Content Creation Secrets

Do you find yourself struggling to write the opening paragraph of your blog post? Do you keep crossing out the sentences you write?

If you find yourself facing this problem, it’s because you’ve skipped an important stage of the content creation process.

What do sportsmen do before they participate in a game or event?

They spent some time warming up, to loosen their muscles and get into the mood for participation.

Bloggers can borrow the technique from sportsmen to loosen their mental muscles to help them kick start their blog posts.

It works.

Say you have a subject for your blog post. You also have figured out how to approach the subject. However, when you start writing it, you’re stuck. You try to restart it without much success.

Well, before you throw in the towel out of frustration, why don’t you try the warm up trick first?

Forget about your blog post first. Set aside five or ten minutes for a warm up session.

In this session you write about what you’ll be writing about in your blog post.

Take out a clean sheet of paper and write: I’m going to write about _______________________

Write on without worrying about content or language. Write without any inhibition telling yourself that this is only a warm up session.

If you find yourself worrying about what you’re writing, remind yourself that this not a real piece of writing. Tell yourself it’s something you’re doing for fun to loosen up.

You can even go to the extent of telling yourself that you’ll be throwing away the piece because it’s just a warm up piece.

Through my experience, the warm up session doesn’t usually give you throw-away material. More often than not, you’ll end up discovering your opening paragraph for your blog post.

You will also experience writing flow which you’ll be itching to transfer to your blog post.

So, when you’re stuck writing your blog post, don’t give up.

Start your warm up session immediately and start writing away about what you’ll be writing about.

Isn’t that better than giving up? At least you’ll have a chance of catching something useful.

A successful blogger revealed that when he sits down to create content, he imagines himself standing on stage and addressing a large gathering.

It helps him to set the tone for his content and when he begins seeing the faces in the crowd, his words start flowing.

You can use a similar approach if you have trouble getting started with content creation. If you’ve no experience speaking on stage, try a variation. Visualize yourself speaking in a seminar, giving a lecture or even addressing an informal gathering of enthusiasts in a café.

Picturing yourself in such a situation helps put you in a relaxed mood. You’re not going to write, but address a gathering. It also helps you focus on your audience, rather than your use of language or writing style.

But then when you’re starting off with the addressing-a-gathering method, you may not meet with much success at the beginning.

You may experience a kind of `stage fright’ and end up lost for words. The situation is embarrassing on a real stage. But since you’re on an imaginary stage, you have options.

When you can’t talk to your audience, you can always talk to yourself and you can talk anything you like on the subject you’re supposed to write on.

You can begin like this: “Hey, listen, I’m going to talk you about ___________. Do you want to know what is _________ and how _________?

Don’t start with any expectation. Treat it as an exercise to warm your mind up.

The whole idea of starting thus is to help you make a connection with your material as you go on writing. If you keep on putting down words it will not be long before you find your direction and take off from there.

Some speakers, on experiencing stage fright, use the same technique. They just start somewhere and keep talking about their topic before finding the opening lines for their subject.

Most of the time you may have to write several paragraphs before you make the connection. Don’t treat them as wasted paragraphs. They are there for a purpose. They act as bridge to connect your thoughts to paper or computer screen.

Once you have crossed the bridge, you can move on smoothly towards your destination.

Although words are available freely for the taking, most of us are reluctant to grab  and use them to our heart’s content when it comes to content creation.

It’s as if every word we put down on paper is going to cost us a bomb. We decide that we’ll be very sparing in our words before we even get started. We promise only to use the best words for our writing. And we search for these words as we write and if we don’t find them we give up writing altogether.

One best-kept secret of successful content creators is not fearing to waste words on paper or on the computer screen.
This is especially important when they are  trying to clarify the subject of their writing.

Be in a generous mood and give all the words that are throbbing in your head to the paper. The more you give the more you’ll have to give.

Successful content creators understand that word-wasting is a necessary part of the content creation process.

This is not to say that you must intentionally write long pieces because you have all the words to waste. What I’m saying is write without censoring yourself and later, when you edit,  enjoy throwing away words  that you don’t need.

Don’t be a Word Miser. Go ahead, enjoy wasting words when you’re facing a blank paper or computer screen. Especially if you have trouble getting started.

Writers come in different packages. Some would not write a word unless they have the material planned to the minutest detail. The research must be done, facts and figures double-checked and everything else needed for the writing must be at hand.

You have a planner here.

The second type of a writer also does his homework before beginning a writing project.  But his planning is not as in-depth as the planner. He’s ready to go after gathering the minimum amount of material. Long planning makes him uneasy. He wants to get into the momentum of writing at the earliest opportunity. He just makes some notes and is ready to go.

If he needs to add extra information, he takes a break from writing, go into the research mode and gets back to writing as soon as he finds the necessary material.

Then there’s the writer who believes in no planning at all, who believes planning will stifle his writing momentum. He looks at the topic, spends a few moments thinking and is ready to go. Here is a diver.

He writes away without worrying about what is to come. He doesn’t fear wasting words on paper. Words doesn’t cost him anything. He uses as many as he likes.
He doesn’t really expect to go anywhere in his writing. In fact, he’s ready to go where his writing takes him. He is sure his writing will take him somewhere worthwhile. He begins writing with this belief.

Usually, he ends up writing long pieces and it will not be long (if he knows his subject) before he hits the bull’s eye and take off from there. Then all he has to do is cross out what’s not needed and retain the relevant parts.

In my twenty years as a writer and editor, I’m often asked which is the best among the three methods is. I have no concrete answer.

It depends on the writer and the writing project. I have used all three methods at one time or another.

If I am writing a technical piece where I’ve to get the facts and figures correct, I would want all the material at hand before I begin.

When I’m writing on a subject which I’m familiar with but have no in-depth knowledge, I get started with what I have and later fill in the gaps with research as I go.

Yes, I also write without a concrete plan. I’ve done that for the most part of my career as a fiction writer. You just have a general idea about a character and his goal or a sticky situation he or she is caught in and you take off from there and see where it all ends up.

This freewriting method also comes in handy when you’re writing a direct personal experience piece. Say for instance, if you’re writing an ebook entitled, How I made a Million Dollars on the Internet in Seven Days, you would not want to plan to the last detail what you’re going to say. You would just want to go with the flow because the material is all there in your head.

Whether you should be a planner or  diver or somebody in between, depends on your temperament and  nature of your writing project.

Keep experimenting to determine which method works for which project.