Do you want to blog, but you are not sure you can come up with ideas? Do you know you have a valuable perspective, but you don’t know exactly what you want to say? Do you want to communicate with the world, but you don’t know how to start? Most of us are full of ideas, and it can be difficult to pull out a good ideas and craft it into a focused blog post in a way that will make your readers just as excited as you.
One of the best ways to find what you want to say is to freewrite, a technique developed by Peter Elbow. Freewriting is wonderful because it is hard to do it wrong if you follow three simple rules:
1. Set a timer. Start with five minutes; lengthen the time as you become more
accustomed to freewriting. When the timer sounds, stop. This will be important to prevent or overcome writer’s block.
2. Write or type without stopping. If you can’t think of anything to write, write “I can’t think of what to write” over and over until you become so bored that something interesting comes to you.
3. Suspend your judgment. You cannot write anything wrong: you can misspell, ignore grammar, make lists, doodle, and even swear. This is for your eyes only. Never cross anything out; you may be destroying the seed of a brilliant idea.
The advantages of freewriting are that it gets the ideas down in a form you can work with. Sometimes we have too many ideas; freewriting unpacks them and spreads them out on the page, so you can see what you have. Sometimes we think we don’t have any ideas; this is a way to dig deep and pull those nuggets out and put them on the page. Sometimes we are so distracted by all the other obligation we have, we can’t get to our blogging ideas; this is a way to list those responsibilities out and clear your mind for more creative ideas.
Freewriting is a great start in creating content for your blog. Stay tuned for posts on writing great blog posts, sustaining the momentum, and generating income from what you have to say.