The First Step – Ask Questions!

People are sometimes hesitant to ask questions even if they need to. Questions get us answers, questions give us what we need to know. We need to ask questions and lots of them especially when we are doing something for the first time.

It’s good to sit down and brainstorm on what questions you want to ask about the topic you are writing about. Good, intelligent questions that are relevant to it and will give you insight and ideas.

By asking questions and writing them down, you will be able to think of more questions, get more ideas, get more insights. The more questions you ask, the more in-depth they will become and the more understanding you will gain.

By coming up with better questions, you will get better answers and better answers will in turn make you write better.

Writing better will get you started on writing freely!

TOO MANY IDEAS

When you’re writing freely, your mind tends to wander, go off on a tangent. Just go with it at first since this will eventually result into ideas and insights that you can write about.

If you find yourself drifting too far, stop, take a break and when you come back, try and get back in the zone by listing down your questions about your chosen topic to get you back on track.

Once you have these techniques down, your writing will take on your personal style, it will have it’s own “voice” so to speak and your words will start to read as if they were being spoken.

Finding your personal style takes time but the longer you write, bits and pieces of it will emerge and pretty soon, you’ll find yourself unable to write in any style but your own. And this is when your writing will really shine.

The more confident you become, the more your creativity gets enhanced. Your brain will start spitting out more and more ideas until it flows out of you like lava from a volcano.

Your writing will free your mind and the ideas captured within.

EDIT AND ORGANIZE

Once all your ideas are out in the open, you need to learn how to collect and select — in other words, to edit and organize.

The editing and organizing processes are completely separate from the concept of writing like a maniac as these are two tasks that naturally counteract with each other.

When you write, you just write. When you edit, you just edit.

Most writers, myself included, take time off between editing and writing depending on what project I’m working on. If it’s something like an ebook or a report, I will take a day off or a weekend off before I start editing. For something shorter like an article, I will generally take a short break before I start editing just to get myself in the editing zone.

When you already have this step done, you’ll develop your own work techniques.

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