Some say it is as simple as sitting down every day and writing. Some have great moments where the words just pour out of them.
Others sit and look at the blinking cursor on the screen and silently scream inside their heads, “WHAT SHOULD I WRITE?”
The trick to figuring that out is to just write.
Madly messy writing.
Horrible awful writing.
Something that looks like you had 50 glazed donuts and 100 espressos and are working your way through Redbull spiked Mountain Dews and M&Ms with 15 minutes to go before the paper is due.
That kind of writing.
The kind that goes so fast that your infernal internal editor can’t keep up with everything that is wrong with your writing. No spelling correction. No wording corrections. Absolutely, no fact checking!
When you are done with your brain drain word dump take a break you because you deserve it and need it. You need to give your infernal internal editor sometime to recuperate for what you just put them through.
Sit down and begin to clean up the mess you just created. It isn’t going to be pretty. Words will be mangled. Run on sentences will gallop amok. Dangling participles will float in the breeze. But, through a steady process you can make the tangled mess into something worth reading.
I prefer to use the highlighter feature and highlight in yellow all the thoughts in one theme and the orange for another and so on. Then it is just a matter of collecting the colors together. A writer friend prints out their writing and then uses a real highlighter, scissors, and tape. Literally piecing her writing together.
It will look ragged at first but as you go through your Frankenstein draft you’ll being to see the final draft taking shape. Soon you’ll have a polished final draft, rather than a blinking cursor mocking you.
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