I’ve written before about my love of writing and I thought I’d share my writing process in this blog post. While I said “writing process“, I suppose it would be more accurate to say “processes” as I have a few different methods for writing out my ideas. I use both of these processes for the writing I publish as well as the writing I keep to myself.
Sometimes I manage to write out all my ideas in one shot. When this happens, normally it’s because I’ve thought out (and usually talked out) my ideas quite thoroughly before I start writing. It feels like someone has placed the finished work in my head and all I have to do is copy it into the computer. This is a rare occurrence but it always feels good when it happens and it lets me get a lot of writing done in a short amount of time while making minimal changes once I’m finished.
Most of the time, I end up writing a bit at a time as the ideas come to me. Some of the things I do include writing the conclusion before anything else, writing down a couple of words and adding to them later, working a bit on each paragraph before finishing any of them, starting a post one day and finishing it the next (often not long before it goes live), and editing it as I go rather than waiting until the end and doing all of it at once. This is the process I’ve used in writing most of my blog posts, including this one.
Once I have all my ideas together, I make my final edits, check to see if everything flows smoothly from beginning to end, and save it if I can’t think of anything else to add or improve. If I’m writing a blog post, I’ll add the tags, categories, and title at whichever point in the process I feel inspired to do so. Then I figure out the date I want it to be published, check over it one last time, and hit the “schedule” button. I try to have my posts scheduled the day before I publish them, though, as indicated in the previous paragraph, that doesn’t always happen.
I’ve found both of these processes to be useful for motivating me to write even when the ideas seem sparse and helping me keep my thoughts organized. I hope this has been interesting and even helpful for those who enjoy writing but feel stuck. There are times in which I struggle to come up with ideas or the right words to express them, but I always manage to come up with something. Sometimes I achieve inspiration through writing down the few ideas I have and other times I need to take a break and clear my head for the ideas to arrive. So if you have writer’s block, please go easy on yourself, relax, and know that this is just a temporary phase before the inspiration returns.