how to speak to their precise needs). Shifting the focus off our own fears onto someone we would love to help can works wonders (as you already know and live through your blog!
).
Milliver’s Travels´s last [type] ..The Chifley Home- Bathurst- Australia
Milli,
Ahhh, advice from the expert! Yay! What a great technique. I’ll put that one to use for sure.
George
Hey George,
Another great post. I normally have ideas for blog posts in my head. I have probably written a years worth of posts in my mind alone. The problem is that when I go to put them on my blog I forget what I wanted to say and the post ends up going in a totally different direction. I love how you have explained this in your post and its good to know that there are other writers out there that don’t plan everything about what they want to write. True creativity comes in the moment and is not something that you plan.
Amanda
Amanda Evans´s last [type] ..Thanks To You- I Won an Award
Hey Amanda,
That happens to me too. I get an idea or a title and then when I sit down to write the darned thing it goes places I never intended. Sometimes to my advantage, sometimes not. I agree that planned creativity is not really creativity at all.
George
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I appreciate your blog and think it is One Lovely Blog. I have passed this award on to you to publicly recognize you. Although the criteria passed on to me to officially accept the award state that each recipient should pass the award on to others, I am recognizing your blog with no expectations that you will acknowledge or pass it on. I just want you to know that I always enjoy your blog and find it informative and entertaining.
You can read the post with the link and description of your blog when the post goes live Monday, July 26th, at http://lillieammann.com/2010/07/26/one-lovely-blog-award/
Lillie Ammann´s last [type] ..People First- Empowering People with Disabilities
My ideas strike at the most inopportune times and unless I go with it right then and there they never come to fruition. I wish I could master the art of the outline or even a not so organized list of ideas.
I am an avid reader of Lillie Ammann’s blog where I discovered yours. Congratulations of being the recipient of One Lovely Blog.
Hi there Dwight.
Thanks for dropping by and for the kind words. Me, I’ve never been able to outline. I think it has to do more with a lack of patience than anything else.
I’m headed over to Lillie’s site to have a look see at the post.
Cheers
George